It’s not clear to me how interpreting the 14th in such a way would affect abortion. The 14th does not now (to my knowledge) apply in cases where private citizens used deadly force in self-defense, so why would it apply to abortion?
Perhaps medical professionals who are government employees could be barred from violating the civil rights of the fetus/person, I guess… It is not currently a sufficiently detailed hypothetical to stir any reflexive response.
If there is a right to life for fetuses in the Fourteenth Amendment, then the central holding of Roe is eviscerated.
Is it? I’m not familiar with the specific aspect of Roe that says “this only applies because we’re defining the fetus as not a person.” Besides, do persons in the U.S. currently have a specific “right to life”? If so, the continued existence of the death penalty confuses me.
And how this affects the actions of private citizens, i.e. women who don’t wish to remain pregnant, more so.
In any case, it’s not necessary to propose some dramatic re-interpretation of the 14th and the uncertain ramifications of same - why not propose, for the sake of argument, that the next ten abortion-related cases that reach SCOTUS are all and unanimously decided along the side preferred (or the one more preferred) by the pro-life faction. This is far more likely and even feasible if, say:
This is unlikely, I admit, but not impossible. I could picture SCOTUS becoming hard-right and staying that way for a decade or more. If that happens, I picture abortion rights in the U.S. (indeed, quite a few rights overall) being sharply curtailed (by my standards) or brought to a more reasonable level (by yours).
I don’t see why that would be a problem it needs to be updated at least every 25-50 years … and id go further on saying it needs to be publicly voted on …
I would demand a Proper Punctuation Mandate, myself.
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Just to very clear, the process was conceived to be political to some degree in the first place. The point of the President chooses who to nominate and appoints with the Senate’s advice and consent was not to have the Senate verify that the candidate was qualified, but to achieve some political balance, and at the time the balance was more fixated on issues of balancing states’ interests and executive powers, not liberal versus conservative. The concern was even then expressed by Adams that the Senate could abuse the power:
But faith in the Senate membership to not so abuse their political power won out. Adams’ concerns about parties trying to increase their power lost out to those who felt that it was balancing executive vs states powers that mattered.
So conceived as political to some degree in the first place, to achieve a balance of power, giving the president the power to choose who serves in the judicial branch with the Senate as a brake on that power … yes. The idea however that the President should not even nominate and that the Senate would not even consider the president’s nominee, would declare that they would refuse to no matter who the president nominated, was likely not even considered within the realm of possibility by the framers. The current abuse by the Senate? Exactly what Adams had been afraid of.
Right, you might think that, and you’d probably express your opinion to that effect. But after the ruling, would you go online and make declarative statements that the either the law in question, or worse, the SCOTUS decision itself were unconstitutional? Probably not, since you’re a reasonable sort.
But that’s what is happening with regard to Crawford and Citizens United.
So?
Opinion before the ruling: this law is unconstitutional.
Opinion after the ruling: SCOTUS was wrong when they said the law was constitutional.
It’s certainly possible (highly likely, even) that the person expressing the opinion has not read the ruling in detail or if they have, has not understood it completely. Alternately, the person could also be well-educated on constitutional law and still hold a negative opinion of a SCOTUS ruling. Heck, the person could be a member of SCOTUS and think the ruling was wrong, hence they file a dissenting opinion. It could be the majority of the membership of SCOTUS deciding that an earlier version of SCOTUS was wrong, hence an overrule.
It slips into unreasonable behaviour when the person maintains SCOTUS is part of a conspiracy, or has the delusion that SCOTUS (and/or its ruling) doesn’t exist, or something comparably nutty.
They do – but that right may be abrogated by due process of law.
A state could presumably still permit legal abortion – that might indeed be “due process of law.” What would not longer exist is the finding of Roe that invalidated state laws that did NOT permit abortion. To make it easy – if the last sentence reads, “…nor shall any State deprive any person, including unborn persons, of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” then Roe does not survive. Roe creates a constitutional right to abortion; such a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment eviscerates that right.
Again, though, keep in mind that while I want to see legal abortion ended, I’d be horrified it if ended by a judicial finding of a right to life for the unborn in the Fourteenth Amendment.
The way to rebut false assertions is by correcting them.
A person who asserts that a concept is unconstitutional when there is current Supreme Court jurisprudence that holds that concept constitutional is seeking to gain a rhetorical advantage – by repeating the claim that the constitutional is really UNconstituttional, the rhetor suggests that the court’s process is corrupt and flawed and its decisions are not legitimate. Perhaps this is not a planned strategy. Perhaps it is. Either way, the implication survives.
To rebut this, the truth.
Why would someone publically express an opinion about a ruling they don’t understand, or haven’t even read? 
Perhaps they have an agenda.
This strikes me as quite a reach or perhaps more accurately, it’s based on the presumption that abortion is only permitted after the government makes it legal, rather than it being only forbidden after the government makes it illegal. A much more plausible route is for SCOTUS to just take on a pro-life bias and decide all cases that come to it along those lines.
It is not, in any case, a hypothetical that causes me to reconsider my stance that judicial review is critical to functioning democracy.
An expressed opinion is only a false assertion if you can demonstrate the speaker does not actually hold that opinion.
Have you met people?
Opinions, no matter how emphatically expressed, trump neither facts nor logic.
This is not entirely correct.
The rhetorical technique is to express an emphatic statement of fact, and, when pressed, claim that it was merely an opinion. But the strong and frequent announcement that sounds like fact has persuasive power, even though it is mere opinion – because it sounds like a claim of fact.
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Cheap shot taken, I agree with you, more or less. An opinion can absolutely be false, even when fully believed by the person expressing it, when exposed to the facts, and should be countered with truth.
Or may just be stating an opinion.
A reasonable person may believe that the dissenters in an opinion were correct and the majority in the opinion were in error.
In fact, is there not some degree of precedent in Supreme Court Justices admitting that one or another of their votes in certain decisions were mistaken? I’m not finding what I’m looking for, but I thought that, at some point, David Souter had said his vote in Kelo vs. New London was wrong and that he regretted it.
A great many of us believe that Congress’s mandate of “In God We Trust” on the coinage is unconstitutional, a very clear violation of the establishment clause. The Supreme Court had made up the doctrine of “ceremonial deism” to permit this, but many of us find that to be absurd. How can such an obvious law regarding an establishment of religion not violate the prohibition on such laws? In any case, having and stating an opinion is not necessarily an attempt to seize a “rhetorical advantage.” It can just be an exercise of rhetoric in its own right.
(Otherwise, the accusation that someone is attempting to “gain a rhetorical advantage” is, itself, an attempt to gain a rhetorical advantage. If so…does anyone give a darn?)
Sometimes, if the majority is large enough, they can. Try to market a canteloupe-flavored soft-drink to the American soft-drink market. Enough people won’t like it to make it “factual” that “Canta is a bad drink.”
(Bummer, 'cause I think I’d like it.)
Seriously, human consensus opinion is the foundation for facts, in a lot of cases. It used to be the fact that homosexuality was a deviant mental illness; that is no longer a fact. Not just the majority changed, but an overwhelming majority.
Who is “us,” in the preceding?
Some 90% of people polled appear to favor inclusion of the phrase.
I’d say that the answer to your question is clear: it’s not an establishment of religion.
That’s a factual assertion based on the state of current case law. You may wish, or believe, that the Court should find differently. But you cannot truthfully say that it’s unconstitutional as a matter of law.