SCOTUS overturns Roe megathread (pg 53 - confirmed)

[All Along The Watchtower]

Absolutely horrendous, and the Court has just surrendered its last ounce of legitimacy.

Name the provision of the constitution where it guarantees abortion rights

literally who cares

[All Along The Watchtower]

8 pages on this in two hours and real issues like inflation are lucky to get two

Abortion, regardless of your view on it, is a very real issue unless you're a smugly sheltered male who can afford to not care. Does that describe you?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Absolutely horrendous, and the Court has just surrendered its last ounce of legitimacy.

Name the provision of the constitution where it guarantees abortion rights

literally who cares

Literally the job of the Supreme Court to care

1. The Constitution is open to interpretation.

2. The Ninth Amendment exists, you can't just ignore it.

3. It's a very dangerous precedent to take rights away from people regardless of whether the rights were "correctly" given by the Supreme Court.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Also it's interesting - I get it's a hot topic, but I always thought trans issues were what generated multipage threads on here. However, this thread was posted like 3 hours ago - less than that - and it's already on its fifteenth page. Other threads about transgenders usually have a hard time making it past 6-7 pages, and that's weeks or even months after they get posted. Still, this news is groundbreaking and it is worthy of discussion (though still shocked at how much is happening).

Perhaps it's because these issues are life or death that they generate discussion!

but what about inflation

that's a more important issue unlike Social issues, because inflation is Economic

[All Along The Watchtower]

8 pages on this in two hours and real issues like inflation are lucky to get two

Abortion, regardless of your view on it, is a very real issue unless you're a smugly sheltered male who can afford to not care. Does that describe you?

Yeah sure smugly sheltered whatever lol I don't care

I don't get the rich part though. Don't you mean "afford to care"?
Most everyone else is getting hit in their wallet because of these prices.

You have to be a certain level of wealthy to consider this an important issue

...you don't understand who is actually harmed by restrictions on abortion, do you?

[All Along The Watchtower]

For those people supporting this decision that say it should be left up to the states, I call attention to this article published in the Post just this morning:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/02/abortion-ban-roe-supreme-court-mississippi/

Cliff: Republicans in Congress are piosed to introduce a nationwide ban on abortion after six weeks.

This flies in the face of Commerce Clause and 10th Amendment jurisprudence. I would expect a majority like Bostock, if not larger, to strike down a law like this.

Let's hope you're right.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Question for more informed people on this issue: let's say the Democrats keep control of both houses of Congress this November and pass the Pro-Choice Protection Act of 2023 or whatever, signed into law by President Biden.

On what grounds could states or others (religious organizations being likely examples) challenge such a law in the courts? The Roberts Court, especially with six conservative justices, has been notably pro-religious freedom in a lot of cases; I suppose the issue would be whether the federal law was so sweeping in its protections of abortion that it didn't have adequate carve-outs on religious freedom grounds, no?

[All Along The Watchtower]

2. This is actually legally terrible. Contrary to popular belief, Roe's legal basis is solid. This is the exact sort of thing that a majoritarian legislature *shouldn't* have the right to weigh in on. The commerce clause is also fine, Dule.

Ok, so despite me being firmly pro-choice and thinking the leaked ruling is awful; this is a part I don't understand.

I actually have a very easy time imagining the US constitution recognizing some sort of vague (and honestly, not so vague) right to privacy. My issue is with the jump from "right to privacy" meaning "right to have an abortion".

There's perhaps an argument to be made about medical documents, or perhaps not disclosing your pregnancy status to your employers; but I struggle to ser how that extends to outright abortion being a right

I am also pro-abortion and pro-right to privacy but fundamentally agree with this post.

A right to privacy in the Constitution naturally implies a right to abortion only if you have accepted the premise that a fetus is not a person with independent human rights.  Just because you have a right to privacy doesn't mean you have the right to murder another person in the privacy of your own home.

So in order for our interpretation of the Constitution to include a right to abortion, that interpretation must also include a justification for why a fetus is not a human life.  And Blackmun's opinion in Roe complete hand-waves this question.  It literally includes the line, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins." The opinion does include quite a bit of discussion of how other parts of the constitution by implication define person "only post-natally", if this is the standard for personhood, why does Roe permit unlimited restrictions on abortion in the third trimester?

If there is a bright side to this opinion, I really believe it will force pro-abortion advocates to finally construct real arguments that actually engage the arguments of the other side rather than simply lazily resting on stare decisis to justify their positions.  I.e. rather than simply arguing that abortion is a right, we will actually have to make the argument for why abortion should be a right.

Yes, all of the debates about whether the Ninth Amendment or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (or alternatively, the Equal Protection Clause) protect a right to abortion based on a right to privacy that isn’t explicitly in the Constitution but is plausibly implied by certain amendments and clauses, ad nauseam mean absolutely nothing in the face of “abortion is the killing of an innocent human life.” That’s always been the objection. All of the rest is a red herring.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Back in the 1970s, Irving Howe made the argument that American Liberals had come to rely a little too much on winning political victories through the courts rather than through democratic means. He was concerned about this on several distinct grounds, but the two that are perhaps relevant here are the democratic legitimacy (or rather the danger of a perceived lack of) those decisions and the fact that those decisions could theoretically be overturned if the political composition of the judiciary altered radically.

In most 'Western' countries, of course, abortion is a political issue of relatively minor salience, largely because the legal framework determining what restrictions are applied to it are the result of social compromise; of the acceptance that it is a difficult issue on which public opinion tends to cut across most of the usual social cleavages. The exact social compromise varies as did the exact process by which it was reached, but the existence of it is the norm. Such a thing was probably achievable in the United States fifty years ago, but instead you are where you are: probably no issue, not even that of gun control, has done as much to poison American political life over the past half century, and things are likely to get even more toxic now.

Tbf, American politics did have social compromise of a kind, for almost a century really, and it wasn’t exactly good. 1876.txt

But your broader point is taken.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Love to have abortion rights struck down because, and this is a direct quote from Alito’s draft, “we must own the libs.”

[All Along The Watchtower]

The real question though is will this help Biden in Texas in 2024


Discuss with maps

[All Along The Watchtower]

Wow, The Young Turks are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party? This is a game-changer.

They have basically told people to vote democratic in the general elections before but this time Ana is basically saying she has given up on congress and Cenk is asking them to stop donating .

Professional online left-liberals are being remarkably hostile to advice to elect Democratic Congresspeople and state officeholders, given that Democratic Congresspeople and state officeholders are the only people in a position to do anything about this. I've seen people attacking Biden in scathing terms for not somehow stopping it singlehandedly, as if he could just order a drone strike on Alito's house or something. Democratic presidency-onlyism is going to be the death of this country.

Leftists attack Joe Biden not just because he’s President but because he’s so broadly unpopular as President, and because Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer alive to be mad at. Also, I’ve seen some people bringing up Biden’s role in getting Thomas confirmed in spite of Anita Hill, but that was literally 30 years ago so whatever.

The more mature, valid criticism is that Democrats as a whole had several decades to prepare for this moment, or at least the plausible possibility, and have (and are continuing to!) treat it purely as a campaign issue (“vote for us or the Republicans will restrict abortion rights!) while simultaneously doing little of substance on the issue, probably because they thought Republicans/conservatives on the courts weren’t entirely serious about overturning Roe. In other words, they projected their own use of abortion as a mobilization issue for many Democratic voters on to the Republicans because “surely the Republicans aren’t crazy enough to do something so extreme—and besides, they need Roe to mobilize their voters, so they won’t actually overturn it…right?).

Democrats—certainly, Democratic elites—got complacent. If anything, the conventional wisdom among Democratic strategists until quite recently has been that the pro-choice position is more  ”polarizing” on average than the pro-life position, even within the Democratic big tent. Consequently, the Dems have often preferred not to talk about the issue whenever possible and just kept their fingers crossed that Roe would never be overturned. Obviously folly from a pro-abortion rights perspective.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Wow, The Young Turks are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party? This is a game-changer.

They have basically told people to vote democratic in the general elections before but this time Ana is basically saying she has given up on congress and Cenk is asking them to stop donating .

Professional online left-liberals are being remarkably hostile to advice to elect Democratic Congresspeople and state officeholders, given that Democratic Congresspeople and state officeholders are the only people in a position to do anything about this. I've seen people attacking Biden in scathing terms for not somehow stopping it singlehandedly, as if he could just order a drone strike on Alito's house or something. Democratic presidency-onlyism is going to be the death of this country.

Leftists attack Joe Biden not just because he’s President but because he’s so broadly unpopular as President, and because Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer alive to be mad at. Also, I’ve seen some people bringing up Biden’s role in getting Thomas confirmed in spite of Anita Hill, but that was literally 30 years ago so whatever.

The more mature, valid criticism is that Democrats as a whole had several decades to prepare for this moment, or at least the plausible possibility, and have (and are continuing to!) treat it purely as a campaign issue (“vote for us or the Republicans will restrict abortion rights!) while simultaneously doing little of substance on the issue, probably because they thought Republicans/conservatives on the courts weren’t entirely serious about overturning Roe. In other words, they projected their own use of abortion as a mobilization issue for many Democratic voters on to the Republicans because “surely the Republicans aren’t crazy enough to do something so extreme—and besides, they need Roe to mobilize their voters, so they won’t actually overturn it…right?).

Democrats—certainly, Democratic elites—got complacent. If anything, the conventional wisdom among Democratic strategists until quite recently has been that the pro-choice position is more  ”polarizing” on average than the pro-life position, even within the Democratic big tent. Consequently, the Dems have often preferred not to talk about the issue whenever possible and just kept their fingers crossed that Roe would never be overturned. Obviously folly from a pro-abortion rights perspective.

And the day after the ruling, Clyburn joined Pelosi in endorsing Henry Cuellar, the only anti-codifying Democrat in the House.

These people don't care about agency. They care about obedience, and they care about their clique.

Big tent!

[All Along The Watchtower]

somehow this is the fault of Bernie Bros right?

[All Along The Watchtower]

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1540852015693037568
This is Rep. Mary Miller (IL-15).  The full quote, which is quite clear, is: "President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday."

Did you expect anything else? For all the concern trolling about "abortion = black genocide", it's painfully obvious that the right-wing anti-choice movement is heavily influenced by Christian Identity (pun intended) politics.

[All Along The Watchtower]

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1540852015693037568
This is Rep. Mary Miller (IL-15).  The full quote, which is quite clear, is: "President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday."

She’s very underrated as an awful Congresswoman. Remember when she said “Hitler was right” (about using propaganda in education so you can get em while they’re young) on January 6?

Hard to tell how much people like this genuinely believe in Nazism and how much it’s just a fun game to them, just another way of owning the libs. I guess it doesn’t matter, ultimately.