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Supreme Court front
The only real surprise in last week’s Supreme Court hearing was how openly all six Republican-appointed justices expressed their desire either to overturn or eviscerate a half century of the court legally protecting a woman’s Constitutional right to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Republican appointees to the court have lied under oath for decades about that intention in confirmation hearings. All three appointees by Donald Trump even did it after the former president chose them from a list vetted by the rightwing Federalist Society for their opposition to abortion.
But they don’t have to pretend to uphold legal precedent anymore now that Trump has created most extreme rightwing Supreme Court in modern American history. When Chief Justice John Roberts was the deciding vote in a five-member Republican majority, he worried about protecting the reputation of the court as well as his own. But he doesn’t control the five other rightwing Republicans on the court who don’t care about such niceties. So now he’s suddenly asking what’s the big deal about Mississippi brazenly violating Roe v. Wade?
Roberts always opposed abortion rights, equal voting rights and laws against racial discrimination just like they did. He just wanted his court to gradually chip away at those Constitutional rights instead of making it obvious to the public by wiping them all out wholesale. The new Trumpian majority doesn’t do namby-pamby.
Lies and More Lies
Justice Brett Kavanaugh was one of those who lied during confirmation declaring Roe v. Wade “settled as a precedent” because “it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years.” Last week Kavanaugh compared overturning Roe to the landmark Brown decision outlawing separate inferior schools for African Americans and a long list of other historic decisions. The only difference was all those important decisions expanded Constitutional rights instead of destroying them.
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked the most important question: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” To rightwing extremists, that stench is the sweet smell of finally getting everything they want. Let everybody else choke on it.
Rights, What Rights?
Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s most virulent abortion opponent despite denying at confirmation he had any opinion on the issue, asked the lawyer for Mississippi’s only abortion clinic challenging the state’s anti-Roe law what Constitutional right protects abortion.
“It’s liberty, your honor,” attorney Julie Rikelman replied. “It’s the textual protection in the 14th Amendment that a state can’t deprive a person of liberty without due process of law and the court has interpreted liberty to include the right to make family decisions . . . including the right to end a pre-viability pregnancy.”
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar seconded the importance of liberty to end a pregnancy in guaranteeing women’s equality. “The court has never revoked a right that is so fundamental to so many Americans and so central to their ability to participate fully and equally in society.”
Most American women of child-bearing age have never lived in this country when it was illegal for them to decide for themselves whether to give birth to a child. Do Republicans really think suddenly throwing women back 50 years to once again experience forced pregnancies without any safe, legal alternatives won’t create a political earthquake in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond?
In Wisconsin, re-electing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who’s already vetoed radical Republican abortion restrictions, would take on white hot significance. So would flipping the Republican Senate seat of extremist Ron Johnson. Republicans are already dreaming of taking women back nearly 200 years if the Supreme Court allows them to start actively enforcing an 1849 abortion ban that’s still on the books. Democratic Atty. Gen. Josh Kaul has already promised he won’t be prosecuting women for violating frontier anti-abortion laws. Republican challenger Eric Toney, endorsed by Wisconsin Right to Life, is ready to load his blunderbuss and start rounding up women.
Republicans may want to reconsider their smug self-confidence about winning the midterms through their usual tactics of corrupt gerrymandering and voter suppression. Women have been one of the driving forces behind increasing Democratic voter turnout in the suburbs and exurbs.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the newest member of the court can complain all she wants about the court being disrespected as “a bunch of political hacks,” but the only way to avoid that stench is to stop being political hacks.
Suddenly, a fetus has Constitutional rights respected by the Supreme Court, but a woman doesn’t anymore. Alexandra Petri, the Washington Post satirical columnist whose father Tom retired as Wisconsin Republican congressman back when moderate Republicans still existed, has written a woman’s “rights were all the alienable kind, it turned out, and (now) she was nothing more than a sort of empty clay jar into which, if she were sufficiently blessed, a person might one day be deposited.”
