I thought this thread was Ihmo. I don’t normally express strong opinions in politics & elections.
Obviously What the Judges did to get on the Supreme Court rubs a raw nerve. It’s hard to stay dispassionate and purely logical.
Mea culpa
… lied more than my old Dachshund did when he was temporarily paralyzed (in my opinon, of course 
). Boff that plagiarist!
Not at a Congressional hearing.
It didn’t matter. If Kavenaugh or Barrett had clearly said “Yeppers, we are gonna overthrow Roe at the first good chance we have!” they still would have gotten in.
So did they lie? Sorta. Did they commit perjury? Probably not.
Gorsuch was almost a compromise, as his background was solid, and he was known more as a strict constructionist. But the other two were blatantly hired assassins to kill Roe.
Yeah, and Roberts kinda hemmed and hawed.
Not so much. This isn’t coming from the Catholic church, so much as the Evangelical movement.
“we” meaning the GOP???
The GOP controlled the House from 1995 - 2007.
Roe v Wade should have been protected by Law when bipartisanship still made it possible. At that time, no one saw the need. Why take a unneeded political hit? Roe protects womens reproductive rights. We had wars to fight and terrorists to chase.
The conservative judges at that time didn’t appear that strongly against Roe.
It was the loss of RGB and appointments of Kavanaugh and Barrett that tipped the scales.
That is what senators of both parties did with Robert Bork, and for the last thirty-five years conservatives won’t shut the fuck up about how “the smartest lawyer in the country” [sic] was denied his deserved place on the Supreme Court because of ‘partisanship’.
Stranger
There has likely never been a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate ready to codify Roe into law. Even after the 2008 elections, when Senate Democrats’ 60 seats made them theoretically filibuster-proof, that majority included several pro-life Democrats and Democrats from red states that would have opposed the measure.
Oh, I see, you mean that even though Ginsburg always held the opinion that women do have a constitutional right to an abortion, and thus it was not “wrong” for the Roe decision to assert the existence of such a right, it should have been justified on different constitutional grounds: hence, “wrongly decided”.
When was that?
True.
Yep.
Well as a candidate they actually have to care about whether they might be seen as biased. But once their confirmed to a life time appointment who gives a hoot what people think of them. Least of all Thomas, who has on multiple occasions ruled on cases that his wife has advocated for. He clearly doesn’t give a damn about the appearance impartiality.
I can’t recall the exact testimony from the long Congressional testimony. I do recall assurances from Barrett and Kavanaugh that they could set aside personal convictions and rule impartially. They also said, IIRC there needed to be a valid and urgent reason to review Roe. For example Plessy v. Ferguson improperly supported segregation and resulted in inequities in schools, jobs,businesses, and other parts of life. There was a urgent need to rule against it with Brown v . Board of Education. We didn’t have that with Roe. It had already been modified with newer rulings to reflect advances in embryo and fetal research.
Objectivity is easier to maintain in criminal cases. Someone is accused of a crime and the case is presented. The judge isn’t invested in the case. The outcome depends on the strength of the evidence and how the jury or judge perceives it. Is it beyond a reasonable doubt?
The appealate judges look for procedural errors in lower court trials. They’re own bias or value doesn’t apply.
The Supreme Court is supposed to only look at whats in the Constitution and interpret it. I’m no longer convinced a judge that personally disapproves of gay marriage,birth control, abortion, or other social issues can totally ignore their own bias.
I don’t know a solution. How do you find impartial candidates for the Supreme Court?
Yeah. I think most of us know the law on this, but – for Conservatives:
- The Federalist Society is to the Judiciary as
- Ghislaine Maxwell was to Jeffrey Epstein
Happy to elaborate if the point isn’t clear
Yeah, was about to comment, Evangelicals reading those posts must have been going, what am I, chopped liver?
The Court has had non-Protestants overrepresented for a while and carried on just fine. It’s the ascent of Federalist Society-vetted so-called “originalists” that’s a problem now. In case y’all did not notice it’s not only about abortion, it’s not the ONLY goddamn issue where the new majorities are screwing us over. Voting rights, environmental protection, corporate persons’ “rights”, labor issues, defendants’ rights, you name it. It’s not “because they are devout Catholics” it’s “because they’ve been vetted to support an illiberal view of the Constitution”.
First off, there’s no doubt at all that the justices intended to overturn Roe all along.
That being said, it would be a bad precedent to compel justices to always stick to their word according to what they said in Senate confirmation hearings. By such logic, if a justice hypothetically said “I will not legalize marijuana” when being grilled by the Senate in 1980, but changed his mind by the 2010s and voted to legalize it, he’d be considered a perjurer rather than someone who simply changed his mind as people are wont to do.
Can a judge that personally approves of gay marriage, birth control, or abortion, (or disapproves of gun ownership) totally ignore THEIR own bias?
I, on the other hand, think she was really that dumb.
There are a number of comments upthread implying that Congress should have codified abortion rights instead of relying on Roe v Wade being settled law. I’m certain that would have made no difference. The fundamental problem here is a highly ideological and activist Supreme Court that has empowered itself to act as a super-legislature, and this was true even before Trump appointed the three lunatics, dutifully following the instructions of the far right.
This is the sort of court whose rulings on political matters are both predictable and predetermined, and whose references to the Constitution are just post hoc rationalizations. They do this even when their rulings contradict the plain wording of the Constitution, as Scalia did in Heller, or when their rulings contradict the long-standing tradition of not being any broader than necessary to resolve the matter before them, as Roberts did in Citizens United, or when their rulings overturn longstanding precedent, as Alito did with Roe v Wade.
So if there had been, in a better world, federal legislation protecting abortion rights, one can easily imagine red states taking the matter to the Supreme Court, and it would have surprised no one to see this Court overturn the law on the purported grounds that the federal government has no power to legislate abortion rights.
To both of these–unequivocally, there are judges who can ignore their bias and rule impartially. That doesn’t mean “rule how a specific person may want”, but they can rule to some non-personal standard. Many of the justices involved in the original Roe decisions, as well as a number of Republican justices who upheld Roe repeatedly in the years after (guys like Souter, Kennedy et al.) came from conservative religious backgrounds and while I don’t know that they ever commented on it I assume were opposed to abortion on personal moral grounds, that didn’t affect how they ruled.
Several of the liberal justices, including prominently RBG and Elena Kagan, have ruled against what the Democrats want on certain issues relating to executive power and policing, as well.
I do think it is fair to say, based on recent evidence, that if a judge is a member of the Federalist society that should be seen as a promise to not be impartial, but rather to only rule in fealty to the Republican party, which is exactly why Roe has now been overturned, because they installed enough judges in the Federalist society to guarantee it.
As I have said in other threads, the Supreme Court is only as legitimate as we allow it to be, once it became a purely partisan appendage the argument for respecting its legitimacy diminished. Even before then, it was still usually a semi-partisan body and should have had its powers curtailed ages ago (I was in favor of this as far back as the 70s, when it was usually Democrats who were arguing with me about how the court needed all these powers, now the parties have switched but my position remains the same.)
The conservative justices don’t vote in lockstep, though. While Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion 95% of the time this term, Gorsuch was in the majority only 75% of the time.
Kagan & Breyer were in the majority at the same rate (69 and 68) and Sotomayer a little less at 58%.
It seems to me that the latter justices vote the same way more often than the other six do.
You’ve stated percentages. What argument are you presenting? Specifically in response to my claim that the Federalist society judges are simply subservient to the political desires of the GOP?