Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is a first take on what the end of Roe will produce.
Anti-abortion protesters and a clinic staffer guiding patients outside a women’s health center in Jackson, Miss., last November. Credit: Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
A leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade describes a United States not seen in half a century, in which the legal status of abortion is entirely up to the states. If the draft, from February and published Monday night by Politico, ends up being similar to the court’s final opinion, expected next month, reproductive rights will be rewritten almost immediately.
If Roe were overturned, would abortion become illegal everywhere in the U.S.?
Stephan: Just as I sat down tonight Politico published Associate Justice Samuel Alito's, draft decision overturning Roe v Wade. If this is the court's decision it will be such a cataclysmic alteration in American culture that I have decided to dedicate Tuesday's SR to this report.
Stephan: If this story is correct, as most seem to think is the case, the 26 Red states are about to revert to the world of 50 years ago, before Roe vs Wade and Casey. These states, all of which already have poor social outcome data compared with the Blue states will, by law, render women unable to control their own bodies. In essence, all females (and I use female not woman) in those states become second-class citizens. I do this because I want you to note particularly that there is no exception for female children made pregnant by rape or incest. Imagine you are a 12-year-old girl, made pregnant by your father, brother, or uncle, and condemned to carry the child of this rape or incest to delivery. Do you think that might warp the entirety of that child's life?
Think about this, five or six unelected individuals are going to determine the status of tens of million of people, all the females in states controlled by Republicans. It also guarantees that the United States, which already has the worst maternal mortality data in the developed world will, by this judicial decision, assure that deaths by women during pregnancy will significantly increase.
This decision will also guarantee an increase in the Great Schism Trend, because very predictably the Blue states will continue to treat females as equal to males and, I predict, you will see an internal migration of women moving from Red states to Blue States, further exacerbating the decline of the Red States. I also predict you will see the Republican controlled states increase authoritarian control over all females. They will pass laws against ordering drugs by mail, or traveling to a nearby Blue state, and increase laws that any person who helps or even talks with a child or adult female to be vulnerable to persecution.
And be very clear that while almost two-thirds of Americans do not want to see Roe overturned, all of this is happening because one party, the Republican Party, has worked for decades to make male dominance the law of America. Anyone who votes Republican in any election is complicit.
One final prediction: If the Republicans take control of the House and Senate in the November election I predict there will be massive pressure for the Republicans to pass legislation making abortion a federal crime, overriding whatever the Blue states do to assure a female's rights.
Abortion rights supporters and anti-abortion demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 1, 2021. Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty
The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.
The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final […]
Stephan: This is one of the best articles on willful ignorance I have encountered. I see this as part of the Great Schism Trend, and it obvious from the social outcome data, that militant politicized willful ignorance is now one of the defining trends of American culture. These are the anti-science, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker, death cult, climate change deniers. The article misses one important point. These are also the rural people who are being most impacted by all the things they disdain, disbelieve, and resent. They are dying at a much greater rate, their farms are increasingly failing, their ecosystems are collapsing, and catastrophic weather events are increasingly destroying their towns and villages. Yet rather than awakening them to the importance of science, it is doing just the opposite.
By September 2021, the scientists and staffers at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had gathered enough data to know that the trees in its green-tree reservoirs — a type of hardwood wetland ecosystem — were dying. At Hurricane Lake, a wildlife management area of 17,000 acres, the level of severe illness and death in the timber population was up to 42 percent, especially for certain species of oak, according to a 2014 forest-health assessment. The future of another green-tree reservoir, Bayou Meto, more than 33,000 acres, would look the same if they didn’t act quickly.
There were a lot of reasons the trees were dying, but it was also partly the commission’s fault. Long ago, the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and their tributaries would have flooded the bayous naturally, filling bottomland forests during the winter months when the trees were dormant and allowing new saplings to grow after the waters receded in the spring. Widespread European settlement and agriculture largely halted the natural flooding, but in the […]
Robert Reich, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He has served in three national administrations, including as Secretary of Labor - AlterNet
Stephan: Robert Reich nails what I think is the central dynamic of the American Congress today, one that most of the media, either doesn't get or won't say. As a result poll after poll shows the American people blame Biden for the failure to get the laws into place that are so desperately needed. This is very wrong. The fact is that Biden and the Democrats have passed literally hundreds of laws in the House that then go nowhere in the Senate because of the Republican Party, aided by the corrupt Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, and the filibuster rule. Because the media does not cover this honestly most Americans have little or no understanding that this is the case.
Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan, speaks with Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, before delivering testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on the proposal to establish a United States Space Force at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, April 11, 2019. Credit: DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro
Why doesn’t Congress get anything done? Well, one chamber actually does. Hundreds of bills have been passed by the House of Representatives, but have been blocked from even getting a vote in the Senate. Bills like –
The Freedom to Vote Act,
The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,
The Equality Act,
Background checks for gun sales,
Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act,
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
The Build Back Better Act.
The list goes on…
So why aren’t these crucial bills getting a vote in the Senate? Because the filibuster makes it impossible.
All told, the House passed over 200 bills since the start of 2021 that have not been taken up in the Senate. Everything from investing in rural education to preventing discrimination against pregnant workers […]
