One of the greatest disappointments of my adult life was coming to realize how stupid you can be and still sit on the US Supreme Court.
Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett…
These are not our best and brightest legal minds.
But they are very good at knowing the right people.
Alito’s “draft” opinion has so many factual, legal, and logical errors that it is an embarrassment. A dangerous, messy, embarrassment. You would think his clerks hate him and want to make him look bad.
Alito says abortion is not a deeply rooted right.
Well, golly gee, women being in charge of their own personhood, was also not a deeply rooted right for quite some time there, Sammy boy.
Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion
There is no mention of the procedure in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. This seems to be a surprise to Samuel Alito. By Jill Lepore
As it happens, there is also nothing at all in that document, which sets out fundamental law, about pregnancy, uteruses, vaginas, fetuses, placentas, menstrual blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community embraced by the phrase “We the People.” ...Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor…
Alito, shocked—shocked—to discover so little in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteeing a right to abortion, has missed the point: hardly anything in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteed women anything. Because, usually, they still weren’t persons. Nor, for that matter, were fetuses….
“The page of history teems with woman’s wrongs,” as the nineteenth-century abolitionist Sarah Grimké once put it. It does not teem with women’s rights. To use a history of discrimination to deny people their constitutional rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice.
www.newyorker.com/...
Sammy channeled hateful Scalia’s haughtiness.
The Most Shocking Aspects of Alito’s Leaked Draft Opinion By Dahlia Lithwick
I think it’s quite possible though, that Alito said, well, Brett and Amy are going to make me tone down some of this stuff, but I’ll put as much of it in as possible to make it more difficult for them to eliminate all of it. I will go all the way to fury mode and just deride Harry Blackmun as a partisan hack and a baby killer. I’ll just write off Anthony Kennedy as a pretentious doof, who had no idea what he was doing. I will completely disclaim these past justices, these past decisions, and hope that Brett and Amy don’t make me walk it back too much. slate.com/...
Not so quick, Sammy.
For much of human history, women barely knew if they were pregnant before the quickening.
Alito's abortion history lesson in dispute
Some lawyers who support abortion rights said many states lacked criminal abortion restrictions until the mid-19th century and some banned it only when performed at a point later in a pregnancy - known as "quickening" - when the woman could feel the fetus move, usually at four to five months of gestation.
Tracy Thomas, a professor at the University of Akron School of Law in Ohio, said Alito selectively cited history as presented by anti-abortion activists...
Some experts who back abortion rights said it is irrelevant what state laws were on abortion more than 150 years ago.
David Garrow, a legal historian, said lawyers on both sides of the abortion debate have disregarded the practical reality that the procedure was commonplace even in states where it was banned when the 14th Amendment was added and that criminal prosecutions were rare.
"If you wanted to argue that abortion is deeply rooted in American history you don't argue about state statutes," Garrow said. "You argue about the evidence of demographic reality." www.reuters.com/...
Alito meant that it hadn’t impacted HIS life.
There's a Glaring Weakness in Justice Alito's Case Against Roe v. Wade
...But another glaring weakness in the draft has received less attention: its specious assertion that Roe hasn’t really impacted Americans’ lives, so there’s no good reason for the court to stand by it. The jarring ways in which individuals’ lives and relationships will be disrupted if this half-century-old precedent falls—a factor the Justices call “reliance interests”—came up repeatedly in the December 1 oral argument, with Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar arguing that scrapping the right to abortion would upend “societal reliance and what this right has meant for further ensuring equality.” But it barely makes an appearance in Alito’s draft…
In the decades since Roe, millions have come to rely, the Casey court wrote, on “the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”
Alito tries to get around this common-sense account of abortion-rights reliance–at the very least as a backstop in the event of contraceptive failure–by calling it “intangible” and quoting Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Casey dissent. The court is not equipped, Rehnquist wrote there, to weigh “generalized assertions about the national psyche.” time.com/...
Not legal consensus changing, merely a power play.
Supreme Court leak signals the triumph of politics over the law
Efforts to dress up this opinion as sober constitutional and historical reflection fall flat precisely because of the sneering contempt shown for both Roe and the many, many judges who left it undisturbed. This is a political opinion from a political court, one that doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
Some will say that is how it should be. That politics, and not law, should decide this issue. That is certainly the conclusion reached by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Fine. But let’s call it what it is: naked power, without the thinnest veneer of a black robe. www.washingtonpost.com/...
Supply and demand, GOP, supply and demand.
Supply
The GOP likes to pretend that abortion providers are the problem.
They want to believe that eliminating providers means stopping abortions.
Not so. Written recipes for abortifacients existed in biblical times.
Demand
Planned Parenthood doesn’t cause unwanted pregnancies.
Dicks do.
Maybe we should regulate them.
Over the age of ejaculation?
1) Great, we’ll take a sample and keep it on file for future paternity and/or rape identification, if needed later.
2) We will schedule your vasectomy now. If in the future, if you have a written note from a woman willing to bear your child, have means to support a child, and are in a committed relationship, the doctors may reverse the procedure.
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And, no, RWNJs, you are not pro-life.
Today’s GOP is not pro-life. They are anti-abortion with a fetal fetish because they understand little about the basics of procreation and pregnancy.
They don’t understand how many fertilized eggs never attach and just flow out of a woman’s body.
They don’t understand how many natural miscarriages occur daily.
They value a 10-celled blastocyst over two 10 year old cousins in TX.
You are not pro-life, if you love guns and the death penalty.
You are not pro-life, if you vote against funding prenatal/postnatal care, daycare, general healthcare, WIC, or education support.
In that case you are not pro-life, again, you merely have a fetal fetish.
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Make you a deal, Alito. Help me help all the children who ARE born to have affordable accessible healthcare, good schools, secure food sources, safe homes, and futures with good jobs.
When we have solved the problems for all of these children who have drawn their first breath of life, so that no child is wanting, then I will help you improve conditions for the unborn and help every one to be a wanted child.