RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/roe-was-never-law/

A controversial subject that should never have been wrested from the people in the states has now been returned to them.

There is no mincing words: The Supreme Court’s historic Dobbs ruling made Friday a great day for life.

A great day for the restoration of American constitutional law, too. And a great day for democracy in our republic. It marks a high moment for the United States Supreme Court, which has been tested as never before. It stood firm and yet restrained, acknowledging that the great public-policy decisions in our society are to be made by free, self-determining people, not unelected judges.

Barack Obama, perhaps the nation’s most solipsistic politician and ideologue, took only moments after the issuance of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion to wail that the Supreme Court had relegated the most “intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues.” If you’re keeping score, yes, this would be the same Barack Obama whose signature presidential “achievement” was radically expanded government control over the health sector, leaving more and more intensely personal decisions — decisions about actual health care, as opposed to the taking of unborn life under the guise of health care — at the whim of partisan Democrats and progressive bureaucrats.

The main point here, though, is not hypocrisy. It is hard-edged politics. The former president went directly to politics because, for abortion crusaders, there has never been anything else.

In Roe, seven willful politicians in robes usurped the power of the putatively sovereign states to regulate abortion. Unless a constitutional right was at stake, the federal judiciary had no business intruding on the internal governance of the states, particularly over matters of health and safety that are the traditional domain of the states. But the Constitution does not speak to abortion.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/bons-mots-and-bad-money-inflation/

I have often been struck by the number of pithy observations — revelatory, pointed or simply true — that were not said by the person to whom they are attributed. Vladimir Lenin apparently never said (in Russian or in English) that “the way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Mark Twain, to whom many amusing remarks have been falsely attributed, apparently did not contend that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Edmund Burke neither said nor wrote that evil would triumph if good men did nothing.

Churchill, like Twain a magnet for orphaned mots seeking parents, did not say that “the idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest delusions which has ever befuddled the human mind.”

Tocqueville, yet another favored repository of crisp admonitory apothegms, did not point out that “the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

One thing to note about these pairings of putative author and scintillating observation is how plausible the linkage always is. Lenin certainly could have made that remark about grinding the bourgeoisie: he was keen on deploying any available millstones to destroy the class he abominated. Unlike Chief Justice John Marshall, who pointed out during the economic crisis of 1819 the great danger that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” Lenin thought of its destructiveness as an advantage.

As for inflation, has anyone improved upon Ronald Reagan’s warning that “inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman”?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-progressives-get-wrong-about-overturning-roe-now-its-citizens-who-will-decide/ar-AAYPQUi

With the release of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, politicians and pundits went public with a parade of horribles – from the criminalization of contraceptives to the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. In reality, the post-Roe world will look much like the Roe world for most citizens.

While this is a momentous decision, it is important to note what it does and does not do.

The decision itself was already largely known. It did not dramatically change since the leak of an earlier draft. The conservative majority held firm in declaring that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided: “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

In the end, Chief Justice John Roberts cut a bit of a lonely figure in the mix of the court on the issue. His concurrence did not seriously question the majority view that Roe was not based on a good law. However, he would have stopped short of overturning the decision outright. It is the ultimate call of an incrementalist detached from the underlying constitutional interpretation.

The court now has a solid majority of justices who are more motivated by what they view as “first principles” than pragmatic concerns. From a court that has long used nuanced (and maddeningly vague) opinions to avoid major changes in constitutional doctrine, we now have clarity on this issue. It will return to the citizens of each state to decide.

The court anticipated the response to the opinion by those who “stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil … other rights.” The opinion expressly does not address contraception, same-sex marriage or other rights. 

That claim has always been absurd but has become a talking point on the left. After the leak of the draft opinion, the New York Times opinion editors warned that some states likely would outlaw interracial marriage if Roe v. Wade is overturned: “Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t.”

It takes considerable imagination because it is utter nonsense, though it must come as something of a surprise to Justice Clarence Thomas, given his interracial marriage, or to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her own interracial family.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/06/abortion-politics-at-a-late-stage/

“The Supreme Court’s decision to accept Alito’s draft has handed a lot of painful moral decisions to all the voters and legislators in fifty states. Many surprises lie ahead. But most Americans seem unlikely to endorse post- and partial-birth abortion with the nearly unanimous alacrity of the Senate Democrats.”

Now that the US Supreme Court has adopted Justice Alito’s leaked draft judgment and overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade precedent that found a constitutional right to abortion in the ‘penumbras’ of the US Constitution, it will be a revolution in American life. It will be a democratic revolution too, because it won’t outlaw abortion—as pro-choice protesters angrily claim—but instead transfer decisions on it from the US federal judiciary to the voters and legislators of the fifty states.

Doubtless that will bring us many, various and unpredictable legal surprises. For, though you would never guess it from the media, neither most Americans nor other Westerners think or know a great deal about abortion law. Sixteen years ago, I described my experiences when the topic was raised over dinner tables in Washington and Paris:

Washington liberal: “Mr O’Sullivan, our American obsession with abortion is so embarrassing. Why can’t we be like Europe? They’re much more sophisticated. It’s not even a political issue there. Please pass the blue sweetener.”

Myself: “Well, that may be because the laws in most European countries are much stricter than those in the US. Women have no constitutional right to an abortion. In Britain, for instance, except in cases of severe handicap, abortions are not permitted after the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.”

Washington liberal: “What! That’s barbaric.”