I did not know this. I had assumed MEPs initiate legislation. Live and learn. (Sorry for the hijack).
True, nearly a million American dead, and somewhere around half of those are the fault of trump, Fox News and Conservative talk radio.
Yes, but that is not a sure thing. And sure, now is better for them, but the actual opinion will come out later, and then all the Red states will pile on to ban all abortions.
Because if all the voters vote the Dems win pretty all every contestable election. The GOP has lost the demographic battle, and they know it. They are desperately courting the racist and weird conspiracy voters, but that is not enough. They are also desperately enacting more Jim Crow “vote security” bills, to make sure less people vote. Too many Democratic party voters stay home. This is why the Russians and the GOP have bots out there spreading “both parties are the same” and “don;t bother to vote, it doesn’t make any difference”.
Yes. Happened in several states last election, for example Georgia, the voters were energized, and got out and voted.
Interesting supercut of these Justices discussing Roe v Wade.
And dump that stupid flag and “United States of Canada”. You wanna join Canada, you join Canada, which has provinces, and doesn’t have silly blue stripes on its flag. Red and White!
Assuming this leak is real, and represents an actual vote of the Court, I was wondering if anybody had gone back and reviewed those Justices’ confirmation hearings to see what they said about Roe v. Wade and about upholding previous precedents decided by the Court.
Now that precedent can be disregarded, are there any other rulings that should be swept aside; Citizens United, maybe?
Hey, as a Michigander, I am down with that! Please, please take Michigan! You don’t even have to make us a province, I’ll settle for territoryhood. Oh, Canada! God save the Queen! Take off you hoser! I mean, if you annex us, then half of the original six are Canadian teams!
Chief Justice Roberts has confirmed that the leaked draft is real.
He also noted that the decision has not been made yet. That draft is not necessarily how the final decision will be.
That said, it would probably be a big surprise if the final decision was much different from that draft.
It’s real - Chief Justice Roberts has confirmed it.
There was no vote. This is the first draft from February, after arguments were heard in December. Typically these drafts get revised a dozen times or more as they circulate back and forth among the justices. The actual decision isn’t due for a couple of months so the revising process is doubtless still ongoing. It may well end up being more or less exactly the same or it might not and justices might end up switching sides. Less likely in this case, but you never know. Which is almost certainly why this was leaked in the first place - to put political pressure on the justices.
This has been done. It all boils down to meaningless phrases like “it is the settled law of the land”, which says exactly nothing. After all what is law now can be changed later. Prospective justices (on all sides) are always carefully coached to sound non-controversial during questioning, while simultaneously giving away absolutely nothing substantial.
ETA: Or what Whack-a-Mole just said with fewer words 
.
Not all stare decisis overturning is the same. A major difference between Brown, Plessy, et al and today’s question is that Brown & Plessy expanded rights. Striking down Roe will reduce or eliminate rights, an unprecedented action.
you know things like this make me think we are only a assassination or two away from a second civil war in which the only winner will be either Russia or china
Conservative-types took a serious try at this on January 6, 2021.
Rather similar to my observation that there are a number of Christians who are not only sure they are going to heaven while you are not, but also they will have ringside seats looking down into the pit to watch you burn.
The landscape is changing in ways that make state abortion bans much less effective than the anti-abortion states think they’ll be. Hell, 90% of US counties have no abortion facilities now. Access has never been widely available to lower-middle class and impoverished women. Ironically, the attempts to ban abortions at the state level are pushing us toward more easily obtainable, cheaper abortions.
For instance, there’s a vast underground of grassroots organizations that educate and train people in self-abortion. Some focus on the construction and use of the De-Em (aka menstruation extraction) device, which has been around for decades and is composed of easily obtainable items: aquarium tubing, a syringe, a mason jar, etcetera–an easy and, by all accounts, safe method of first trimester self-abortion. It’d be difficult to outlaw aquarium tubing and mason jars. Other groups educate people in medication abortions, which are even safer, and since those meds are also used for conditions such as high blood sugar, they’re also not easy to ban. Still others encourage people to “prep,” that is, to buy the medications now in the event they’ll need an abortion down the line.
Every end-run tried by anti-abortion states will be met by counter measures. That’s what happens when a minority tries to impose its will on the majority.
Here’s a good article in The Atlantic that goes into all this. Sorry that it’s paywalled.
yeah but im talking about a street-level Beirut type of armed militia /street gangs shooting at each other while being cheered on from the top …
I for one can’t wait to see what this SCOTUS has in store for the separation of church and state.
Not necessarily. The leaker might have merely wanted the info to be available to the public and had no agenda attached or ax to grind. That’s called journalism.
I have personally recorded some local government meetings for broadcast simply because the government didn’t want them to be widely known and I thought that informing the public was a good thing.
I saw an op-ed piece yesterday which asserts that the Democrats have no plan for dealing with these developments. And it is true. We have no arrows, no quivers, no plan. There’s practically nothing to be done at a national level, since we don’t have a pro-choice majority in our undemocratic Senate. Even if Manchin would agree to suspend the filibuster, he’s anti-choice anyway. We can’t get to 60, unless we work a major upset in November. And even if an abortion rights statute were signed into law, it would likely go down in the Trumpist courts.
The truth is, we did have a plan, and it was to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016. We could have done it, but unfortunately a relative few who typically would have voted Democrat, decided to cast protest votes instead, or just not bother voting for any candidate. We saw how McConnell and the Senate Republicans hijacked the vacancy resulting from Antonin Scalia’s passing, and that alone should have made it clear to everyone that this was not the time for anyone on the left to stick their nose in the air and pontificate about not voting for the lesser evil.
I get that HRC was not an appealing candidate for a variety of reasons, but if she had become the 45th President, we would not now have Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett seated on the Supreme Court. Quite possibly we would now have a 6 - 3 liberal Court instead.
Nothing in the past five years had surprised me.
I expected all of it from the minute we knew Trump had won.
I was still a Republican in 2014, was no longer one by 2016, but yeah, the losses in the 2014 midterms and the 2016 general, which appeared to largely be due to many Democrats simply not coming out to vote, have enshrined the Republican far right for likely a long generation with little prospects for easily fixing it. Because the far right was able to use these wins to massively spread their appeal throughout the rest of the GOP, they are not so entrenched in the structure of the country that nothing can easily be done about it.
When I was a Republican for most of my life I often remarked about how lucky we were that our voters were fairly reliable in off year elections, there were eras of my life where that was the only reason we could even keep it close in the House and Senate (remember someone like me who came up in the 70s and 80s, Democrats controlled most of the Congress most of the time, and had since the New Deal era.)
Now with the implosion of Democrats support from working class Americans for a number of reasons, it isn’t quite as clear that they can win where and to the degree they need anymore, even if they do “get their people out.” Some of their people are Trumpists now.
This is why I live in Europe now. It has not been and will not be a straight line from Trump’s election to the end of the American experiment, but an irreversible corner was turned.
It’s nice you are able to, but most of us are stuck here.