8 thoughts on “Gardner: It’s “Up to the States,” like Alabama, to Decide if Abortion Is Legal”

1. Garbo speaks………

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2. AOC nails it:

   

   Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez✔@AOC

    · May 17, 2019

   Replying to @AOC

   The GOP doesn’t care about babies at all – especially brown, black, or poor ones. If they did, they’d:
   – cosponsor the Green New Deal or at LEAST have a real climate plan
   – guarantee healthcare so ALL can get prenatal care
   – not stand for the death+caging of babies on our border

   

   Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez✔@AOC

   What angers me about the GOP’s attempts to turn the United States into a far-right Christian theocracy is how dishonest they are about it.

   At least be forthright about your desire to subvert and dismantle our democracy into a creepy theological order led by a mad king.

   97.3K

   12:23 PM – May 17, 2019

    

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   1. Don't hold back, AOC.  (No matter what Repeal and Replace advises).

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3. The Denver Post used to have a commentary guy whose name escapes me (I think he may have been a law professor) who was fond of saying that Roe was the greatest gift the GOP ever received. For decades, Republican politicians could gain favor with dumbass hicks by railing against abortion while at the same time complaint that Roe tied their hands. Get rid of Roe, this guy argued, and the GOP will have to deliver; let's see if they can stand up to footage of doctors and 12-year-old rape victims being frog-marched to prison, or even the gas chamber, for committing "murder" (at no time in the U.S. was abortion ever categorized as murder, but hey, that never stopped the GOP from grandstanding to the stump-jumpers).

   We may be about to discovery whether/to what extent that guy was correct. Three SCOTUS justices — Thomas, Gorsuch, and rapey alcoholic manbaby — categorically reject the legal theory on which Roe and its progeny are based. Four justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan) support the original formulation of Roe, the attenuated formulation from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or something in between. That leaves the issues of whether Roe and its progeny survive, and if so, in what form, exclusively in hands of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. That's more than a little sick-making.

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   1. Altogh it's very early, there are modest signs that Kavanaugh may join roberts in a new center .  In contrast Alito is ultra right on every thing.

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      1. Here's a good piece discussing that point:

         But as Liptak observed in his piece on the two Trump justices, this occasional divergence should not be exaggerated, and could disappear in some upcoming landmark decisions. For one thing, Kavanaugh may be exhibiting a well-known “freshman effect” whereby new justices often hew close to the Court’s ideological center until they get their bearings:

         Early in their tenures … justices are less apt to dissent, according to data compiled by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Kevin Quinn, a political scientist at the University of Michigan.

          

         That could explain, Professor Epstein said, why Justice Kavanaugh has voted with the majority in 95 percent of the argued cases this term decided by the full court in signed decisions, while Justice Gorsuch was in the majority 82 percent of the time.

          

         “After his controversial confirmation, Justice Thomas laid low, voting far more often with the majority in divided cases than he did in later years, as did Gorsuch,” Professor Epstein said. “Kavanaugh seems to be doing the same, hewing closely to the chief justice — the court’s new center. Whether, within a term or two, Kavanaugh joins Alito, Thomas and now Gorsuch on the far right remains to be seen.”

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         1. Is SCOTUS independent still? I'd like to think so.

            However, the sudden, unforeseen resignation of Justice Anthony Kennedy argues against that independence; Kennedy resigned just at the time when his son Justin's former employer,  Deutsche Bank, was being investigated for Russian collusion and money laundering. Justin left Deutsche Bank in 2009; however, as head of the bank's New York real estate department, he would have been in a position to make some of those bizarre big loans that $rump couldn't qualify for any other way.

            Snopes has a balanced write up of both the conspiracy theories and the more benign interpretations – but both theories show executive branch pressure on the Supreme Court.

            Trump's partner in crime, Mitch McConnell, has certainly maneuvered to make the Supreme Court as Trump-friendly as possible.

            It sucks that I'm now pinning my hopes for rational law and precedent-based decisions on John Roberts, the guy who gutted the Voting Rights Act and has said that racism is basically solved these days ( no more legal segregation, so there ya go).

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            1. Yeah, no.  SCOTUS is in a state of disequilibrium — Roberts is holding the court's reputation together only by the thinnest of threads.

               With another *rump appointee possible with RBG's potential passing, the odds are that it will do a swan dive into the abyss before we can electorally raise our voices in protest.

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