Dahlia is, QUITE RIGHTLY, stunned and PISSED at John Roberts and the other radical partisans on his court...
Don’t Be Hysterical, Ladies. Daddy Chief Justice Knows Best.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiam decision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”
That’s right. The majority of the court (and all of its females) found the issue too “emotional” to do the hard work of denying women in acute medical emergencies abortion care.
Had he given his word choice 10 seconds’ further thought (or even conferred with his wife, who is by all accounts “fond of flags”), Alito might have taken out that “emotional” crack before attacking Amy Coney Barrett’s defection in this matter, in the time between the accidental release of the draft decision and its final publication the next day. He did not.
It’s gross, but not unexpected, that often when the court fractures along gender lines, as it has frequently this term, you will hear a whole lot of the jovial “Calm down, little missy” talk that you might recall from 1950s sitcoms.
It is nevertheless pretty jarring to hear that kind of condescension trotted out by Chief Justice John Roberts, in the democracy-altering immunity decision handed down Monday. The court granted itself the imperial authority to confer upon the president powers of a king, but although Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said as much in their respective dissents, it fell to Big Daddy Chief Justice Roberts to intone to his readers that their aggregated dissents strike “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today.” Implying that the dissenters were overreacting, and without ever attempting to address the substance of their claims, Roberts accused them of “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the President ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law.’ ”
Roberts, that blinkered butthole (yes, you heard that right), is like an ostrich with his friggin' head in the ground. "Extreme hypotheticals"??!? The guy is absolutely delusional if he thinks The Moron is NOT going to initiate the most outrageous, unprecedented executive orders of all time if he is given the opportunity. HE HAS ALREADY DONE IT, FERCRISSAKES!!
You know who understands full well what happens when the full power of the state is conscripted into an effort to belittle and degrade women? Donald Trump. He used those powers to commit election offenses in order to silence Stormy Daniels; he used those powers to turn crowds of his fans against Nancy Pelosi and her husband. He used those powers to seat three justices who would make it their life-tenured duty to harm women in service of protecting fetal personhood. Weaponizing the power of government to hurt women and other marginalized communities is the beating heart of Project 2025. Immediately after the immunity decision came down, Trump celebrated it with a Truth Social post singling out Liz Cheney, former Wyoming congresswoman and impeachment effort leader, calling for her to be prosecuted by way of military tribunal. “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post read. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”
This isn’t hypothetical. This isn’t fearmongering. This is how Trump lives and will continue to live. It is how he governs and how he will continue to govern. Women who point this out as clear and obvious truths are maligned and dismissed as irrational. It’s almost as if the conservative justices’ commitment to originalism requires them to believe that women who raise any objection to their tidy paradigms should be viewed as either empty vessels or scheming witches. It’s almost as if they wish to lay down the tracks for just such a project. It’s almost as if in granting Donald Trump immunity, they may have found their path there.
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