Can you fit five justices and a flux capacitor in a DeLorean?
Who knew when Marsellus Wallace said, “I’ma get medieval on your ass,” in the 1990s he was invoking the past and predicting the future?
Saturday Night Live took on Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked opinion overturning Roe v. Wade over the weekend. Alito went back to 13th century England to justify his views. Why not SNL to mock them?
Where this court majority is headed, however, is no joke. Jennifer Rubin contemplates the Inquisition-like methods that might be necessary to enforce the state bans on abortion the Supreme Court could unleash when it issues its final opinion in June.
To prosecute a woman for having an illegal abortion, what will due process look like under the court’s theocratic ruling? Rubin writes:
Consider what it would take to “prove” a woman had an illegal abortion. Would a search warrant be issued for her phone and computer to see what doctors and health-care providers she sought out? Would housekeepers, relatives and friends be interrogated as to her menstrual cycle?
It’s not clear whether states would respect doctor-patient confidentiality (an abortion ban seems to imply that is a thing of the past). Does everyone from the office assistant to the doctor get grilled about the woman’s gynecological history? Maybe security cameras at offices will be reviewed to see when and if she went in and out of a health-care provider. Are we to subpoena insurance records, travel records, bank records?
Rebecca Traister captured the witch-burning mood of the 2016 Republican National Convention mob after Chris Christie held a mock trial for Hillary Clinton and the crowd screamed “guilty!” and “lock her up.”
Three Donald Trump court appointments later, here we are. With states enabling cash rewards for townspeople who can make their accusations against any woman stand up in court, Rubin warns, “the Fourth Amendment goes out the window entirely; ‘private’ bounty hunters are not restricted by the amendment at all.”
Moreover, given the impossibility of policing all pregnancies and running down every accusation, the discretion put in the hands of individual prosecutors will be enormous; it is an invitation for selective prosecution. (Do we really think the rich, White daughter of a prominent businessperson will be hauled into court?) Some prosecutors will play Inspector Javert, harassing and menacing women; others will choose to look the other way, making further mockery of a law meant to chill conduct but not to be enforced.
Ultimately, we wind up with a society of snitches, suspicion and distrust. When the Texas bounty bill was first passed, Robin Fretwell Wilson of the University of Illinois law school wrote: “The encouragement of ‘voluntary espionage’ between neighbors hints at forms of totalitarianism that most Americans would publicly rail against.” She continued, “North Korea utilizes citizens as spies to inform the government of anti-government behavior of their fellow citizens. While the penalty there is certainly much greater — potential public execution — the underlying mechanism is the same, promoting fear and mistrust among neighbors.”
Promoting fear and mistrust among neighbors to drive its paranoid cultists to the polls is the only agenda Republicans have left. Since the earliest days of Rush Limbaugh’s radio tenure and Fox News, stoking resentment is the party’s principle mechanism for holding power. Performative democracy is a nosegay for a party committed only to maintaining its grip on power by any means necessary. As it withers, majority rule too will be tossed aside with constitutional protections. One can argue it already has been.
This is your “land of the free” on Trump-fueled theocracy.
(h/t IW)
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