As a teacher of US History and Government for many years, I want to boil down the decision to overturn federal recognition of abortion rights to its essence. This extremist Court has determined As a teacher of US History and Government for many years, I have to boil down the decision to overturn federal recognition of abortion rights to its essential finding. This extremist Court has determined something shocking: that sovereignty comes from government, not from the people.
Feel however you will about abortions or fetuses or sanctity, but be clear: the only way restrictions will be enforced is through the bodies of citizens. That's all it can mean. This is profound: it creates a precedent of all-powerful government over - over, not of - the People.
What we Civics teachers have (for generations) taught is this Fundamental Principal: that the citizens' "popular sovereignty" is the political manifestation of our "natural rights." Our Constitution — with limited government, separation of powers, division of power between states and the federal government, checks and balances, and yes, judicial review -- was designed to construct political bulwarks to protect a nation where our most basic theory is that the people rule. Without that Most Basic Idea, our nation is meaningless. The First Principle is, and must be, Popular Sovereignty.
But: This radical group of five judges (Roberts' position is conveniently nuanced) - only one appointed by a President who received the majority vote! - has determined that the people themselves are not sovereign. That governments possess the very bodies of their citizens - that we are, in fact, subjects. This is far, far, far away from any traditional liberal OR conservative view of American government, outside the old Confederacy. It is a key idea of fascism, which turns political legitimacy upside down so that a nation’s ultimate power flows from government force and not from a free people.
There is no other way to read this ruling. You can say that you value the fetus as a life with equal rights, but as a legal issue that's not the endpoint, because you still have to argue that governments (state governments for now, and clearly the religious authoritarians will push to federalize the bans) should and do have the power, by right, to force their view through the bodies of citizens. That cannot be reconciled with the ultimate originalist argument that the Founders made, that we have a government formed by We The People, and only by our own authority and consent. That's the political side of "popular sovereignty."
My argument is not intellectualized or airy. It is literally a textbook understanding of American government. Look up "six principles of US government" and you'll see complete agreement on these ideas across the political spectrum. But not from the new Supreme Court majority. They have a different view.
This Court says that governments have the authority - according to them, the legal, legitimate authority - to commandeer the bodies of citizens for what they view as a public purpose defined by the state.
Obviously - isn't it? - the decision to overturn federal protection of abortion rights is part of a process -- a plan -- that is delegitimizing election rights, drowning the people's voice with corporate equal-speech rights, seeking to arm and militarize the civil space, and so much more. Something new is being built in America.
As Lincoln told us in his "House Divided" speech, if a number of workers arrive separately, some with cut lumber, others with tools, and each with a different job to do, and then leave with a solid house standing, then building the house was their plan from the beginning. Lincoln said it didn't matter if the South denied they intended to impose slavery throughout the Union: Lincoln said, look at what they're building and you'll see the plan.
I am rageful about the pain this will impose. But there is a deeper plan and vision at work here, for a new kind of America. It is rising all around us.
The Dobbs decision has supplied a solid new legal foundation for the wicked house they seek to build and force us all to live in, divided or not. The people, according to the Supreme Court of the United States of America, are not sovereign. Citizen's bodies are not their own. We are, rather, engines of the state's purposes. How can this be anything but unAmerican?
I understand that abortion, like guns or school prayer, is an abbreviated convenient code for where people stand in red/blue America, but don't be kidded that this decision is an expression of conservatism: Roe v Wade was decided by both liberal and conservative justices and was rooted in the unalienable sovereignty of the individual in their own body.
How will we we teach "The Six Principles of The Constitution" when we live in a country where governments can force decisions through and into the bodies of their citizens, where one person can be forced to put their body into labor for another person, even an as-yet unborn potential person?
This precedent must not stand. I can't teach it as right, or be neutral. That's not acceptable. I wouldn't have been able to teach the Dred Scott decision as acceptable or "just another legitimate idea" in 1857, for much the same reasons. If a Civics teacher abandons America, what's left?
The Supreme Court has now plainly made itself a new kind of power in American government, not just interpreting the Constitution but deciding that it can be ignored when needed and dragged out to legitimize when it serves their purposes, like a holy book. And their purposes, crabbed and hard-edged and hellfire infused, are as clear as carpenters working together to build a new kind of house, that none of us will ever call our own.