Category Archives: supreme court
Guns and Abortion
The Roe v Wade decision of 1973 established a woman’s constitutional right not to bear children. The constitutional right to bear arms was ratified by 3/4 of the states in 1791.
As the president would say, the public’s views have “evolved” on social issues. People are becoming more tolerant of homosexuality in general and same sex marriage in particular. Ten states plus the District of Columbia now recognize same sex marriage.
Abortion is trickier. According to a Quinnipiac poll 63% still support the Roe v Wade decision. Yet in a USA Today Poll only 28% believe it should always be legal, 52% say sometimes legal, and 18% never legal. Eighty percent feel it should never be legal in the last trimester of pregnancy – Dr. Gossnell’s sweet spot.
Unfortunately, that last trimester is also the sweet spot for politicians like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. While scolding the gun lobby’s “willfull lies”, the president blindly supports an abortion lobby that leads to barbaric practices like Dr. Gossnell’s.
(Journalists have been shamed into providing more coverage of the case.)
Same Sex Supreme Court
Justice Kennedy isn’t homophobic, he’s Roe v Wade-phobic. He think’s “a democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say”.
Which is what happened in the Roe v Wade decision. Attitudes toward abortion were already changing and Justice Ginsburg says the court went “too far and too fast“ in removing the issue from the political process. Anger and frustration rages over abortion today with many attitudes shifting back the other way.
But nobody likes an abortion. Everybody loves a wedding.
Borked
Robert Bork died late this year. He was a distinguished scholar. One of his many distinctions included having a last name as a verb form – “to bork”. The good judge was borked by Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy during senate hearings on his nomination to the supreme court.
The late senator from Chappaquiddick claimed, ”Robert Bork’s America” was a place where “women would be forced into back alley abortions and blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.” A more circumspect Biden would wait 25 years before claiming they would be seated in chains.
Bipartisanship
In the Obamacare ruling shakeout over the Obama Healthcare Mandate, it appears that Roberts changed his mind after writing the, then, majority opinion overturning the individual mandate based on the commerce clause. He later wrote the new majority opinion upholding the mandate under Congress’ taxing power.
The chief justice isn’t the only one having it both ways. Obama has loudly insisted an estimated one zillion times on national TV that the mandate is not a tax (and he still does, now that he’s won).
After Justice Kennedy’s famous question, “can we create commerce in order to regulate it?”, it looked like the court wasn’t going to uphold the mandate as regulated commerce. So, the administration lawyers argued, hell yes, it’s a tax!
Healthcare Rewrite
You’ll have to pass it to find out find out that Justice Roberts gutted the commerce clause according to Tom Scocca in Slate.
To which the WSJ says maybe so but he just increased Congress’ taxing power.
And Andy Wilson says the Chief Justice “…rewrote the statute in order to save it…” much to the dismay of its previous supporters and lobbyists.
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