Now, Roe, as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court is consistent with making abortion safe, legal, and rare. That’s one reason I am in favor of keeping it.
I’ve been saying that for decades, we can’t keep carrying red state America, we don’t share the same values, or culture and they contribute nothing.
Of course, Senators represent land, not people. I a Washingtonian, have less voice in Congress than an empty field in Oklahoma.
We could. Progressive policies tend to be extremely economically lucrative, and so the blue states tend to have plenty of money at the end of the day. If the red states are fiscally incompetent, and their population unable to fend for itself, then it is on the blue states to take care of their mentally and physically disabled sibling.
However, what makes it unsustainable is that as we carry them, they take that as an opportunity to stab us in the back.
If power in America was based on number of votes, or economic power, blue state America would be in charge, but it’s based on whiteness of skin and whatever nonsense the oligarchs can get the red staters worked up about (BLM, who is using what bathroom, gay marriage). During the Reagan years, abortion was just some red meat for the hard right Catholic voters, but it took off with them.
If people are going to keep posting those stupid maps, could we at least get one that reflects an election later than 2004?
I’m struggling a bit to understand what you’re asking.
I was simply restating the fourth amendment, and making the claim that within the penumbras of that amendment it seems fairly reasonable to conclude that a right to privacy exists, and has existed, since basically as long as we have been a country. This isn’t so much my argument (but I do agree with it), but the argument of many, many Supreme Court justices who were part of a number of important majority decisions. I’m addressing the issue of enumerated vs unenumerated rights–specifically saying, that there are some fairly obvious unenumerated rights, that if we do not have them, it calls into serious question the scope of our enumerated rights. Privacy and travel / movement would seem to be the two most obvious ones. I tend to agree that an unenumerated right with virtually no precedent or compelling argument from existing principles is one that the courts need to be very hesitant to engage with–but I think privacy is a pretty solid right, not invented out of whole cloth but instead being found as a reasonable unenumerated right based on the plain text of the fourth and fifth amendments.
The logic under Roe is that due to having a right to privacy, that means medical decisions and medical procedures you discuss and schedule with a physician are likewise private, and thus government needs some compelling interest to be allowed to intrude into that.
If you believe life begins at conception because the Pope told you so, that’s a compelling reason. But in the United States we can’t legislate or adjudicate that way. So better put–there were five Republican justices who agreed that the right to privacy exists, and agreed that if such a right exists, the government has no right to go into your bedroom with your wife and tell you that you’re allowed or disallowed to use contraceptives.
It is a little hard to find serious fault with that ruling constitutionally–you’re telling me the Founders intended the government to require good legal cause to come into my home, to seize my property, to explore my private writings, but they can at whim tell me and my wife how to govern our sexual procreation, a matter between a man and wife going back as far essentially as men and wives have existed as a concept–and certainly in the English common law (maybe in some other cultures with polygamous or social forms of marriage it was different)–nah, I don’t think so, I think even a strict originalist would have a hard time arguing that the original intent of the fourth and fifth amendment would leave open a gateway where the government is allowed to regulate the sexual procreation of a man and wife in the “marital bed” so to speak, it would have been such a patently absurd idea for government to even attempt such a thing in 1789 it would have been laughed out of existence.
Now imagine you’re one of the five Republicans who voted in the majority in Roe, and you had previously voted in the majority in Griswold–under fairly good grounds. A lot of these Republican justices were devout Christians who were personally opposed to abortion. What argument do they craft that would let them bar abortion, but uphold the privacy implications of Griswold? How different is saying sexual procreation is a private matter and saying a woman getting a private medical procedure to end a pregnancy is a private matter, governed under the right of privacy?
The big difference, as I mentioned, is fetal life–the Roe majority found that government did have a valid stake in the future of fetal life and in protecting it, and there is decent historical and constitutional grounds for that assertion. This puts you in a ‘rights weighing’ argument, where do you draw the line.
Alito decided to not even go that far, he actually attacked more of the core principle, and that is why a necessary conclusion that would likely need to be reached in subsequent cases, would be overturning Griswold, Lawrence v Texas and Obergefell v Hodges, with Griswold overturned most 20th century judicial conceptions of constitutional privacy will cease to exist, as with it the right to privacy (which I argue we have enjoyed as a natural right as long as we’ve had a country, it was not invented out of thin air in the 1960s.)
Like I mentioned upthread, I’ve never been quite comfortable with the Roe decision, and I consider myself personally pro-life, but I also don’t find the legal arguments against Roe that straightforward either. If you attack the right to privacy you are attacking a core right that I argue we have always had as Americans, just because it was only clearly enumerated long after the fact, does not mean it did not exist prior to that enumeration. Further, I can cite a stack of Federal legislation going back 200 years, and the Bill of Rights itself, and a large number of Supreme Court cases, that even under Alito’s “history and tradition” standard he recently invented, would suggest we have a history and a tradition of enjoying a right to privacy.
Griswold–>Privacy–>Roe, is the chain. If you reject the privacy argument of Roe you reject the right to privacy and thus Griswold, which I find problematic. Note that I don’t think any of the fifty states are going to ban contraception if Griswold is overturned, but Supreme Court decisions frequently have importance far beyond the specific parameters of their case. Griswold isn’t important because it meant women could freely get birth control pills. It is important because it is cited in dozens of other landmark cases that flesh out our right to privacy.
Detractors of cases like Griswold consider it “judicial activism”, or the judiciary legislating from the bench. However, while I do think the Supreme Court has done that very thing, I don’t think that is the case with Griswold. The legal system and our constitution are complicated, and the sorts of laws that States pass, and the Federal government passes, and the actual text of the constitution (through the amendment process) change over time. The sort of cases that get challenged in court also change over time.
Sometimes issues may not reach a full judicial exploration for hundreds of years, but just because that is the case shouldn’t mean that the conclusions of those judges is “judicial activism”, the constitution wasn’t written to cover every imaginable circumstance. The broad rights and privileges guaranteed in the constitution are never perfectly defined, and have always needed interpretation to be effected.
As I’ve said–the GOP no longer has a moderating force because no GOP voters punish their politicians for catering to extremist views. This means the extremist views will continue to shape policy and law until the moment the GOP pay a price for it. Unless that happens that moment will never occur.
And they take our tax money.
Blue state America carries red state America while they pretend to be coal miners and prevent black Americans from voting.
Nitpick: the federal government is our servant, and doesn’t have “rights.” It has duties and responsibilities, and is granted certain (and limited) powers to carry them out.
We’re gonna make America great again!
There’s a good chance that the official ruling will come down in June, which is when the Supreme Court usually announces the majority of its rulings (all three Obamacare rulings came in June, in different years).
There’s not much difference in timing between May and June in terms of what voters remember. It may be that the leaker was interested in giving pro-choice activists the maximum amount of time to organize support in the run-up to the mid-terms.
It’s not perfect (poor Colorado gets tossed to the reds).
It’s the idea that matters.
Good observation, IMHO.
This could be a good thing… nay a great thing.
The Dems will win if they get the voters to vote. The electorate was energized last election, when it was “get rid of trump!”.
It seems quite possible that in the midterms, without a energized electorate, the GOP will takes back the House and/or the Senate. That would be a disaster.
But this could energize the electorate and get the Vote out. If the Dems keep both houses and even pick up a seat or two in the Senate (by no means impossible) then we can vote in Abortion rights, and get another Biden Judge in SCOTUS. Thomas is getting too old.
I am hearing a LOT of very angry women about this.
Good post, except they are not “pro-lifers”, they are anti-abortion and anti-women’s rights. They are generally pro death penalty, etc.
I have no objection to your nitpick.
And pro-pandemic.
Yes, it’s puzzling. But in this case some of those on the other side take the attitude that “well, sure, the state can’t tell you when/how to procreate, but at the time the Founders (peace unto their name) could not have imagined this”(*).
Which is an interesting exercise they were engaging in. Freedom of the press “naturally” extends to Satellite TV, and the Second Amendment to a full auto AKM… but the right to be secure within your household and conduct your personal affairs does not extend to The Pill?
(*notwhitstanding certain herbs and preparations that were used for that purpose in different cultures)
But that is one of the things I suppose were a “trigger”. That the right to personal privacy was expounded and made explicit in the context of personal reproductive… no, strike that: sexual conduct. That you were now laying down the basis for saying you cannot outlaw such private sexual behavior of consenting adults and that furthermore it’s their right, i.e. it is good that it be so. That is what gets the hard right bent out of shape.
BLASPHEMER!!! STONE HIM!!! 
They want to to see the sinners get smote hard. And if God takes too long they’ll do the hard smiting themselves.