Bernie didn’t bad mouth HRC. His supporters did. Most of that prompted bur Russian information planted all around them. It’s a bit of a call to ask the American people to ignore the director of the FBI when he says a candidate was reckless and irresponsible with classified information ( agreed she was not ). I think you miss the point. They WERE voting with the information they had. They believed HRC was a vile treasonous liar and that Trump was a anti-elitist billionaire that was truthful as the day was long. They felt that way because their Facebook pages were loaded with Russian info, posing as American in source, telling them so. They did vote what the knew. That’s why they voted for Trump. And their Facebook pages are saying the same crap for 2018. GOTV has never worked for Democrats nor have appeals to “self interests” so I think it time for something else.
Aside from that being banana republic style court packing and unconstitutional as hell it’s also never going to happen. You can have 200 justices and still have the same problem. There’s over 400 members of the house and it’s partisan driven right down to the brand of soap used in the bathrooms.
By the end of Trump’s term the Supreme Court will be as right-wing as it’s ever been. It will be a reactionary Court and stay one for 20 years or so. We can take satisfaction in the fact that Court will hurt the folks that voted Trump ( perhaps more ) just as much as it will the rest of us. In less than 3 years it will be horribly unpopular which will stifle the likelihood the political right in this country will use it to take us to Handmaidens Tale territory. But in the interim we can expect some real un-American crap from that Court. Cruel rulings. Bigoted rulings. Rulings that will be seen as bad by large majorities. Roe will be gone. Affirmative Action too. Class Action will be so crippled it no longer serves a purpose and your kids will be indoctrinated in Christianity while attending public schools. ALL law enforcement will be “unchained” and allowed to be abusive public menaces with impunity.
Then folks will have had enough. I’m 67 so Ill not see it. But I know it’s going to happen.
The anti Clinton campaign was waged by Republicans for over a decade, and they won. It started the day she asked if she should have stayed home and baked cookies. I was very shocked that so many Americans would just close their eyes on misogyny and racism and voted for an idiot, because they bought some line about how he was a businessman. And now it’s like a cult and you can’t reason with any of its members.
The Soviet Union didn’t play fuck all in Brown v. Board of Education. Credit Thurgood Marshall, the winning attorney in that case, who started with the NAACP back in '32, winning a series of cases . . . along with, oh, Truman integrating the military … . WWII. . . stuff like that.
Like Hell Bernie didn’t bad mouth HRC; you are entitled to your opinions but not your own facts. When it was clear to Bernie he was not going to win, he (and his wife) became bitter - and became nasty. Look at what he was saying in the spring '16. And just compare and contrast Hillary when she lost in '08 to when Bernie finally - way past when the writing was on the wall - begrudgingly acknowledged he lost.
White privilege.
More than a decade: it began in '92.
Maxaroo I agree with your comment. I know this is a huge issue for women’s right to choose. If Roe vs Wade is overturned it will hurt low income women hardest. BUT I am in Indiana. Say Roe vs Wade is overturned and it is sent back to the states. Indiana would make abortion illegal.
OK say Illinois state legislature keeps abortion legal. You could have privately funded clinics setup in Indiana similar to Planned Parenthood. They would provide women information and provide financial assistance to those who show they need it. These women could then go to Illinois and have the procedure done there.
My point is if Roe vs Wade is stuck down. A new way to work through the system will be devised. It will make it harder for women in certain states to have an abortion if so desired. But there will always be ways to get around these road blocks.
On a different subject similar is the WALL on the US-Mexico border. People that support Trump seem to actually think if you build a WALL on the Border. All illegal immigration will end south of the border. This is ridiculous. The people trying to come to the US will find it harder to get into the US. But they will figure out ways around the WALL. That’s why it is a waste of money. As General Patton said “fixed fortresses are a monument to the stupidity of man.” You make a law or build a WALL. Clever people will figure out around these road blocks.
The people who want Roe vs Wade overturned should consider the fact if Roe vs Wade is overturned and it goes back to the states. Do states have the right to make up their own rules on say at what term in the pregnancy a woman can have an abortion? Seems by overturning Roe vs Wade a whole Pandora’s box is being opened. Be careful what you wish for…
Increasing the number of Supreme Court Justices is not “unconstitutional as hell.” The Constitution does not set the number of Justices, that is codified in 28 US Code §1, “The Supreme Court of the United States shall consist of a Chief Justice of the United States and eight associate justices, any six of whom shall constitute a quorum.” Congress set the number at 9 and has the complete authority to change the number any time by passing a bill through both the House and Senate and either getting it signed off by the president or overriding a veto.
Other than that, I agree with your forecast about a reactionary Court making life miserable for the next 20 or 30 years. The only saving grace is that the Court may take the path of the Tenthers and defer to State law where half the country will be fine and the other half will be living in an ante bellum, faux Xtian theocracy.
That’s what the leadership wants. But there are a lot of state and local activists driving this who genuinely want to ban all abortions. With Kavanaugh (or, even if he’s somehow defeated because he’s so obviously there to protect Trump, someone similar) on the court, some state will ban abortion outright and they’ll push that case to SCOTUS.
That is the most probable outcome. The Court will say the legal basis for Roe was faulty, there is no implied right to privacy in the 14th Amendment, and it is the sole province of the individual states to determine whether abortion should be legal and how tightly it should be regulated. Of course, that approach can lead to a wealth of unintended consequences. If there is no implied right to privacy in the Constitution then the government has free rein to control every aspect of our personal lives.
Big picture, the Federalist Society is not all that concerned with ladies’ junk. The main mission is to protect the interests of large white landowners and modernly large owners of capital and employers, who John Jay believed had the most skin in the game. It is essentially a regaming of the system that once perpetuated aristocracies. This is very destabilizing for the long-term health of the nation which requires a reasonable distribution of wealth (e.g. gini below .35), economic opportunity for all and an education system that sustains the country at the technology frontier. Even the Gilded Age super-rich acknowledged this. They were bad, but they weren’t as selfish as some of our current billionaire class.
Yes. Add to this, it is no coincidence Roe has not been overturned to date, as the business sector of the Republican party has some understanding that every action begets a reaction. (See: Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and '65.)
This is another important point. The right to privacy in general is something that actual conservative legal scholars (i.e. not just Trumpist hacks), Scalia foremost, have been crusading against for decades. Declaring it doesn’t exist would allow them to completely redo the civil liberties landscape. They may not go so far as to overturn Lawrence (decriminalizing homosexuality) and Obergfell (marriage equality), but it would mean no more future decisions like that.
Now is the time to start planning a “simple” solution to this problem. All it takes is one sufficiently funded non-profit organization.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned de jure (in addition to de facto in many states), then what ought to happen is this: Some multi-billionaire Silicon Valley type (or equivalent) should establish a non-profit organization (with a billion or so of seed money) whose purpose is to completely fund an abortion for any woman in a state where it’s illegal or overly restricted and who can’t otherwise afford it. For women who qualify, fully fund 1st class airfare, at least a week’s hotel accommodation, and all expenses of the procedure so the woman can have the procedure in a convenient place of her choice.
And if any of the despicable states make this option illegal, fully fund the woman’s relocation to a much better place to live.
I have no idea what the typical expenses of each person might be. Say the average is $10,000. A $1B fund could then afford to assist 100,000 women - who otherwise couldn’t afford it (much less the future expense of raising the child).
In 2016, I was hearing the “both of them suck” mentality from too many people who should have known better The media did THAT “good” of a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton- where she was considered just as bad as- if not worse than-Donald J. Trump. To where it didn’t really matter who you voted for or if you even voted for all. It was disgusting and appalling, not too unlike 2000 when Al Gore was run through the mud to help prop up Bush.
We also saw the same in '68, when enough of the left torpedo’ed Humphrey.
Only white people who were raised middle class or better say stuff like that. Let it get worse for thee but not me!
It already happens. There are huge “abortion deserts” in this country where women have to travel hundreds of miles to access services, and yes, there are people helping them do that. Already. Have been for years.
I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again: donate to Planned Parenthood, donate to NARAL, donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds. And spread the word about AbortionPillInfo.org and PlanCPills.org, which provide up-to-date, medically and scientifically accurate information about getting and using medication abortion.
I posted this in another thread a few weeks ago. How long do you think it would take for a state that has made abortion illegal to pass a state version of the Mann Act that would include abortion for “Whoever knowingly transports any individual in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, with intent that such individual engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense”?
“If the Supreme Court was feeling bold, it could use any abortion case to overturn Roe and say that abortion is not a right enshrined into the Constitution.”
Of course it makes sense to discuss the many legal paths which the new Federalist Society majority could go down to effectively end abortion rights without making a bold categorical ruling just chucking Roe in toto. Those are the lines along which the legal war over abortion has been fought for decades, so, sure, let’s stop and review the bidding as we prepare for a committed FedSoc tool to replace Kennedy. The author is much more qualified than I am for that task, and I have nothing to add or subtract to that part of what is said.
I just don’t think that confining the discussion to the already drawn battle lines covers the waterfront here. Most importantly, it fails to cover the single most damaging thing that the new FedSoc majority could decide about abortion rights, that they are a matter for the states, not the federal govt.
The quote above does not represent a Federalist Society way of thinking about Roe v Wade. Sure, to speak of Federalist Society thought is sort of like talking about the mercantilists or libertarians. There’s a spectrum there ,with many particular emphases depending on individual FedSoc tools’ individual special interest in particular issues. The FedSoc doesn’t have a coherent theory of anything, any more than the libertarians or mercantilists, its close cousin sophomoric pseudo-philosophies. But one common thread is the idea that the Warren court in particular, and really all the courts appointed by presidents since Wilson, have “legislated from the bench”, discovering “rights” never intended for address by at least federal courts. The Framers carefully and narrowly restricted the sphere of things the US govt was allowed to do to the items in Art I, sec 8, while leaving most of the law to 13 (or however many states we have at the moment) different state implementations of the common law.
From the birth of the Republic to Roe v Wade, the question of whatever rights pregnant women and the fetuses they carry might have that might be enforced one on the other, was treated entirely as a state matter. There were state laws about abortion, one way or the other, and this just wasn’t a federal matter, period.
Maybe the new FedSoc majority is not united in favor of bold action against abortion rights. But maybe some thought should be given to the possibility that they are united, and may be up for bold action, to vindicate the sophomoric pseudo-philosophy they all adhere to. Whatever the practical wisdom of going slow and stealthy, if they are committed anti-abortion rights people, maybe they are not united on that point, and will not engage in some prolonged down-low approach to ending Roe. Maybe they are exactly what they’ve been telling us for decades that they are, believers in the idea that much of the Constitutional jurisprudence of the past century has been a usurpation of political questions that should be left to the political branches to hash out on their own, and “social war” questions that should be left to the states.
We need to look at how “the other side” fights this. (No, not the abortion clinic bombings and the shootings.) They basically keep on trying to ban abortion, even though most people think they’re full of shit.
So if we do lose Roe V. Wade, there are several things we can do:
- Litigate at the state level; a lot of states already have court rulings establishing Roe v. Wade at the state level.
- Remember that it’s a current issue, and a surefire win for Democrats almost anywhere. If you can’t turn the legislature (remember that a few high profile burnt offerings of Republican leaders in state legislatures via the ballot box will tend to send the message to their colleagues) get it on the ballot in those states that allow for it.
- Get the Underground Railroad up and running between red and blue states. Maryland is not a huge drive from WV. Get the Underground I-81 Cannonball Run going. Get VA turned reliability, and Kentucky and Tennessee are in play.
- Make sure that we really, seriously do outreach to under-30 women; these are a lower-than-average turnout demographic that is about 80% pro-choice and that will freak out when Roe goes down.