Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

From things I've read pissing off the Chief Justice can make a Judge's life tough. I'd be shocked if it is a judge.

So Roberts is trying to flip 1 of the five to his side- His side is Roe is still valid, but the Miss law is fine as viability now is not what it was 50 years ago?

So 4 votes throw out Roe. 3 votes throw out Miss. 2 votes leave Roe and leave Miss. So then what is the outcome? Nothing happens because there are not 5 votes for anything?

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I read 60 or so pages of the thing at the suggestion of a friend who was stunned by the vitriol within it.

He was right. The language veers into sarcasm and is often passionate. It's more advocacy than decision, I suspected at first because Alito really needed to slam Roe to overturn it, knowing how hostile the response will be. But as I read along, I began to think Alito is a just a really fucking angry dude.

It's also poorly reasoned. From what I could gather, it turns on an argument that abortion has not historically been something falling under "ordered liberties" (individual liberties which society has previously balanced against the interests of society in total). These "ordered liberties" by Alito's estimation include the pedestrian right not to be over-fined or penalized (parking tix, DUI fees, etc.), but do not include the right to a guaranteed certain level of autonomy over your body. Seems a bit weak, no?

The whole thing is an absolute position where an argument of degree is needed. If the speculation is accurate, Roberts was and may still be inclined to agree that states have a right to curtail abortion, but not unreasonably deny anyone the right. The possibility of that decision is an 800 lb gorilla sitting in the corner as you read Alito's. You can't digest what he writes without seeing eminent and numerous compromises.

Instead, Alito digs the hole even deeper, and displays animus to not only Roe but also the Courts before him that followed it. When he gets into the history of abortion historically being a crime even where there could not have existed outside-the-womb viability, he's just embarrassing himself. He's obviously inoculating the decision against the criticism that compromise was possible.

TL;DR: The decision isn't a decision as much as it is advocacy.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Even Bret Stephens at NYTimes is saying this was a radical decision.

Yeah, you're right. I figured sane people would stay sane. There was a time when moderate Republicans saw to it that things like Roe - imperfect but useful compromises that kept issues where people held irreconcilable differences from becoming tails that wagged all of our politics and policy - stayed in place.

Even people who didn't personally condone abortion realized Roe kept the peace.

So yeah, I'm a fuckhead for thinking the old men in the smoky rooms who gave us people like Souter and O'Connor and the Rs on the Court who were responsible for Roe still held sway.

But I'm not giving up on thinking that some crowd of elites, bipartisan ideally, will emerge in DC and take the wheel. I'm not giving up that hope because Most People Want Compromise. Minority rule of this sort is simply unsustainable. Adults have to prevail.

Or we're just fucked.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I love the sunrise over Marblehead.

https://images.fineartamerica.com/im...by-mcguire.jpg

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That would be substantially politically smarter.

That's five votes for the constitutionality of the Miss law and we're back for the next round.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

The problem is that thus far, the GOP has suffered no consequences for its extremism. Nobody treats them as extreme and they only gain votes. Until it starts costing them something, they will keep going.

Meanwhile, the Dems are still afraid of the ghost of George McGovern.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Note the passive tense here. Too many Democrats keep waiting for this to happen of its own accord, as if these consequences are just going to happen as a force of nature, like farmers lamenting a drought. It's politics. Democrats need to figure out how to make it happen. Every election is a choice.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Thank you for the sanity check. Plurality decisions are a bitch. A year and a half ago (or so) my firm had a case at the Supreme Court. We had to read the decision 3 times before we understood what the result was.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I will also fall on my sword in that I thought this was a conservative pipe-dream that the Justices, no matter who or how appointed, would ever endorse/enact/effect.

That said, no one is talking about how this leaked draft was entitled "First
Draft" and dated February 22nd, with no indication of whom, if anyone, signed off on it. It seems as if Alito had five votes at conference and was assigned the majority, and this might have been his first draft. If so, I suspect he may have pushed his then-majority too far. I can only hope.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think we're all hoping on this. I have seen discussion from several - including Biden - on this point.

But I'm going to take this opportunity to say that next comes Obergefell, after that either Lawrence or Griswold. Along the way some lesser decisions. As someone exposed, unfortunately, to a lot of the right wing Catholics, who play a huge role in the Federalist Society, I cannot tell you how much they are lusting after Griswold. It keeps them up at night. We have a lot of right wing Catholics on the bench right now.

There are dozens of cases already in the system setting up various challenges to rights we all take for granted.

I know you really hate virtually all religion, and we've sparred on that. But this is an example to support your view there, I cannot fully describe how bat shit crazy and obsessive right wing Catholics have gotten. Most believe there is a "natural law" with its roots and greatest expression in the Bible and the medieval Catholic Church, and that the enlightenment began a period of great evil which needs to be reversed (yes, the whole damn enlightenment). Some, and an increasing number, believe in "integralism", where the State becomes subject to and governed by the Church, like a medieval state gave fealty to the Pope. When you hear these people say we are a Christian nation, that is what they mean. But for the right wing Catholic world, the discussion is between "natural law" and "integralism", not over things like originalism and textualism, and I don't think many in the legal media or many liberals have picked up on this.

Bill Barr is aggressively on the natural law side; Alito is a natural law type with integralist curiosity, and Thomas is more integralist. Barrett Coney is very quiet about where she falls, but at Notre Dame she lived in the heart of the integralist world and many of the people around her are integralists. If you don't learn some of the buzzwords and historical fantasies that motivate each group, you're not going to really understand what they are saying in these opinions.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Why just hope? The Court, this Court in particular, is political. If we assume the person who leaked this had inside info regarding the status of the votes, we can assume they leaked in an effort to create pressure to either lock in the justices or to cause one of them to change his vote. And given the fact that Roberts did not author this draft, it's a fair assumption he might be leaning toward a Solomonic decision (states can regulate abortion to an extent, but not unreasonably prohibit one).

I'd guess the vote most likely to join that and switch this to a 5-4 vote in favor of preserving Roe would be Kavanagh or Gorsuch.

Kavanagh clerked for Kennedy and replaced him. Kennedy famously changed his vote (allegedly at Laurence Tribe's urging) from overturning to upholding Roe in Casey.

Now is the time to bring intense pressure on Kavanagh and Gorsuch. Make it clear just how much they'll be pariahs, and how much damage they'll do to the institution, if they support Alito here. Make it clear how much damage they'll do to the country if they leave this issue to state legislatures. Now is the time to tell everyone you know who be able to be heard by or exert indirect pressure on the potential swing votes to get in their faces. Implore them not to take the country down a terribly dark path.

Seriously, if Kennedy could be swayed in 1992, why not Gorsuch or Kavanagh now? If you have to picket in their front yards, pressure the fuck out of these two. If shit gets intense enough, they might shift, and it appears there's a really solid chance Roberts is looking for an off ramp and in desperate need of an ally.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I hate to cite Bret Stephens, but this is excellent:

"[A] decision to overturn Roe — which the court seems poised to do, according to the leak of a draft of a majority opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — would do more to replicate Roe’s damage than to reverse it.

It would be a radical, not conservative, choice.

What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.

This is partly a matter of stare decisis, but not just that. As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period. The fact that Casey somewhat altered the original scheme of Roe, a point Justice Alito makes much of in his draft opinion, doesn’t change the fact that the court broadly upheld the right to an abortion. “Casey is precedent on precedent,” as Justice Kavanaugh aptly put it in his confirmation hearing.

It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.” Hamilton understood then what many of today’s originalists ignore, which is that the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.

. . .
Americans are almost evenly divided on their personal views of abortion, according to years of Gallup polling, but only 19 percent think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances.

It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how Americans will react to the court conspicuously providing aid and comfort to the 19 percent. You may reason, justices, that by joining Justice Alito’s opinion, you will merely be changing the terms on which abortion issues get decided in the United States. In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.
. . .

[T]he decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition. The fact that the draft of Justice Alito’s decision was leaked — which Chief Justice Roberts rightly described as an “egregious breach” of trust — is a foretaste of the kind of guerrilla warfare the court should expect going forward. And not just on abortion: A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/o...servative.html

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

It has become more clear that there is some sort of split within the conservative side of the Court about whether to overrule Roe dramatically or to eat away at it by pieces. Alito wants to do the former. Roberts wants to do the latter. Alito would not have been drafting a majority opinion if Roberts were in the majority, so it appears that in February, Alito had five votes, so presumably Roberts was trying to win at least one, maybe most likely Kavanagh, back. The best guess is that the draft was leaked by Alito or someone close to him to try to mobilize pressure on the five to stick with his approach.

Or maybe this.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I saw a suggestion that Kavanagh and Gorsuch recuse themselves given their senate confirmation testimony. That would allow them to back the fuck out of this insanity without having to join a position they don't want to take.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

My activist lawyer daughter is of the opinion we are entering a world where major cases will be reversed over and over the tides depending on the majority at any one time.