Edward Abbey was not as radical as today’s conservatives
The leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization indicates the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade when the opinion is released in June. As unprecedented as rolling back women’s rights protected for the last half century is the leaked draft itself. Politico’s report indicates that after oral arguments in December, Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, and all three Donald Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, voted to overturn Roe.
There will be hell to pay at the Supreme Court this morning as staff and the justices investigate who leaked the opinion and why.
The report went off like a fuel-air explosion overnight (Washington Post):
Such was the force of the report that crowds gathered outside the Supreme Court on Monday night, and political leaders issued fiery statements based on the article.
“If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans,” read a joint statement from Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “… Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation — all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century.”
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick characterized the opinion Monday night for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The “gobsmacking” leak itself confirms that norms and traditions that have steadied Supreme Court jurisprudence for decades and even centuries have been discarded. The court’s public approval has plummeted to new lows in a compressed amount of time, Lithwick observes.
The lack of formal ethics rules, and especially Thomas’s wife’s apparent participation in planning the Jan. 6 insurrection, has damaged the court’s legitimacy. Yet several of the court’s conservatives have argued people must not criticize the court for the very reason that it undermines the court’s legitimacy.
Those arguments echo the pretext conservatives use to justify passing restrictive state voting laws to restore voter confidence in elections they themselves have spent decades relentlessly undermining with false claims of fraud. The conservative Supreme Court majority treads that same path.
Alito argues that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issues, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
“[T]his is not a court,” tweeted the Post’s Jennifer Rubin, “it’s a partisan outfit out to enforce Christian Nationalism.”
Let’s look at that with help last night from Fred Clarkson of Religion Dispatches:
Earlier this year, Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press published an ahead of the curve, now essential, three part investigation of how the Dobbs case and its potential to overturn Roe was the result of a long term Dominionist religious and political strategy.
Part 3 https://bit.ly/3JKGkKU
Part 2 https://bit.ly/ChristianDomionistWarOnAbortionPart2
Part 1 https://bit.ly/ToRuleHistoryWithGod
Part 1 reinforces what I’ve written for years about the Christian Dominionist right and the far right in general. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule.
In “The Keys to Dominion,” a teaching guide [anti-abortion activist Lou] Engle sells on his website, the preacher tells Christians that “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.”
“We will govern over kings and judges and they will have to submit. … We’re called to rule! To change history! To be co-regents with God,” the guide says.
Bow before us … er, Jesus.
To fulfill their destiny, conservatives and allied Christian nationalists are willing, if not to burn the country to the ground, to monkeywrench any and all of the norms that have held the United States together for nearly two and a half centuries. Edward Abbey was not this radical.
In Ohio, Republicans are again ignoring the court orders to redraw new districts the state Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.
Refusal to call meetings to count electoral votes in select states or in Congress are ways it’s suggested Republicans will monkeywrench the 2024 presidential election. We are seeing the delaying tactic used in Ohio to manipulate outcomes. TFG has built his life around court delays. Norms are for suckers, not for rulers.
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