Not a pretty picture:
Yeah, that was a pretty bad angle for Breyer to take. The argument of Casey was basically, “Since public opinion wants Roe overturned, we must therefore uphold Roe in order to give the middle finger to public opinion.” That means the Court is still being influenced by public opinion - just in the opposite way (you could call it “Joey Crawford Logic” - the NBA referee who was notorious for being extra biased against the home teams, as a way of showing how un-intimidated he was, as a ref, by home crowds.)
Breyer definitely was bolstering his opponents, intentionally or unintentionally so.
That’s not even close to an accurate assessment.
Check out the Scalia quote in the Slate article linked.
A sneering line about Cossacks from a dissenting judge famous for sneering at liberals in dissent isn’t exactly a top-line summary of a case’s rationale.
Okay… Re-read it…
Still doesn’t say that.
At most you could say that that was Scalia’s opinion as to what he thought of the ruling, though I think that you added a bit more snark than even he did. But in any case, that was not the reason given by the majority who actually made the ruling.
To say that it was “basically” as you said, is not a legitimate place from which to make an actual argument. Much less to extrapolate as you have.
What do you believe it says, because I read it that way as well?
That’s “basically” what Casey said.: Hey, a bunch of people want us to overrule Roe. If we overrule Roe, it will look like we are responding to political pressure. If it looks like we are responding to political pressure, that will make the Court look bad. We don’t want to look bad. Therefore, we should not overrule Roe.
I know of no other case in history that has used political opinion, against a prior decision no less, as a reason for keeping a prior decision that a majority won’t even say was correct in the first place.
No, it really doesn’t. If people share the same goals, they don’t actually have to work together in some secret behind-the-scenes way. All it takes is for there to be sufficient people who decide on their own that they shouldn’t pull the trigger when it comes down to the wire.
All you need are enough Republicans who were willing to pretend to run on abortion but not actually perform any actions to stop it. And that’s not a farfetched idea at all.
The issue is when pro-choicers start thinking of this as a reason to be relieved. That’s stupid. There’s a basic principle that, the more you advocate for something, the more you actually believe it. There’s also the principle that, the more the base starts to see through the deception, the further you have to go. And then there’s just the fact that the Republicans are on a path of competing to see who is the most extreme.
Just because there arguably was a point where a majority of Republicans would claim they were working to overturn Roe. v Wade while having no real priority in doing so doesn’t mean that remains true today.
But people thinking it might do not have to be conspiracy theorists, as your sneering language presupposed.
Whence comes this idea that the Supreme Court shouldn’t be listening to the public? They aren’t supposed to be partisan, but as a part of a democratic government, they are still beholden to the people. They are supposed to make decisions that they believe We the People would support, based on both the principles they have enshrined in law, as well as how people understand terms and concepts.
For example, when the court decided that marriage was a right, they did so based on how the people see it. When they decided that it was sexual discrimination to not allow two people get married if they both were the same gender, they were relying on how we understand the concept of sexism.
Sure, the public’s opinion isn’t the only thing they have to pay attention to, but it’s clearly always been part of the process. If it wasn’t, then why would we get different rulings in different eras, all of which happen to align with prevailing public sentiment?
The Justices can’t just wall themselves off from society. Precedent gets overturned when something from outside those walls changes how those decisions are interpreted.
Again, that’s not to say that anything partisan should affect decisions. It should never be about supporting one party over another. But knowing where the public stands on the issue is useful information for preserving the integrity of the Court. If, as in this case, the majority of the public wants Roe kept, and they overturn it because a loud minority say it should be so, then they look partisan.
None of their reasoning now would be any different than was presented back then, so none of it can be a compelling reason to overturn.
Define the “it” that you are talking about. Are you talking about the actual ruling, or about the opinion of one of the dissenters?
Can we do that with any bill or ruling? We just make up our own take on it, and say, “it ‘basically’ says this”?
At most you can say that that is an interpretation that one of the writers of the dissent had. To claim that that was the actual motivation of the majority opinion is to just make stuff up out of whole cloth.
If I were to presume the motives of the court, then I would say that they wanted to be consistent in their rulings, and uphold the precedent set by Roe v Wade, rather than demonstrate that the court was as easily swayed by political pressure as you seem to want them to be.
I’m sure if you were not so motivated to find this one to be such an outlier, we could probably find some other cases that people felt were just as politically motivated.
Is this a semantic game, based on the plurality nature of the ruling? Because there is strong support for Roe in Casey:
(My emphasis)
So, yeah, an important part of Casey is showing respect for precedent (e.g. stare decisis; based in part, by the way, on the idea that people had relied upon Roe for a generation in making family planning decisions, and so it would render a harm to revoke that holding), but not before the court favorably reiterates the legal basis by which Roe was decided.