I don’t disagree. It was a made-for-social media event. We have bursts of passion but we can’t sustain it.
Can Congress do something?
Nancy Pelosi has been making some noises about a law to codify Roe v Wade into statutory law. (It has no hint of a trace of a chance of passing in the current Senate, but possibly in some future Congress?) Will that suffice to invalidate the Texas law?
Or, can Congress pass a law to specifically attack the kind of strategy that is written into the Texas law?
ETA: Sherrerd suggests, above, that a sufficiently outraged populace can fix this. So, could a sufficiently outraged populace elect the kind of Congress (and President) to do this?
…or make it “voting for a Republican” in a blue state.
That’s the petard…
And we see why conservatives are so, so dangerous to this country.
Some interesting points:
I just saw this:
Actually… there are alternatives. Which are illegal and therefore not to be discussed on this forum, nor are they anything I would condone or do or in any way support or advocate.
But given the January 6 insurrection I wouldn’t dismiss illicit and/or violent alternatives to “wait until justices retire or die” or “pack the court”.
If I can see this, surely others of less moral fiber can see this.
As to the Uber question:
What happens if, six months from now, new technology allows doctors to detect the fetal ‘cardiac flutter’ activity that is essentially the trigger for this law … at only three weeks of pregnancy ?
Don’t the idiots in Texas realize that this law will have the greatest impact on those who can’t afford to go out of the state to get an abortion? So now these same people will have children that they may not be able to afford without public assistance of some sort. Then the same idiots will be screaming that tax payers shouldn’t be supporting children and the parents who had them after forcing them to have said children. Is the long term goal to get poor people (primarily, people of color and other dems) to stop reproducing? Maybe forced sterilizations? It sounds far-fetched but it is Texas.
Texas wants to secede? Good riddance.
But who says that they’re going to expand benefits? See, the cruelty is the point. They’ll cut welfare at the same time they’re banning abortion. They’ll just build new prisons. And it’s not just in Texas - this is the boiler plate for much of the South and other ‘red’ states.
On Friday, Texas Right to Life had to find a new home on the web, because hosting provider GoDaddy gave the group 24 hours to find a different place to park its website. “We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service,” a spokesperson told The New York Times and The Verge .
By late Friday, it appears it found that home: Epik, the provider that also helped save controversial sites Gab, social media platform Parler, and internet hate forum 8chan when other web service providers wouldn’t take them, is now listed as the registrar for prolifewhistleblower.com as well. The site is still having some trouble staying online though: as of 4AM ET Saturday, we saw HTTP 503 error codes when trying to access it. According to Ars Technica , it tried to use Digital Ocean as a hosting provider first, but may have fallen afoul of that provider’s rules as well and is not hosted there anymore.
Of course the “heartbeat” produced by these machines is faked. There’s no actual sound produced by the not-yet-a-heart inside a 6-week-old embryo:
And of course “fetus” is reserved for development far past what the Texas law references:
Yes. People have been looking for ways to re-institute slavery for decades.
Keep poor women pumping out those babies and put them right into the workforce (inside “juvenile facilities” or what have you). After all, we just can’t afford antiquated child-labor laws, given all the challenges we face!!!11!!! And these children deserve the chance to learn some real values, even if the only way to do it is with their legs shackled to the work benches!!!1!!!
With the current radically-activist majority on today’s Supreme Court, there’s no real reason that this dream can’t become a reality.
The number of Justices has changed SIX TIMES in U.S. history.
The choice of the word “stacking” is purely subjective. As the number of circuit courts has risen, so has the number of Justices, but we haven’t kept pace for a while. With thirteen circuit courts (aka US Courts of Appeals), “thirteen” would be a logical number of Justices.
We began with six Justices. The workload rose with the population of the country. Was increasing the number of Justices “stacking”? Or was it a logical response to the growth of the nation and its business?
Does the fact that politics played a role in the discussion of all six of those size changes, mean that there should be no further size changes? If so, why? How is that a logical bar to making a seventh change in the size of the Court?
There is no logical–and certainly no Constitutional–reason that “nine” must be the number of Justices in perpetuity.
Those who insist on using terms like ‘stacking’ or ‘packing’ have no reasonable rationale for such use, given that the number of Justices has varied so often over the course of the nation’s history.
The Court as an Institution - Supreme Court of the United States.
Not in a very long time, and not to gain more than a subtle partisan advantage.
I’m for a bigger court if decisions stop being en banc. I think this would discourage highly controversial decisions and allow the court to take on more cases.
But increasing the size of the court just to effect a short-term change in partisan composition I am against. All it will do is help the GOP to win the next election.
Yes, am I sure that you support this to decrease the workload of say, poor Elena Kagan, forefingers and thumb to her brow after too many nights of riding circuit.
An insufficient respond to judicial activism will also help the GOP win the next election.
How did you feel about ‘refusing to vote on a legitimate nominee for SCOTUS’ in order to effect a short-term change in partisan composition?
What I’m suggesting here is that Republicans took radical and unprecedented action to change the partisan make-up of SCOTUS. Moreover, the leader of the Senate Republicans has vowed to do it again if given the chance.
So why are we concerned only with what Democrats do? Why are Democrats obligated to passively stand by and watch Republicans effect radical change? Especially since changing the number of Justices is NOT a radical change—it would merely be the seventh time something happens in our history. (Not routine, perhaps, but certainly not radical.)
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What an odd argument. I don’t recall anyone bringing up either the changes in the duties of the US judiciary (which used to include SCOTUS Justices traveling from town to town), or Elena Kagan in particular.
What I brought up was the fact that “nine Justices” is by no means a sacred number, given that the number has changed six times in our history. Why not a seventh?
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Yes. The current radically-activist Supreme Court majority is far outside the US norm and far outside the sentiments of the majority of Americans on virtually every radical action they’ve taken. The very concept that citizen-bounty-hunters would be given the seal of approval by said radically-activist majority, should be enough to convince many that having a radically-activist majority on SCOTUS is antithetical to the values that created this nation.
The solution is to make the radical activists something other than a majority. A more moderate majority would better reflect the current state of American views—among everyone but the radical right, of course.
I was, and remain, against it.
You personally have no such obligation.
I support the leadership of the Democratic Party, including Pelosi and Biden, on this because increasing the size of the court polls badly now, and will, IMHO, poll worse if its succeeds. And then a resurgent GOP will make the court even bigger, or do something comparable. And that won’t poll as poorly because it will just look like an undoing of Democratic court packing.
As for the Merrick Garland precedent, that just wasn’t as unpopular as something that will be called court packing. But there is a good chance the Garland precedent will come back to bite the GOP. Or maybe it won’t. People often do bad things and get away with it. The value of fighting back depends on circumstances.