U.S Supreme Court Ruling Rescinds Roe v. Wade (6-24-2022)
In their unprecedented decision, the 6 Supreme Court Justices in this majority ruling are not even pretending to follow the rule of law and tossed precedent out the window, ignoring stare decisis. Never before had the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded an individual right that an earlier court has affirmed, not once, but twice, (Roe and Casey). What they have done is a shocking decision that is a very depressing and dystopian setback to the rights of Americans.
Regarding this ruling, Maureen Down succinctly stated in her 6/24/22 NY Times Op-Ed column the following:
“Over the last three decades, I have witnessed a dismal saga of opportunism, fanaticism, mendacity, concupiscence, hypocrisy and cowardice. This is a story about men gaining power by trading away something that meant little to them compared with their own stature: the rights of women……
Women’s rights had to take a back seat to Trump’s ego and ambition and McConnell’s desire for a conservative court that would pull back the reach of the government, denying protections to Americans who need or value them. They pushed through three conservative justices — one had to defend himself against sexual assault charges and one was in a weird “Handmaid’s Tale”-style extreme fundamentalist Catholic sect — and that was checkmate for Roe.”
The U.S. Supreme Court was supposedly the one institution in our tri-partite constitutional republic that was presumably intended to be non-political and devoid of all biases. That ideal is obviously no longer the case and may not have been since their Bush v. Gore ruling back in 2000. Looking back, we can now see that four of the six Justices who were in the majority overturning Roe v. Wade all had one thing in common during their Senate confirmation hearings: they lied under oath. All 4 of them said or inferred, in so many words, that “Roe v. Wade is settled law.”
In their ruling, these six justices have shown that they are intellectually lazy and really do not care about the people they serve. They work in a privileged, protected environment and insulated ivory tower. They rationalize their rulings on their personal reading and IMHO, warped historical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives and Republicans press the view that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to what their text was originally understood to mean, often referred to as “originalism”. Liberals and Democrats tend to argue that the framers defined rights in general terms to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning by applying them in new ways in response to new societal understandings and conditions that they could not conceive of at that time.
I strongly believe that basic human rights, like the right to decide what happens to your body, should not be decided by six unelected U.S. Supreme Court Justices. What they did with this ruling is just bald-faced activism. Sadly, this court is now revealed to be a very bad and sad joke and due to their 6-person right-wing ideological majority, no one can expect to have a fair and impartial ruling from them. It is also very concerning as to what future cases they may take and rule on that would possibly reduce or curtain other rights granted by earlier court decisions.
Simply put, these Justices are purely motivated by their right-wing ideology and conservative dogmatic religion and ruled this way because they could. The arrogance and unapologetic nature of the written opinion and final ruling is truly breathtaking and clearly sums up what the US Supreme Court majority is today: religious and politically motivated zealots. This majority has proven that their suspected reputation as partisan religious hacks is completely accurate. It is not just the end of the Supreme Court as an impartial judicial referee. On this important topic, these six, unelected Justices represent the minority extreme right-wing ideology in this country and unfortunately are allowed to decide how the rest of us live. Ultimately, the result of this ruling is the total loss of trust, as well as respect for and legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court by the American public. How much longer will the majority of Americans tolerate this imbalance and injustice in our ever increasing polarized and divided country?
Unfortunately, I also believe that this ruling will most likely mean an accelerated hollowing out of rural backward-thinking states as young people flee the abrogation of women’s rights, and all the other trappings of religious fundamentalism, including violence towards gays, intransigent racism, anti-science education, xenophobia, etc. Yet still, those economically doomed states will wield increasingly disproportionate and extremist power because of our flawed Constitution giving them disproportionate voting power in the U.S. Senate, not based on total population.
To me, the political hypocrisy is mind boggling. Historically, conservatives say they do not want a police state, or a nanny state, or a welfare state. Yet, by overturning Roe v Wade, these six U.S. Supreme Court Justices have given us a police state and a nanny state. Physicians who care for women can and will be criminally charged if citizens in states where abortion is now illegal, decide that those physicians helped a woman to obtain an abortion that THEY think is wrong. We have a nanny state because SCOTUS has decided that women cannot be trusted to decide what is best for them, their bodies, or their families. Their competence will be supplanted by the state's decision. We will have a police state as some States will attempt to track down and prosecute women who seek and get abortions in other States. This is not true conservativism… it is intolerable fanatical authoritarianism of people imposing their religious beliefs on others.
Once again women, the poor, and children are the ones most hurt by powerful religious zealots who don't understand or care about their lives. Who are these people to decide whether a pregnancy is a gift or a curse? That is for the woman who has to bear that child and care for that child. If it was truly the desire of right-wing Republicans to value each and every child, then our foster care system would be empty, no child would be raised in poverty and we would have single-payer national health care. But that is not the case and many of the no abortion states won’t even expand Medicaid. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.
Looking down the road, these six SCOTUS Justices supposed ideological rationalized originalism of the U.S. Constitution is a means to affirm novel legal interpretations grounded in present-day right-wing grudges, as what the Constitution intended all along. It is now plausible that every time those grievances shift, the interpretations will shift with them, even as the Justices scour history anew for confirmation of ideological conclusions they would never question, even if they failed to find it. That is ultimately why no rights that Americans currently possess are safe from this Court. The core conservative belief about our country’s culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This is the primary means of constitutional interpretation for the Court’s current majority, not historical research and not legal analysis. And while the justices will both pretend and insist otherwise, the public needs to recognize this fact and not believe for a second their vow that other constitutional rights are safe from being overturned and eliminated.
Now we know that the Republican Party and this current Supreme Court, is controlled by extremists who contort U.S. Constitutional law to match their extreme religious beliefs. We also now know for certain that a vote for Republicans is a vote for outlawing all abortions, even in the case of rape, or incest, at every stage of pregnancy, including the morning after pill. There is nothing defensible, or even tolerable, about the Republicans in the U.S. Congress or in state legislatures, warping of the federal and state judicial systems to impose by force, policies that they cannot achieve through votes in elections. Now that they all feel emboldened with this ruling, what other rights will they take away…?
In my opinion, nakedly partisan hacks abusing lifetime positions to tyrannize over the citizenry and undermine democracy cannot be permitted to wield power. What should be done now? These are my idealized recommendations:
- Impeach Clarence Thomas for supporting Donald Trump's insurrection.
- Impeach Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett for lying during their Senate confirmation hearings.
- Impose 9-year term limits on SCOTUS judges so every president has 4 picks and every annual SCOTUS term has a new member.
- When the Democrats have control of Congress with at least 60 votes in the Senate, expand the U.S. Supreme Court to 13 Justices. Then also create a system of cycling off two Justices each year, with cases to be assigned randomly to an ever-changing set of nine justices.
- Vote in ALL primaries and general elections! Not just all Democrats, but newly awakened Independents, Libertarians, educated suburban Republican women.
- Eliminate the arcane Electoral College.
- Add the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as the 51st and 52nd States.
- American women must withhold sex from Republican men until they get this ruling changed.
07-01-2022, 02:50 PM
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