Well, that didn't age well.
Today's Guest Post observes the predictions by Court Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh. They said the Dobbs decision on abortion would get the issue off the table of national politics.
Justice Kavanaugh projected an image of happy federalism.
[T]he Court's decision today does not outlaw abortion throughout the United States. On the contrary, the Court's decision properly leaves the question of abortion for the people and their elected representatives in the democratic process. Through that democratic process, the people and their representatives may decide to allow or limit abortion.
No more one-size-fits all.
The GOP never had a chance to make this a winning issue or a local one. Too many Republicans take the moral position that human life begins at conception, so abortion is murder, plain and simple, wherever it happens. GOP officeholders are jostling to ban abortion in their own states. They are reaching out-of-state, to make a felony out of "aiding and abetting" an abortion for a woman from their state. The issue has gone national. The fever dream wishes of the most anti-abortion legislators in the reddest of red states will be the issues on the Supreme Court's docket.
John Shutkin brought this bit of backfire karma to my attention. He was a college classmate. He is a retired corporate attorney who finished his career as General Counsel for two international accounting firms. He is on multiple nonprofit boards and addressing equal rights, equal justice, poverty, and access to education. He lives in Massachusetts.
Guest Post by John Shutkin
For the record, though a long-time lawyer and litigator, I am not in any way either a Constitutional scholar nor a (professional) SCOTUS analyst. Disclaimer out of the way, I nonetheless found this CNN news story today of great interest: CNN.
And, even after reading this article, I saw a New York Times headline that Wyoming had become the first – but certainly not the last – state to outlaw abortion pills. Expect lawsuits over this legislation to be filed in.
So Alito and Kavanaugh confidently claimed in Dobbs that, based on their ruling, judges would soon be “out of the abortion equation?" Um, boys, is it possible to be more than 100% wrong? At best, they were stupid and naïve. Or they are damned liars, willing to say anything as a pretext for justifying the pre-ordained holding they want to come to. (We lawyers refer to that as “Writing the opinion from the bottom line up.”) And they are neither stupid nor naïve. So guess which one it is?
But this is the post-Dobbs world that they created and there is no putting things back in the toothpaste tube. I can imagine Chief Justice Roberts, so desperate to protect the legitimacy of SCOTUS – and, not coincidentally, his own legacy – metaphorically clutching his pearls as the abortion cases keep pouring in, many of which will likely end up on the SCOTUS docket. And, though it will be of small comfort to us on the other side of the abortion argument (especially to all the women and families whom Dobbs and its progeny will have destroyed) I do hope that Alito and Kavanaugh are called out in no uncertain terms on their blithe assurance by the liberal Justices. They damn well deserve it.
Thanks for sharing this - I didn't know that's what Kavanaugh / Alito said.
In 1988 as a freshman law student our Constitutional law professor has us read aloud in class segments of the transcripts of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) oral argument. He said a plurality of lawyers, despite liking Roe as policy, considered it to be unconstitutional on its face, that is, "bad law." Dobbs ratified the plurality view, that is, Roe was bad US Constitutional law. However, as to policy, parens patriae jurisdiction will be settled state by state in red or blue.