by CHARLES C. W. COOKE
What do you think of the abortion law in Texas?” a friend asked me this morning.
I’ll tell you: I think that the question makes no sense. Properly understood, the abortion law in Texas is not really an abortion law, but a key designed to interact with one of the world’s most preposterous Rube Goldberg machines. What Texas has done is a response to what the Supreme Court has done, which is a response to what previous Supreme Courts did, which was a response to what even earlier Supreme Courts did. And all of it, right from the start, has been nonsense.
Which is to say that the core problem here is not Texas’s law, or the order it prompted, or the case law that it put at issue. The problem is Roe. The problem has always been Roe. It is not this or that law; it is not this or that precedent; it is not this or that state or legislator or governor. It’s not the trimester rule or the viability standard or the shift from strict to undue burden; it’s not the details that were presented in that case from 1991, or the circumstances in which that 2017 appeal was heard, or the judicial philosophy of the judges who heard that brief up in Pennsylvania; and it’s not this or that “ism,” either. It’s Roe. Because, legally, Roe has always been utter nonsense — and because, deep down, we all know it. In this country, there exist profound and sincerely held differences of opinion on the question of abortion — views that run from the insistence that all abortion ought to be banned without exception to the claim that abortion is a positive good that ought to be celebrated. But there does not exist a set of rival cases for Roe. Roe is a lie, a contrivance, a calculation. It is a 50-year-old imposter that has distorted our fundamental law, corrupted our politics, and damaged our Constitution. It is a gremlin.
As the pro-choice legal scholar John Hart Ely noted a few months after the decision was handed down, Roe was indefensible in every conceivable way that a Supreme Court decision could be indefensible. From whole cloth, Ely wrote, Roe created a “super-protected right” that “is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure,” and thus answered “a question the Constitution has not made the Court’s business.” Roe “is bad,” he concluded, “because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
It is from here that all our subsequent problems have flowed. Roe was the spider, and the resulting litigation — Doe, Casey, Whole Women’s Heath, and the rest — is the tangled web it has woven. Eventually, there will be no choice for the Supreme Court but to nuke Roe in toto, because there is no manner in which it can be plausibly amended, squared, resolved, or preserved. No further inquiry or inspired approach can possibly rescue Roe, because there was nothing to Roe in the first place. “One of the most curious things about Roe,” the pro-choice legal scholar Laurence Tribe has noted, “is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” Sometimes, there really is smoke without fire.
When backed into a corner, advocates of Roe and its descendants like to talk about “democracy.” This, too, is irrelevant. The United States Supreme Court is justified in striking down a democratically enacted law when, and only when, that law conflicts with a superior democratically enacted law: namely, the Constitution of the United States. If the Constitution prohibits that law, it goes; if the Constitution does not prohibit that law, it stays. Everything else is noise. The popularity of the two provisions in question is immaterial, as are the popularity of the Court, the reputation of the Court’s staff, the broader debates over the underlying political question, and the feelings of the public toward any relevant precedents. Roe could be beloved or detested or somewhere in between, and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference, because the pertinent question is whether it is juridically correct. And it is not juridically correct. It is not even juridically debatable. It is tosh.
Since it is believe men can get pregnant, do I get to have an opinion on abortion now?
You have a right to conduct your private life however the hell you want. You have NO right to dictate how others must live theirs. Once you do, YOU become the tyrant. YOU become the Taliban. At that point, YOU can go to hell.
Oh… you mean OTHER than forcing people to wear useless masks or take a vaccine they don’t want?
No one forces someone to go out and get pregnant. I think the quickest way to Hell is to support killing babies to promote promiscuity.
greggie, your soap box is empty and starting to crumble on the corners. Hope you are making plans for your future while you still have a shred of sanity left.
So now children in Texas have a better chance at life. For you anyone who supports this is Taliban?
You are out of your pea sized mind. Next time you decide to post another inane comment, abort it first.
Maybe you need to take your mask off for awhile.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/02/a-look-at-scientific-evidence-suggesting-face-masks-damage-your-health/
2022 Democratic election meme:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6uKeC2XoAAivSx?format=jpg&name=small
Gov. Abbott’s assistance is much appreciated.
Afghanistan.
Yep, that’s “the plan”, I’m sure. It’s been obvious for for a week. Unfortunately for “the plan”, one year from now Biden will be the guy who ended a 20-year war a year ago, and Abbott will be the guy who’s still angering women voters a year later.
Afghanistan disaster.
Border Crisis.
COVID19 resurgence (related to border crisis).
Economy.
Inflation.
Unemployment.
Energy.
Taxes.
MASSIVE deficits.
No part of US life has not been shit on by idiot Biden. Your lies about abortion don’t even begin to chip away at that.
Everything on your list is part of the Trump legacy, but you’re too stupid to understand that.
Actually greggie, this was all you and Biden Even CNN, MSNBS and the rest are now pointing to Biden. There is quite a lot of regret out there for voting for Biden. Only the most ignorant voters have not started to regret! Guess that includes you!
Nice try, crybaby. That’s idiot Biden’s disaster and that’s just in 8 months. Trump had them all in great shape and idiot Biden trashed it all.
Blame, blame, blame. Kinda hard to do when you hold all the power.
The Trump Legacy:
Four years talking about leaving Afghanistan, but not actually doing it;
Four years of pretending a 2,000 mile long fence would solve the problem of illegal immigration;
A year of telling people the COVID pandemic was no big deal and pitching bogus remedies, while resisting common-sense pandemic measures;
Four years of doping an already recovered economy with unsustainable tax cuts and suppressed interest rates so that the richest could grow even richer;
Which of course LED TO inevitable INFLATION, because that’s what happens when you simply print more money to cover deficits;
Huge, PERMANENT high-end tax cuts, when he was already running up federal debt FASTER THAN ANY PRESIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY, with ridiculous empty promises that the working and middle class’s cuts would at some point become permanent too;
Resistance to renewable energy programs, as if fossil fuels would last forever, while ramping up domestic fossil fuel production so that money could be made by EXPORTING resulting surpluses;
Four of climate change denial, with the western United States having increasingly massive wildfires every summer, and regional hurricanes and flooding becoming more severe with every passing year. (Maybe Biden should go to Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and New York to throw out some rolls of paper toweling.)
Not to mention the fact that this fraud-of-a-small-p-president promoted anger, hatred, and division to his personal advantage, flagrantly abused his official powers of office to commit and conceal his crimes, lied like a dog on a daily basis, and tried to overturn the election when a HUGE majority of American voters kicked his excessively HUGE butt out of the White House.
21 Quotes by Margaret Sanger that Will Probably Make You Sick
Yeah, that’s what the left stands behind.
what is wonderful is that none of the ignorant, loudmouth, dolt snowflakes, millenniums or ass wipe zero generation were even alive when Roe vs Wade was reviewed by SCOTUS. in all of the major cities and towns in America illegal abortion clinics operated without impunity. Septic abortions were high and the outcome on a very septic patient was zero survival.
As for margaret sanger’s psychiatric stability-she need treatment now. demonstrates elements of a homicidal maniac-very sick woman. it was a shame that she was not aborted, but term delivery followed by strangulation or drowning, the common practice methods used to kill viable term infants. Note, when a nurse or a doc’ strangles or drowns a new born they make no sound-silence is all that is left as life leaves the body.
No wonder catholic bishops refuse to give biden communion. Seems as though he has strayed from the catholic doctrine
‘Devout Catholic’ Joe Biden Says Life Does Not Begin at Moment of Conception
Most Democrats are anti science.
Certainly anti-intelligence.
Remember Bill Clinton vetoed a bill to ban certian Abortions while having thousands of acres of land set aside as National Monuments and Rivers listed as Wild and Scienic the Draft Dodger put protecting inanimate Lands and Rivers more important ten the lives of the unborn