Stephan: As of the decision of the Supreme Court today overturning Roe, women in the Red states have been reduced to second-class status, and what that means is no abstraction. For instance, in Republican-controlled states, if you are a woman who has a miscarriage, you may now be subject to police investigation, and criminal charges. Was that miscarriage naturally occurring, or did you take a medication that invoked the miscarriage, which would be a violation of state law? Are you carrying a fetus that is so damaged in some way that the child has no chance of living after birth, or will be born dead, too bad, you will have to carry that fetus to delivery. If you are a 13-year-old girl raped by a family member, a rape that left you pregnant, too bad you will have to carry the child to term. And then what? Six christofascist incompetent ideologues, three appointed by a lifelong criminal have now taken control of one of the most important and intimate aspects of being female and are telling a hundred million fertile women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.
At ten o'clock this morning the United States of America reverted to an earlier century and a nastier time. How do we deal with this? There is only one way. We must vote only for pro-choice Democrats. The anti-choice movement and today's Supreme Court decision is absolutely the result of a political effort created and controlled by Republicans.
Reproductive Health Services is one of the few remaining clinics that perform abortions in Alabama. Credit: Hannah Cauhepe/Hans Lucas / Reuters Connect
On Friday, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in a decision by Justice Samuel Alito. Last month, when a draft of that decision had leaked, Leah Torres wrote about the future of medical care for women.
If you want to understand the future of medical care for pregnant women in a post-Roe world, look no further than what is happening in Alabama. As others have pointed out for Slate, the leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization paves the way for criminalizing many aspects of pregnancy. While Texas’ abortion ban, S.B. 8, has essentially halted all abortions in the state, Alabama offers a glimpse of a troubling future in which the provision of medical care for pregnant people is deeply intertwined with the cultural attitudes that seek to criminalize “undesirable” pregnancy outcomes.
In the summer of 2020, I got a firsthand experience of these attitudes in action. Three weeks after starting to practice at West Alabama Women’s Center, […]
Thomas said justices should also reconsider other cases that rest on the right to privacy — specifically cases protecting contraception access and same-sex relationships.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote.
These cases have long been in the crosshairs for conservatives, who mock the idea that there’s a constitutional right to privacy. Yet in his opinion for the majority Friday, Justice Samuel Alito said the Dobbs outcome absolutely does not mean that conservatives want to go after those decisions. He even mocked the liberal justices’ dissent for drawing comparisons between “the abortion right and the rights recognized in Griswold (contraception), Eisenstadt (same), Lawrence (sexual conduct with member of the […]
Stephan: The Roe decision, the NY gun decision, that's only part of it. There is also this. I think these dramatic anocratic decisions are as extreme as they are, because the Ginni and Clarence Thomas, showed the justices that even the most obvious corruption, and treason, would not incur any consequences. So let's go for it, the christofascist cabal, said to themselves. These six people are restructuring American society, in a quite unpleasant way.
US Supreme Court Credit: supreme.justia.com
In this term, the Supreme court has issued two decisions that limit habeas corpus and the right to judicial review of unlawful detention. A third ruling treats the death penalty with a casualness that undermines the constitutional justifications for the punishment.
While this extremely narrow view of habeas corpus is being pushed by the legally incoherent rightwing of the Supreme court, in this instance they are finding legislative support in a bipartisan piece of legislation called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act from 1996.
The result is a procedural quagmire that’s more concerned with not clogging up the courts with habeas corpus petitions than with ensuring those who are executed are actually guilty.
Stephan: I think Jia Tolentino has it right. What is happening at the court, particularly the Roe overturn, is a beginning to a dark road and, as she says, it is going to get worse. It all depends on November.
In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not the onlyrights disappearing. Now that the Supreme Court has issued its final decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and removing the constitutional right to abortion, insuring that abortion will become illegal or highly restricted in twenty states, the slogan sounds almost divorced from reality—an indication, perhaps, of how difficult it has become to comprehend the power and right-wing extremity of the current Supreme Court.
Support for abortion has never been higher, with more than two-thirds of Americans in favor of retaining Roe, and fifty-seven per […]
Stephan: The christofascist cabal on the Supreme Court has just made your life more dangerous, particularly if you live in a large city where gun murders are already a serious problem. This group of Trumpers have gutted the laws to carry weapons in public Given what we see almost daily going on somewhere in the U.S. it is hard to imagine how Clarence Thomas, who wrote the opinion, and the others could justify such a ruling but, of course, millions were paid to Republicans to get them on the court, so this is just payback to them. It is getting very dangerous in America, particularly if you are a person of color, or obviously an LGBTQ individual, to go to public places because violence is all too common. You should note that the opinion was written by Clarence Thomas who, in my view, should not be on the Supreme Court and whose corruption is so obvious, and yet nothing is being done about him.
Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The National Rifle Association’s decades-long campaign against even the most basic and popular firearm regulations scored another victory Thursday when the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key New York state gun control law, a ruling that could spell doom for similar statutes across the country.
The NRA has spent big in recent years to fill state and federal courts—including the Supreme Court—with judges that are hostile to gun regulations. In 2017, the gun lobby dropped $1 million on ads supporting former President Donald Trump’s nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch, a successful campaign that it repeated in subsequent years to ensure the confirmation of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“The Court That Dark Money Built just handed a massive win to a gun industry that drives horrific violence in this country.”
All three of those judges—along with Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts—supported Justice Clarence Thomas’ new majority opinion
✎ EditSign invalidating New York’s century-old restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms in […]
