One thing John Edwards got right
Adam Serwer (The Atlantic):
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson contains a classic Alito disclaimer—an explicit denial of the logical implications of his stated position. In this case, Alito declares that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” even as he argues that when it comes to rights “not mentioned in the Constitution,” only those “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” are protected. If you’re asking yourself who decides which rights can be so described, you’re on the right track.
Feel that chill up your spine?
Justice Clarence Thomas in a concurring opinion invited challenges to Supreme Court precedents on contraception, legalizing same-sex marriage, and striking down anti-sodomy laws. He left out the ruling permittting interracial marriage for some reason.
Judicial restraint is gone now that conservatives have a supermajority on the court. The right’s aversion for judicial activism was as phony as the rest of their well-marketed principles.
Justice Samuel Alito’s concurring opinion on the New York concealed carry case this week was but “a paraphrase of culture-war blather one hears in right-wing media,” his reasoning on par with what “might come from a fifth grader,” writes Serwer. “[O]verturning Roe was less a result of the partisan composition of the appointees than the ideological evolution of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” Logical consistency, like principles, is disposable in the pursuit of translating “right-wing cultural identity into law.”
Two Americas
The majority’s supposed originalism is a means to affirm novel legal interpretations grounded in present-day right-wing grudges as what the Constitution demanded all along. 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. Decisions about which rights survive and which do not are highly dependent on what it means to be a conservative at that time. There will always be new right-wing grievances to ameliorate by judicial fiat, justified by new abuses of constitutional history.
The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. And while the justices will both pretend and insist otherwise, the public need not flatter their imperious delusions. They should take the right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing.
Majority rule in the Supreme Court is based on minority rule in the Senate, and increasingly often (by conservative design) by minority rule in the House and by constitutional design in the White House. The right will restore feudalism one way or another. The Christian right will put those of usurper faiths in their places.
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.
If the ADD-prone left does not want to be ruled, they’ve got to quit squabbling over whose pet issues take priority, dump expectations for instant gratification, and get as serious as the movement conservatives who spent decades (and billions) plotting to take away personal freedoms in the name of liberty.
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