Vote your ass off, every election, every level; all the way from POTUS to your school board.
And drag your friends with you.
Republicans just lost the single-issue campaign point they’ve been using to demand votes, by accomplishing it.
That is, unless they turn it into a demand that people vote to get abortion banned nationally, states’ rights be damned. So I expect that’s what they’ll be doing next.
And maybe that as well. Although considering the number of people using contraceptives, and the number who by now are friends and/or family with people in same-sex marriages, they might hold off temporarily. “But they’re killing babies!” makes a better rallying cry than “you, personally, are about to have your life screwed over!”
So they need control of the electoral process before they can go full theocracy.
Agreeing with @Leaper; and adding that discouraging people outraged by this from voting is a very, very. very bad idea. Don’t play into the theocrats’ hands: not voting is exactly what they want.
I continue to be of the opinion that voting for the school board is more important than voting for POTUS. I mean sure, vote for POTUS, but make damn sure you are voting for the school board too.
I agree. But, hopefully this step gets some of the Republicans to relax, while it energizes Democrats.
They are working on that.
Agreed, if this devolves to violence, then we all lose.
I’m not sure if I’m mis-reading you, but this take is wrong on multiple levels.
The abortion war is by no means over with Roe being overturned today, and in fact probably only intensifies. And even if the GOP managed to ban abortion nationwide through Congress law, the pro-life fight only shifts from “ban abortion” to “keep abortion banned.” Republicans did NOT lose their single-issue campaign point today - not by a long shot. If anything, they just invigorated their base. This is a huge morale boost to the anti-abortion cause.
Secondly, the Republicans have a LOT more arrows in their quiver than merely being anti-abortion. They have the anti-LGBT arrow, the anti-CRT arrow, the gun rights arrow, etc. Even if abortion were satisfactorily banned nationwide, they have a LOT more other stuff to use to rally their base with.
To say Republicans only care about abortion as a single issue and nothing else, would be like saying Democrats only care about abortion as a single issue and nothing else.
I don’t think that is what was said. However, it is the case that this has been an issue that has been used to motivate a number of Republican voters over the years.
And just as Democrats became complacent, and didn’t think that they needed to work to keep abortion legal, some Republicans may well become complacent and don’t think that they need to work to keep it illegal.
I think that the number of Republican voters who sit out due to this is not zero, but is fairly marginal. OTOH, I think the number of Democratic voters who will now vote that otherwise wouldn’t have is going to be significant.
I think this is because anecdotally, abortion is the issue that seems to come up the most as the self professed lynchpin of many voters’ support for Republicans. Obviously, they could still be wrong or insincere, but it isn’t coming out of nowhere. And there’s a non zero number of people on the left who feel like it’s over; therefore, there has to be some on the right as well. Whether any of them are correct has yet to be seen.
You mean nobody’s publicly campaigning to make abortions mandatory. Poll 100 people at random and you’ll get at least 1 person who feels abortions should sometimes be mandatory and/or that certain types of people should be sterilized. And there’s a very nasty history of people being forced or tricked into getting sterilized in this country.
My opinion is it does not. There isn’t much of a base or political movement that is vehemently pro-choice to a degree that it drives significant votes. To some degree this is the result of the general desiccation of the Democratic party as a viable vehicle of exercising politics. They don’t have nearly the same issues based organizing, rabble rousing, propagandizing etc capacity as the Republicans, in some ways looking at the modern Dem party almost looks like an atrophied version of a political party. They seem to rarely try and rouse people up and mostly hope that an election is about topics on which they poll well (like healthcare) and not on topics they poll poorly on (crime, immigration, defense, social values.)
Politics is a competitive sport, by my eyes the Democrats have been playing it like it’s something else for a long time. It’s weird to me too because I came up in the 70s when the Democrats were still pretty damn effective and proselytizing and demonizing the enemy. They didn’t always win, but they threw heavy punches. It feels like every election now is the Republican party’s to lose, because of mismanagement, and rarely the Democrats to win.
I do think as more extreme anti-abortion laws hit, and the effects are fully felt, you may start to build a reactionary political movement. It won’t be fast, certainly not fast enough to affect the midterms. There’s hard political work to be done here, and it remains an open question to me if the Democrats even understand basic political operations enough anymore to do it.
It would only make sense to sterilize certain groups of people, criminals, mentally or physically disabled people, and any other arbitrary criteria we can come up with to make society “better”.
Problem is, your criteria may be different from mine, and mine may include you, and vice versa.
So, rather than try to figure out who we should remove from the gene pool through forced sterilization, we shouldn’t do that. Unfortunately, if a state passed a law doing so, there isn’t much precedent left to appeal to.
Justice Thomas dissented from Lawrence v. Texas back in 2003. His entire dissent, 539 U.S. 558, 605,
I join JUSTICE SCALIA’S dissenting opinion. I write separately to note that the law before the Court today “is… uncommonly silly.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, 527 (1965) (Stewart, J., dissenting). If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.
Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a Member of this Court I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated. My duty, rather, is to “decide cases 'agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States.”’ Id., at 530. And, just like Justice Stewart, I “can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,” ibid., or as the Court terms it today, the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions,” ante, at 562.
Scalia’s dissent, in turn, is summed up by his opening paragraphs,
“Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 844 (1992). That was the Court’s sententious response, barely more than a decade ago, to those seeking to overrule Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973). The Court’s response today, to those who have engaged in a 17-year crusade to overrule Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186 (1986), is very different. The need for stability and certainty presents no barrier.
Most of the rest of today’s opinion has no relevance to its actual holding-that the Texas statute “furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify” its application to petitioners under rational-basis review. Ante, at 578 (overruling Bowers to the extent it sustained Georgia’s antisodomy statute under the rational-basis test). Though there is discussion of “fundamental proposition[s],” ante, at 565, and “fundamental decisions,” ibid., nowhere does the Court’s opinion declare that homosexual sodomy is a “fundamental right” under the Due Process Clause; nor does it subject the Texas law to the standard of review that would be appropriate (strict scrutiny) if homosexual sodomy were a “fundamental right.” Thus, while overruling the outcome of Bowers, the Court leaves strangely untouched its central legal conclusion: “[R]espondent would have us announce … a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy. This we are quite unwilling to do.” 478 U. S., at 191. Instead the Court simply describes petitioners’ conduct as “an exercise of their liberty”-which it undoubtedly is-and proceeds to apply an unheard-of form of rational-basis review that will have far-reaching implications beyond this case. Ante, at 564.
I wish they didn’t call it a right to privacy. In common usage, “privacy” is almost exclusively used to mean “keeping information secret”, which isn’t at all how it is used in this debate. People hear “right to privacy” and it makes no sense to them. It’s the “right to make choices about your private life”, which honestly, I think would be better described as “personal liberty”.
I’m pretty sure thats both the reason they took substantive due process on directly and tied part of their reasoning to historical traditions. It allows them to gut whatever else they want that comes out of that broad umbrella but if they ever want to keep a substantive due process precedent they can say “well this one is rooted in history.” The line there is so arbitrary that who can say they’re wrong.
Well, certainly not mandatory for everyone, but maybe a state will decide that they have a financial interest in not providing medical care for a child with an abnormality that will cause the child to require expensive, state subsidized medical care and will require abortions unless the parents can prove that they are financially able to provide medical care without assistance.
Now, to be clear, I would be totally against such an action,unless that’s what the mother wants, this is why I am pro-choice.
But it’s now been deemed OK, and maybe some states that are running cash-strapped MediCaid programs will do this.
Right, so when someone asks where the right to self defense is enumerated in the Constitution, they can claim that they are ruling based on historical precedent, rather than the actual constitution.
I agree that if there was one thing that Republicans could have dome to increase Democratic turnout with the midterms, this is it. And as refreshing as “increased Democratic turnout” is generally, -Holy shit, what a price.
Unlike the Supreme Court, the vast majority of Americans would oppose this. It would be an interesting test to see how far the disproportionate representation that Americans have could be used against the majority of the people, but again, at such a cost.
The two are inseparable; Alito/Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Barrett’s conception of substantial due process only applies to fundamental liberties rooted in history and tradition. Even Roberts has the same concept although he declined to apply it in this case, preferring judicial restraint to the specific question of viability that was before the court. (Roberts’s dissent was essentially that the woman’s right to choose only extends to a reasonable opportunity, which definitely doesn’t go all the way to the point of viability, and he declined to say any more than that.)
Thomas’s conception of substantial due process is that it isn’t part of the Constitution at all. Thomas is still alone among the Justices on that.
The problem with that is that if abortion laws are now passed locally, the “more extreme anti-abortion laws” are unlikely to be passed in those states where it would provoke “a reactionary political movement”. If the Republicans start pushing abortion laws on a national level, that would be something else, but at this time this is highly unlikely to happen.