SCOTUS overturns Roe megathread (pg 53 - confirmed)

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Reading through this opinion and man is it bad. I’m on the part where Alito says that the word “necessary” is too ambiguous to interpret.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

honestly amazing that some people still have such unearned adoration for the Supreme Court as an institution that they will assume good or even consistent faith on its part.

And that they’ll be more mad at the leaker than the justices signing onto the opinion.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

It's pretty wild, and under discussed, how Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all blatantly lied to the Senate about how they respected Roe's precedent.

Susan Collins is extremely concerned.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1521673584116178944?cxt=HHwWgIC51YCEiZ4qAAAA

This is a good sign for democrats. They know they’re gonna get rocked if they overturn it. Let’s hope we can actually do something with it

Or it could produce the reverse effect. Republicans can be like " Democrats don't care about your pocketbook and they want to pursue radical social policies. ".

Most people don’t think Roe v. Wade is “radical”.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

If we assume the position that striking down Roe V Wade doesn't ban abortion, it just brings it to the people and state legislatures to decide, I fail to see on what grounds interracial marriage would be any different from this, or that it should be any different than this ruling.

Either 14th Amendment protections for privacy exist or they don't.

To argue something like 'abortion is an issue of such importance to people that it should be decided by the public but interracial marriage isn't' is the exact sort of 'legislating from the bench' that conservatives claim they don't like.

Yeah, when Alito said that abortion was different because it raised moral questions, my immediate thought was “wouldn’t social conservatives say that about all those other cases you cited too?”

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I’m on my way to my Jill Stein-voting cousin in Pennsylvania’s wedding right now. Wonder what that’ll be like.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

How does the majority opinion compare to the leaked draft?

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

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?

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

This is where we're at this country now:

Jim Bopp, an Indiana lawyer who authored the model legislation in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, told POLITICO on Thursday that his law only provides exceptions when the pregnant person’s life is in danger.

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.

This is disgusting. And apparently a 10-year-old child is a woman too.

But see, the Democrats are sexualizing kids by…having men wear dresses at the library!

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I was just mentioning the importance of which party controls the senate when it comes to these picks and its just misleading to not take this into account. Like yah Haynsworth and Carswell still get rejected with a Republican Senate but its very possible with a Republican Senate Nixon nominates people like say Paul Laxalt , or Malcom Lucas

Well, a Republican filibuster effectively gave Nixon two appointments that would've otherwise gone to LBJ. That was a concerted effort on the part of the right to move the Court to the right. And the last Republican Senate to approve a Democratic appointee was in 1895.

My overall point though was that Democrats were not opposed to giving Republican Presidents massive deference in terms of their nominees. You don't always swing for the fences with every nominee even when you have the majority. (Even so, Scalia was confirmed unanimously.) Before RBG passed, the Court had a certain equilibrium for decades. That has been completely upended. Even someone as conservative as Roberts as the median Justice was acceptable to the general public (even after decades of people like Powell, O'Connor, and Kennedy in the middle of the Court).

My other point was that Bork could very well have been defeated in a Republican Senate as well.

Haynsworth was openly segregationist in the years leading up to his nomination, which puts him way out of bounds in a way that's distinct from everyone else in this discussion.

Carswell had made segregationist comments in a political speech while running for office in rural Georgia >20 years before his nomination.  Whether or not he still secretly held those views was unclear, but he had publicly disavowed them.  In any event, he was a clear judicial conservative and there's no way he would have joined Roe, let alone written it.  If the other justices were the same, it would have still been 6/3 to legalize abortion, though quite possibly with different reasoning.

Interestingly, Carswell was secretly gay and would have lived long enough to hear Bowers v. Hardwick if he had been appointed to SCOTUS.  However, Blackmun already dissented IRL so he couldn't have changed the outcome.  His seat would have been filled by Clinton if he stayed on SCOTUS for the rest of his life.

My point wasn't about the possibility of either of them being confirmed. It was in response to the fact that three Republican-appointed SCOTUS nominees were defeated under Democratic Senates. That seat ended up going to Blackmun. While he was liberal during his later years, he was generally more conservative in his early years (particularly on the death penalty). I do have to wonder what would've happened if Fortas had become Chief Justice (or if LBJ had picked someone else and they were confirmed in time).

If LBJ hadn't pressured Goldberg to leave for Fortas, Goldberg would have lived into Bill Clinton's term, securing the seat for the left for the long haul. 

The seat’s already secured, though. It’s KBJ’s.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I think the Ninth Amendment is highly underrated. Perhaps the most underrated of all the amendments. It establishes that there must be some rights retained by the people beyond those enumerated by the Constitution itself (or if you don’t like it, you can look to substantive due process or the privileges and immunities clause or the emanating penumbras of the Bill of Rights - I don’t think it matters which one). The question is then how do we determine what rights there are? History and tradition? Sure, even though by their very nature both history and tradition are biased against women, racial minorities, LGBT people, etc. Even then there is historical and traditional support for the right to privacy. At this point, from Louis Brandeis through the Griswold line of cases, our legal system has firmly established a right to privacy and a right to make one’s own decisions regarding intimacy and family. There are countless cases that support this. To ignore them is to ignore over a century of history and tradition simply because one finds it inconvenient. To believe that whatever rights we retain are fixed by the imaginations of the Founders is to base our conception of what rights women possess on the beliefs of a group of men who considered them second-class citizens.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I think the Ninth Amendment is highly underrated. Perhaps the most underrated of all the amendments. It establishes that there must be some rights retained by the people beyond those enumerated by the Constitution itself (or if you don’t like it, you can look to substantive due process or the privileges and immunities clause or the emanating penumbras of the Bill of Rights - I don’t think it matters which one). The question is then how do we determine what rights there are? History and tradition? Sure, even though by their very nature both history and tradition are biased against women, racial minorities, LGBT people, etc. Even then there is historical and traditional support for the right to privacy. At this point, from Louis Brandeis through the Griswold line of cases, our legal system has firmly established a right to privacy and a right to make one’s own decisions regarding intimacy and family. There are countless cases that support this. To ignore them is to ignore over a century of history and tradition simply because one finds it inconvenient. To believe that whatever rights we retain are fixed by the imaginations of the Founders is to base our conception of what rights women possess on the beliefs of a group of men who considered them second-class citizens.

This is a compelling approach at common law, but it just takes on a ton of water as an interpretation of a codified set of rights, even if some of those rights are codified in a deliberately open-ended way. Possibly a lot of the uniquely Calvinball-ish aspects of American individual rights jurisprudence have to do with the uneasy coexistence of those features in our legal system.

But that’s my point, I don’t think you can just read the Constitution as a “codified set of rights” to the exclusion of all others. The text itself cautions against that; that’s the Ninth Amendment (or you can read it into substantive due process or however you prefer). I agree that a lot of the Calvinball-esque oddities of constitutional jurisprudence are consequences of our vague constitution (which is not very well suited to a 21st-century country), but I don’t think that’s an argument for one made-up way of determining which individual rights are retained by the people over any other.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I think the Ninth Amendment is highly underrated. Perhaps the most underrated of all the amendments. It establishes that there must be some rights retained by the people beyond those enumerated by the Constitution itself (or if you don’t like it, you can look to substantive due process or the privileges and immunities clause or the emanating penumbras of the Bill of Rights - I don’t think it matters which one). The question is then how do we determine what rights there are? History and tradition? Sure, even though by their very nature both history and tradition are biased against women, racial minorities, LGBT people, etc. Even then there is historical and traditional support for the right to privacy. At this point, from Louis Brandeis through the Griswold line of cases, our legal system has firmly established a right to privacy and a right to make one’s own decisions regarding intimacy and family. There are countless cases that support this. To ignore them is to ignore over a century of history and tradition simply because one finds it inconvenient. To believe that whatever rights we retain are fixed by the imaginations of the Founders is to base our conception of what rights women possess on the beliefs of a group of men who considered them second-class citizens.

This is a compelling approach at common law, but it just takes on a ton of water as an interpretation of a codified set of rights, even if some of those rights are codified in a deliberately open-ended way. Possibly a lot of the uniquely Calvinball-ish aspects of American individual rights jurisprudence have to do with the uneasy coexistence of those features in our legal system.

But that’s my point, I don’t think you can just read the Constitution as a “codified set of rights” to the exclusion of all others. The text itself cautions against that; that’s the Ninth Amendment (or you can read it into substantive due process or however you prefer). I agree that a lot of the Calvinball-esque oddities of constitutional jurisprudence are consequences of our vague constitution (which is not very well suited to a 21st-century country), but I don’t think that’s an argument for one made-up way of determining which individual rights are retained by the people over any other.

I wasn't trying to imply otherwise (although I think the Ninth Amendment and Privileges or Immunities tacks are both a hell of a lot sounder than the Due Process tack and think it's a deeply unpleasant accident of our history that the latter is what SCOTUS has normally preferred to go with). I'm just observing that if you do take a more text-oriented approach to individual rights in the American legal regime then even the Ninth Amendment just plain becomes very difficult to work with in a broadly convincing way because of how unspecific it is. But the Bill of Rights was almost certainly written and ratified with the expectation that the vague parts of it would be read through the general assumptions of the common law as it existed at that time, which is probably why both Roe and Dobbs feel the need to cherrypick that particular tradition as aggressively as they do.

Oh I agree in general, for as much of a Goldberg Concurrence Enjoyer as I am I don’t think the Ninth Amendment (or any of those options) provides any textual support for any specific right per se. I don’t think it’s possible to take a fully text-based approach to unenumerated rights without getting into emanations and penumbras, because the founders in their infinite wisdom didn’t say anything about how to go about it within the constitution itself. At a certain point you just have to vibe with what you think the constitution and society are supposed to be About - do you want a more expansive approach to individual rights jurisprudence or a more restricted one?

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/abortion-vote-recount-under-way-in-kansas/ar-AA10BWNu?li=BBnbfcL

They really don’t like democracy.

When tens of millions of American voters across over 30 states voted to amend their state constitutions to ban same-sex marriage, Democrats did not like democracy either. All those voters were "homophobic."

Yes.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

https://twitter.com/greenhousenyt/status/1558541651592859649

This will hopefully drive up Dane County turnout.

Enough to save Evers, sure, but he's still going to have this legislature to deal with because it's about as gerrymandered as apartheid South Africa.

Wisconsin is a Jim Crow state at least on this issue.

the feds unironically need to step in with regards to WI gerrymandering. it's bad enough that the state is basically no longer a functional democracy.

Sadly, the Supreme Court has decided (for some reason) that they can’t decide (or just don’t feel like deciding) what a “republican form of government” is.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

Does Graham’s bill allow abortions before 15 weeks? Or does it merely ban it after 15 weeks and allows states to decide before 15 weeks?

Only 5% of abortions occur after 15 weeks. Honestly 15 weeks seems acceptable compromise to me

We're not compromising. 

Why though?

Partial birth abortions were banned with bipartisan support. Wasn’t that a compromise? Third trimester abortions are illegal in like 48 states. Isn’t that a compromise?

Most women who give birth after 15 weeks are emergencies which graham bill may or may not protect.

Look how well those compromises worked out for the pro-choice side.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

https://twitter.com/ribunchreports/status/1592581823837573120

Judge McBurney was appointed by former Gov. Nathan Deal (R).  He's also the judge overseeing the Fulton County special grand jury investigating interference in the 2020 election.

So which constitution does the Georgia abortion law violate: the US Constitution or the GA state constitution?

Apparently he struck it down because Roe was still in place when it was signed (in 2019) and they’d have to re-pass a similar law again post-Dobbs.