On a personal level, in my household, my mother’s word was law. It is the case in most households, that one or both parents make the rules, and rulings.
“Mom can I go to the metal concert with girls ten years older than me?’
“No.”
“Mom, can I go skydiving?”
“No.”
On a national level, in legal terms, the Supreme Court is like an umpire in baseball. They make the calls by which the game is decided. They are not always right. But they are always, eh, supreme.
What these Texas lawyers are proposing here is to make themselves essentially, insulated from the rulings of the Supreme Court. This seems to be at first glance, approaching a unprecedented level of insubordinance. After all, the Supreme Court for better or worse, has adjudicated weighty matters ranging from Dred Scott to Brown v Board of Education.
And for better or worse we have lived according to those rulings.
At no point in my life have I ever seen a group try to say to the court, “We note your opinion. Now go away.” This clearly signals that these Texans would have no intentions whatsoever of terminating the law even if the Department of Justice wins. Then what?
NBCNews has more-
Lawyers for supporters of the Texas abortion law told a federal appeals court Thursday that the state was free to pass its law banning abortion after about six weeks because states can reach their own conclusions about whether abortion is constitutional.
"The Supreme Court's interpretations of the Constitution are not the Constitution itself - they are, after all, called opinions. The federal and state political branches have every prerogative to adopt interpretations of the Constitution that differ from the Supreme Court's, and they have every prerogative to enact laws that deprive the judiciary of opportunities to consider pre-enforcement challenges to their statutes."
States have the right to adopt different interpretations of the Constitution? They do? We can just ignore the Supreme Court altogether? President Gore will be glad to know that.
I mean here I am thinking the entire purpose of the Supreme Court was to call balls and strikes on Constitutionality in a manner that was binding, and here the whole time they have just been nine pundits in black robes.
They go further..
"Abortion is not a constitutional right; it is a court-invented right that may not even have majority support on the current Supreme Court," they said. States don't violate the constitution "by undermining a 'right' that is nowhere to be found in the document, and that exists only as a concoction of judges who want to impose their ideology on the nation," they continued.
This is also nonsensical. Our rights, including that over our own bodies, fall under broader headings. To accept this literally would be to require someone to make an amendment for eating a Kit Kat. That right is not explicitly outlined either, but it is widely assumed since Kit Kats make us happy, that we presumptively maintain this right under the heading of the more specifically defined freedoms.
And you can pry my Kit Kat from my cold dead hands!
And back to my earlier point about my mother. Asking the court to essentially declare its own irrelevance takes some moxie. And if it did rule itself irrelevant, how would that ruling have the effect of binding rule if they have no authority to rule?
“Mom, I note your opinion, but I ask you to rule that you have no authority to rule.”
That sounds like something a 12 year-old might say.
Or, a right wing lawyer from Texas.
-ROC
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-ROC