BIG SCOOP — The Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.
"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.https://t.co/EtlZQrLFnK
— Sam Stein (@samstein) May 3, 2022
Putting down my marker here: Yes, this is depressing. Yes, this was entirely predictable. No, we are not going back to 1972 when it comes to reproductive rights.
Assuming the far-right fetus fetishists’ most fervent fantasies were to be enacted by the end of the summer (they won’t be), we have everything from widespread internet access, to major improvements in contraceptive and post-coital medicine, to the dissemination of information on safe pharmaceutical abortion — not to mention fifty years of lived experience in a post-Roe nation — on the side of women’s rights and human justice.
This is one more battle in the Long War. We all hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but only the most optimistic among us assumed it couldn’t come to this.
And, amid the opening salvos, this looks to be as dangerous for the anti-choice right-wingers as it is for us sane people. If they weren’t afraid of the consequences, they wouldn’t be squealing like piggies:
That’s almost surely why it was a leaked — and, if so, it’s an outrageous and dangerous violation of democratic norms. If it was a clerk, they should be fired at minimum. If a Justice, impeached.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) May 3, 2022
Josh has had wet dreams about this very day and even he can’t celebrate.
— russian submarine moskva (@CollieYimby) May 3, 2022
The leak is not the story. The dismantling of a woman’s right to reproductive choice is the story. https://t.co/0PEgJD3BhA
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) May 3, 2022
If someone leaked a decision that said the court was preserving Roe protections, why would I care who leaked it? I'd be celebrating! Are Republicans scared of being the dog that caught the car?
— Markos Moulitsas (@markos) May 3, 2022
What an actual "coordinated assault" looks like. https://t.co/sSASsuzJaq pic.twitter.com/cUXARACyKv
— Tina Smith (@TinaSmithMN) May 3, 2022
Laura Ingraham says it's "incumbent" for Chief Justice Roberts to drag every law clerk before him and say "give me your phone" to catch the leaker.
"Or the FBI. Give me your phones, we want all of your accounts. We have to look at every device…" pic.twitter.com/BYS1pCMSMn
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 3, 2022
This is captures the GOP reaction. This is Jeff Clark, the crooked lawyer and insurrectionist who plotted with President Trump to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election. He's quite unhappy about the leak. https://t.co/s4i2suwjCq
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 3, 2022
Weird it’s almost like those Supreme Court Justices think there’s some kind of right to make decisions in private https://t.co/G8oEPTLO5c
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 3, 2022
If Alito's opinion had a firm 5 votes, Roberts would be irrelevant and would have no reason to leak.
Implication: Alito does not have a firm 5th vote. Probably Kav.
They're fighting over Kav: full repeal of Roe and later all DP cases, or narrow ruling.https://t.co/KQfv1t014c
— Fred Is Desperately Short of Infantry (@LesserFrederick) May 3, 2022
The Thin Black Duke
I hope those white women who voted for Trump in 2016 are happy now.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@The Thin Black Duke: Well, they’re convinced it won’t affect THEM, just those OTHER people. You know, the less-deserving ones.
Like the Caitlyn Jenner “pull the ladder up behind me” mentality. And Niemoller’s warning, too: “then they came for X, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t X. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”
I wish those people everlasting agony, in this life and whatever comes thereafter.
lowtechcyclist
My attitude right now is: they wanted a ‘culture war’? Fine, let’s give them one. Let’s make this election about reproductive rights, voting rights, gay rights, trans rights.
We believe in equal rights for women, blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, gay people, trans people, you name it.
They don’t. They’re against all that.
And for bonus points, they’re in the process of trying to undermine and if necessary destroy our democracy to get their way.
I’m good with fighting this election on that turf. Sounds like they’re more than a bit scared of it.
Betty Cracker
Conservatives, including female conservatives, have never recognized women’s full humanity, so no surprise. I’m not a lawyer, but from reading the draft opinion, it sure looks like Obergefell and Lawrence will be the next precedents to fall. So marriage equality will become a patchwork “right” too, and states will once again have the “freedom” to persecute queer people.
Betty Cracker
@lowtechcyclist: That’s the spirit! :)
p.a.
@The Thin Black Duke: How may of them know, or at least think, that they will have the resources to get around the law, and only certain women will feel its force.
Another point: an unprecedented breach???? Laughable coming from the human shitstains who have done more to delegitimize the court than anyone since, who, the Taney court?
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@Betty Cracker: Isn’t gay marriage popular with younger Republicans? Most conservatives I know, which admittedly isn’t very many, seem fine with gay marriage. I guess what I’m saying is going after that will be testing whether ginning up hate will change people’s attitudes and pull them further into the hate tent, or turn more of them off and cause them to bleed more support. I wouldn’t want to test that if I were them.
Betty Cracker
I think it’s interesting that some of y’all are speaking about white conservative women as if they’re likely to have secret regrets about this outcome, as if it might have blowback on them that they’ll regret. You must not know any. I guaran-damn-tee you they are gleeful.
The Thin Black Duke
Welcome to the New Republic of Gilead, everybody. God Bless America.
Betty Cracker
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us: Great point. I guess the SCOTUS theocrats can’t contain themselves. Honestly, if they valued political expedience, they could have gutted Roe/Casey while letting it stand (like they did to the VRA). Same with Obergefell, Lawrence, etc., but the theocrats have worked so hard for this outcome, so maybe they just feel compelled to do a touchdown dance.
prostratedragon
“if a Justice, impeached. ”
That is rich, isn’t it.
Sally
Human Rights. Human Rights. Human Rights.
That includes the right to love, to vote, to have no one watching your bedroom, toilet or medical exam room. Roe is healthcare for far more people than “just” women. It’s for families, communities. Women are daughters, cousins, mothers, wives, aunts, doctors, firefighters, volunteers and much, much more, as well as employees and “economic units”.
Keep your government hands off my healthcare (as the teapots used to say).
Human Rights. Human Rights. Human Rights.
Ishiyama
This is what the politics of compromise and finding common ground inevitably leads to. “Those who refuse to learn from history, etc.”
Rusty
What has the right upset is not the win on abortion, but that finally it’s revealed that they are after a whole slew of rights. They are after access to contraception, want to criminalize sexual behavior such as oral and anal sex, gay marriage and everything that comes under a right of privacy. A quick scan of the draft decision should lead anyone with a legal background to see that Miranda is at risk, along with anything that looks like a “new right” decided since Lochner. That could even mean Brown is at risk. The reactionaries that make up a majority of the court want to remake the country. This is a completely radical reordering that is now hard to hide.
Expatchad
It has LONG been prophesied that a decision such as this would herald the beginning of the destruction of the Republican party.
This is the fanfare.
REJOICE!
Dusty Confetti
I work with several conservative women. Today is not going to be a good day at work.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
The one I knew best was my mother, who’s still alive but in her mid-90s and deep into dementia. She was a secular conservative Republican, but adamantly pro-choice. If her mind hadn’t gone already, she’d hold her nose and vote Democrat. I believe she did the same in 2016 because Trump appalled her, but since she lived in D.C. then, it really didn’t matter.
But I think there were more women like her in her generation than there are now: upper middle class Republican women who were nominally Christian but not at all invested in religion. And of course that was a pre-Fox News generation; such propaganda as was aimed at them was much more intermittent and less intense. Since then, things have pushed most people one way or the other, and I expect that’s the case with the wives of upper middle class businessmen. I don’t think there are a lot of women left who are like my mother used to be.
Tony Jay
I’m sure this will go over extremely well at the ballot box and will not in any way trigger a more-or-less proportionate response from Democrats that will remind the modern GOP why their predecessors avoided doing anything so monumentally stupid.
“You could have heard a pin drop,
When Biden stopped,
And locked the door.”
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
It was always aggravating how certainly lefties always took Roe for granted. People like Nader et al. would say they’ll never overturn Roe because of the backlash. Even those who acknowledged it could happen would fall back to “It’s okay to shit on Hillary cuz it’ll still be legal in blue states”.
With the fundies now going for a national ban, the usual suspects can no longer spout plausible disinformation about “it won’t affect me”
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Expatchad: The problem is, I’m not sure but what the 21st-century GOP will destroy America before their own downfall is complete.
Even with my health issues, I suspect I’m going to live to see the death of either the Republican Party or the United States of America as we know it, and I’m fairly certain that I’ll be long dead before the damage the GOP is doing is fully repaired, if that ever happens.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@lowtechcyclist:
religious participation has dropped significantly:
Personally, I believe in going to church every Sunday, unless there’s a ballgame on.
geg6
@Rusty:
I don’t know why they are upset that they’ve shown us exactly what we already knew about their true goals. The whole point of this particular court has been to kill any rights for women, for LGBTQA and for people of color. We’ve always known that Obergefel, Roe, Griswold and Brown were going to be overturned by these cretins. This country is about to enter the Dark Ages. I despair.
Geminid
So, I checked out a lefty site called Common Dreams and read the comments on their article about the leaked Alito opinion. Most ommenters said this is the Democrats’ fault. They have a majority, the arguments went, so why haven’t they codified Roe? No acknowledgement that Manchin is a no vote, and no call for electing more Democratic Senators this fall.
Only one person pointed out that this draft majority opinion directly resulted from Trump’s election in 2016. For the rest, it was just another pretext to dunk on the Democratic Party.
NeenerNeener
The RWNJ women I know are all single issue voters: abortion. If this goes through then they won’t bother voting any more; their work is done and besides, it’s such a hassle to stand in that line…
Gvg
I just know that I am furious. I hope a lot of other people are too.
we need to hold the presidency and the Senate until 2 conservative justices die and are replaced.
Better would be enough pro rights in all federal and state governments to pass the ERA and contraceptive rights into the Constitution. That can’t be done easily, it needs years of work, but we should try.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
This is so dumb. The leaker was likely Roberts. Anyone bright enough to become a clerk would use a burner phone or other means of communication (Woodward would signal Deep Throat using a potted plant on his balcony)
Feathers
@Betty Cracker: The youngs in my feed are in a fury at the Democrats and also unfollowing anyone who suggests that the shenanigans surrounding the left’s lack of support for Hillary brought us here.
What I find quaint is their assertion that this is the Dems fault for not codifying Roe into law. They don’t understand that the VRA reauthorization passed the Senate in 2006 98-0. There would just be lawsuits against any new laws and they would be overturned on spurious grounds.
There is a panicked desperation to maintain that the problem is feckless Democrats, not the overwhelming depravity of the Republicans and a Constitution that heavily weights towards rural power.
Why do I follow these people? None of them post primarily about politics. It just bubbles out when shit like this goes down. I like to know what they are up to. Worked in higher ed for a long time, am familiar with this cohort.
The Thin Black Duke
@Geminid: This is why I don’t go to the Common Dreams site anymore. If these clowns haven’t figured it out by now, they never will.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@NeenerNeener:
They’re already rolling out a “national ban” as a carrot to keep the fundies voting, the problem is the single issue voters against choice were already mobilized, while too many who supported choice weren’t. That changes now.
Lapassionara
@NeenerNeener: I wish. There will be another issue ginned up by the R’s, and then another after that.
Not to mention the laws making it harder for certain people (“cough, cough”) to vote, or giving the state legislatures the right to decide elections.
This is not going to be fixed anytime soon.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Feathers:
Denial and anger are the 5th and 4th stages of grief. At least they’ve started their way to acceptance.
Feathers
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: There are all sorts of support staff as well. The fact that it showed up in Politico, rather than the Post or NYT, has me leaning on the leak coming from the right rather than the left. However, if it is indeed support staff, some personal connection to someone at Politico, roommate, family, romantic connection, college bud, could be the key.
Matt McIrvin
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us:
Right now Republicans seem to be flipping from “I’m fine with gay marriage, it’s settled law” to “anyone even supporting gay rights is a child molester” seemingly in unison. I don’t think these beliefs are deeply held unless the Republicans in question are actually gay, and physically in the United States.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Just looked at the Laura Ingrahm video and none of them are celebrating a moment they’ve longed called for, to the contrary, they look like they’ve been hit in the face with a brick.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Always important to keep an eye on the REAL enemy.
Victor Matheson
I will say that if someone had leaked the Court’s gay marriage decision early, I wouldn’t have been mad about it. and having written an amicus brief for the recent Alston v NCAA case, I wouldn’t have been mad about finding out early about the NCAA getting thrashed there either.
If your beliefs are worth defending, you shouldn’t have any problem when people find out about them.
Matt McIrvin
@Feathers:
What, the Democrats they didn’t vote for? It’d be nice if there were more of them in office so they could actually pass stuff.
Betty Cracker
@Feathers:
I am not in any way endorsing their ignorance about how all this shit works, but is their ignorance not an enduring political fact? And don’t we, as Democrats, have to figure out 1) if that contingent is critical to winning elections, and 2) how to get them to vote for us if so? I don’t have any answers.
Feathers
I do have to say that the people taking this moment to complain about trans erasure in the reaction to this erasure of women’s rights are really not helping their cause. Oberfell is also on the line, contraception is on the line. If you can’t handle imperfect allies, you aren’t ready for the fight. I mean it is a valid point, but at this moment all you are going to do is enrage people and make enemies.
daveNYC
The only reason the USA isn’t going back to 1972 on reproductive rights is because Griswold v. Connecticut was decided in 1965.
Xentik
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Acceptance that the Democrats are the real problem, and that the only way to usher in the new lefty Utopia is to side with the Republicans completely! /s
More seriously, between this and the upcoming public Jan 6th hearings, perhaps we can finally get the country to wake up to the fact that there are a bunch of fascists pounding at the door, and that we need to hold the house and gain at least two senate seats if we want to fix anything (It’s not like Manchin cares if the republicans take us back to 1822, he’s pretty sure he’ll be A-OK).
matt
If every decision was made on the shadow docket there couldn’t be any leaks. That’s the model conservatives would like.
matt
The reason they’re mad about the leak is because it wrong-footed their press rollout. It’s like when Biden leaked Russia’s plans in Ukraine before they executed them.
john (not mccain)
It looks like the rapture is our best hope for a better world.
Betty Cracker
@Feathers:
True, and if we don’t come together to win this fight, and if the fascists end our democratic experiment, your quote above would be a fitting epitath.
sab
@matt: Yep. Okay for them to break norms but not for us.
Geminid
@The Thin Black Duke: Those folks definitely are stuck in their politics. I follow just to see what stories they repory and how they spin them. The comments interest me more for the ones that dissent from the standard. For instance, when this war started comments were typically anti-NATO, but 20% forthrightly supported Ukraine and U.S. support of that country.
I think the readership skews older. At least, I recognize a lot of what I saw of “radicals” in the 1970’s. Some of the commenters on Common Dreams are the ones who did not move on to New Age ideologies.
PST
@Geminid:
It wouldn’t matter anyway. The same justices would hold that the federal government has no power under the Constitution to prevent states from banning abortion. It does not, for example, fall under the taxing power or power to regulate interstate commerce.
hueyplong
@Betty Cracker: Conservative white women are probably the biggest fans of this about to be released ruling, and they’re why the 19th Amendment isn’t 100% safe.
Of course, they’re in this influential spot because of the absolute certainty that conservative white men are reliably awful.
sab
Today is primary election day, so I get to go vote for a real Democratic Senate candidate imstead of a Justice Democrat. I am quite happy with our Congressonal candidate also.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The aftermath of the Iraq War convinced me that I needed to pay more attention to critical voices from the further left. I abused myself for years listening to these people, because they were right about one important thing when the mainstream of the Democratic Party had been wrong and I had personally been wrong, and I figured I owed it to myself and my country to play attention to them.
But they’re just so dumb. Over and over and over, basically telling people to either disengage from or outright sabotage electoral politics, because if you always lose your hands remain clean.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: I have an extended-family member who is deep into QAnon and the way she got in was via being extremely, extremely anti-abortion. It seems to be a thing that just turns into an infestation of brain worms.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I detect irony here, and I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying I should not take notice of what people on the left say?
I don’t obsess about these folks, but I do do keep my eye on them. They very consistently undermine support for our party, especially among young people.
PST
@Geminid: I could be wrong, but I took Betty’s comment as an ironic commentary on the obsessive focus of the ultras on the supposed sins of mainstream liberal Democrats.
New Deal democrat
Please note, this is an opinion that clearly sets forth a rationale to overrule *all* of the privacy decisions of the last 60 years, including contraception and gay rights.
Which means that these 5 reactionary Justices believe that they hold superior wisdom than *all* of their predecessors going back over half a century, who had determined that the Constitution did include a right to privacy. This is a supremely arrogant and ultimately lawless position. If a lifetime of cases in an entire area of Supreme Court cases can be overruled this brusquely, then what precedent, no matter how long or previously well accepted is safe? How does society govern itself when 5 people in black robes can change everything on a dime?
In other words, there is a lot to be said for the concept of stare decisions: that previous rulings that have been accepted by society over time, , and the people have lived their lives accepting that decision, should remain intact.
P.S.: I will repeat what I have said before. Never in American history has the Court taken a right away from the American people. A legion of psychological studies show that people react much more strongly to a loss than a gain. I believe this opinion will completely dominate the fall elections.
prostratedragon
@Gvg: Until much much more groundwork is laid, I recommend chanting a mantra or singing a lullaby whenever amending the Constitution comes up till the feeling passes, in hope that some people forget that it can be done.
Geminid
@sab: I noticed that Hakeem Jeffries and John Clyburn campaigned with Shontel Brown on Sunday. I’ll be watching the OH-11th primary.
I hope you enjoy the last fifty or so Republican Senate primary ads.
Geminid
@PST: You could be right, and I could be overly touchy on this subject.
sab
@hueyplong:In regards to the 19th amendment and conservative white women. My husband’s first wife registered to vote (Ohio back then allowed same day registration then voting) in order to vote against same day registration.
hueyplong
@New Deal democrat: I hope you’re right. I could see a gerrymandered midterm in which Democrats get far more votes yet lose both houses, after which we experience nonstop propaganda about the death of rights being the will of the people.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: I’ve been reading the discussion over on LGM and it’s striking how many people there immediately jumped to “it won’t make any difference to the election; nobody gives a shit”.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed.
And I think most of us here overestimate the importance of “deeply held” beliefs. Very few people are single-issue voters. And I really think that political alignment/party affiliation means something different than it did in the 70s. It isn’t about listening to candidates thoughtfully and voting for the people who believe the same things as you. It is far more a vehicle for expression of self-concept than it used to be. In some ways, that’s great, I think people being more open about their views is good. In some ways, it’s terrible, because fewer people are persuadable.
And everyone is fucken BROKE and INDEBTED AF and stressed out. We mock economic anxiety, but shit is more perilous now than it used to be.
MisterDancer
Dred Scott did, for all intents and purposes, by (very basically) declaring that Black folx weren’t US citizens, and nullifying the Missouri Compromise.
But since Scott was, arguably, an inciting incident for our Civil War, and a horrific example of how actual judicial over-reach causes a backlash, I think it stands as an example of the concepts you’re laying out.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: They say that cynicism is bliss.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Matt McIrvin: Isn’t LGM full of incells?
zhena gogolia
@p.a.: They accepted stolen Supreme Court seats. They have no integrity.
rikyrah
The muthaphuckas more concerned about the leak than women’s rights being decimated…
Phuck You??
zhena gogolia
@Expatchad: I pray you’re right.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterDancer: The Supreme Court was more often than not a reactionary influence until the Warren Court, which was an anomaly. Since then, there have been enough occasional decisions like Roe, Lawrence and Obergefell that liberals on some level still think of SCOTUS as a Warren-esque guarantor of rights. But we have to adjust to it being the opposite, which is more the historic norm.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
Uh huh
Uh huh??
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: These people don’t seem very happy.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:
The people who are tend to focus on right-wing preoccupations: banning abortion or eliminating gun control. The single issue is itself a proxy for identity.
Biff Baxter
@The Thin Black Duke: They never will. They live up their own asses.
zhena gogolia
@PST: You are wrong. She was criticizing geminid for mentioning what the lefties are saying.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Agree. The issue itself is a way of signaling social alignment. And it’s never really a single issue. It’s really a package of issues that form an axis form a social orbit.
There are plenty of people who don’t feel too strongly about outlawing abortion, they probably think banning it is not the right thing to do…. but they won’t vote for Democrats.
Kay
Political and religious indoctrination in return for shelter. Can’t wait for the exposes on the “maternity homes”. Just chilling.
New Deal democrat
@MisterDancer:
I’ll quibble about Dred Scot. I don’t think it took away a right that was there. To my knowledge it was the first time that the Court considered the legal standing of ex- or runaway slaves.
On the other hand, by nullifying the Missouri compromise and very strongly implying that *no* State could outlaw slavery, at least to the extent that a slaveowner could bring his “property” with him to a northern State, it did absolutely galvanize the North.
I believe that is on the order of what we are about to see.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The way the Right is losing their shit in their moment of glory makes me think this draft was just “fan service” to the Right, it’s talking about removing gay marriage and banning gay sex too, heck I wouldn’t be surprised if it also calls for the return of slavery. They real decision likely will be fucked up, but much more family friendly.
MisterDancer
@Feathers: There are, and will continue to be, Trans people who don’t identify as Women, and have the capability to reproduce. Why the hell should they be good little soldiers in this “all for one” narrative you’re weaving?
It’s always easy to say this shit when it’s not you and yours on the line, here. Always a different season for “their” rights, when yours are on the line.
This “you need to wait!” is a backwards formulation. If the bulk of Abortion Rights people openly and fully embraced the fact that there’s a clear diversity of people who can get pregnant, that adds to the people with skin in this game.
As Anne said up top, this is a different time, and trying to run the defense with the same old plays — well, it didn’t work to stop this day from coming, so why the hell do you think “let’s not talk about Trans pregnancies” is gonna help NOW, with all the people who — if they are engaged into this cause, and given a voice, would be willing to assist? Who are, in a number of cases, already assisting?
I mean, you’re right on this: we do have a mighty fight ahead. And taking time to chastise people with legit concerns about being left behind has never — not since the Suffragettes left behind African-American activists — been a winning strategy in the long run.
I 1000% reject any Abortion Rights narrative that does not explicitly make room for the diversity of gender identities and relations that we claim to care about.
satby
Can’t agitate single issue voters if that issue “wins”, and you sure can’t fundraise on it. Plus, they were hoping to have the law nibbled to death, not overturned in total. They know playing to their crazy base gets them money, but letting the crazy base control things gets them backlash.
Ksmiami
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: a brick to their face is the least of what they should expect from here on in…
James E Powell
@The Thin Black Duke:
Don’t leave out the supposedly pro-choice white women who voted for Bush Jr. Twice.
Suzanne
I just saw a headline “‘Moral values are a luxury good’: The richer people get, the more likely they are to prioritize moral issues when they vote”.
I’m sure there are stats in the piece, which I haven’t read, but it aligns with my observations: middle-class people are fucken economically anxious — like, honestly… though that doesn’t mean that they’re homeless or starving, just precarious — and even people who agree with us are voting around their taxes and the cost of stuff.
Jinchi
I see a lot of commentary by people arguing Democrats should expand the court when they get the opportunity. I’m not opposed to that, but I don’t think it solves the real problem of stacking the court with hardliners.
I think the best solution would be to end lifetime appointments altogether.
New Deal democrat
Just a little beyond the topic.
If Roberts dissents from this reactionary landmark ruling, he – who has been so concerned about preserving the Court’s stature in the history books – may have second thoughts about continuing to preside over a Court whose majority is hell-bent on destroying its moral legitimacy.
I hope Biden takes the opportunity to put the bug in Roberts’ ear that the best course for his personal legacy in the history books is to retire now and allow Biden to name a new Chief Justice (perhaps named Barack Obama) to take up the cudgel.
Kay
I actually think it’s profound for women and the lurch back 50 years will go well beyond reproduction. If women don’t have a right to basic bodily autonomy – and now they don’t- you can do anything to them.
I can’t think of another example where my grandaughter now has fewer rights than I did or my daughter did.
wenchacha
Freshman year of college, 1975: at least a couple of the young women on my hall got abortions that year, or the next. A friend and I went to PP for tests; she was pregnant.
In high school, my husband took his then-girlfriend to the clinic. No parents were told, then the girlfriend had bleeding, so her Dad found out. He was okay about it, thank goodness.
I know it matters only to me, but I figure that my children exist only if that abortion happened. Likely I wouldn’t have met my guy in college; he would have married that girl.
F#ck Alito.
MisterDancer
It’s a fair quibble. I think this ties into what Matt was trying to say to me, which didn’t to me match my comment (sorry Matt!), yet does match this — that Scott was one of the first times SCOTUS took what was a patchwork of local and state laws, and gave a Federal mandate around them.
One of the things I gathered from my paused reading of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America is that all this was terrifyingly like pre-Roe Abortion Rights, with laws all over the place with regards to Black rights and citizenship. But — and this is crucial — there were rights, if very imperfectly applied. Scott took that away, thus why I argue it meets this rubric, if not in the same way we’d think of it around Roe, today.
Jinchi
So your argument is that there are women who are pro-choice, but would give it all up to kick trans people?
This is a Niemoller moment.“First they came for the trans students, but I was not trans …”. People who support abortion rights, or the right to contraception, or the right to marry the person of their choosing (regardless of gender or race), are being explicitly shown that they’re not all that high up on the chain of targets.
Jager
In 1973 when Roe was decided, my lovely, little, grandmother, then in her late 70s said, “Now, somebody besides rich girls can get things taken care of.”
Suzanne
There’s a lot of things that are different from when Roe was passed. Medical abortions that can be delivered via the mail. An internet for ordering them. Widespread use of assisted reproductive technology. Better birth control, including Plan B. More women being fine with staying single or childfree or both. More acceptance of life beyond cisheteronormativity. Women having more education and money, ergo less dependence on shitty men.
OTOH, many men who want wives and kids are more desperate.
Kay
Next you’ll see a slew of new state law on “father’s rights” starting at conception because they’ll need a legal mechanism to allow the father to enforce and monitor the pregnancy.
Just very complex stuff, interlocking rights. There’s going to be a lot of property claims on the womans body.
James E Powell
@Matt McIrvin:
I would never say that nobody gives a shit, but I do have doubts that the supreme court overruling Roe will have outcome determinative impact on the midterms.
Each of the state & local elections has many factors.
MisterDancer
Outside of any of this — I do recommend this book for next steps. It was free for a while, but I paid for a copy and for the writer’s Patreon, when she had it up: New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support.
Nora
Serious question: all those would-be justices who were asked, point blank, under oath, whether Roe was settled law and whether they would repeal it, who LIED UNDER OATH in saying, “No, of course it’s settled law, we would never vote to repeal it” — isn’t that perjury? Can’t a judge, even a justice, be removed for perjury? Isn’t perjury one of those crimes which strikes at the heart of the judicial system?
I’m looking for a way to do something NOW to stop these morons from making things worse.
Jinchi
I don’t see how that works. If Roberts has a sudden revelation, he could simply, you know, change what he’s doing. How does replacing him with Chief Justice Obama solve anything?
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Sorry to pick on you. I’m just struck by how much of the initial reaction is intramural sniping. Shouldn’t be surprising since it’s kind of a reflex at this point, but I hope like hell we can focus our collective minds going forward or we are so fucked.
Elizabelle
I despise Samuel Alito. I hope he never has another day of peace in his life. I hope Mrs. Alito is crying every day forward. (Remember her from the hearings?). Lindsey Graham crying would be fine with me too.
Jebus.
Betsy
@Betty Cracker:
Exactly. The reasoning in the opinion also supports a legislature’s ability to pass a law forcing people with two kidneys to give one to a deserving stranger. Or to remove all contraception from store shelves, or outlaw it entirely, or to invalidate non-heteronormative marriage, or …
Jinchi
I think we’d have better odds if Democratic candidates started explicitly running on a platform to Manchin-proof the Senate so they can expand the court.
No sitting justice will be impeached in the next six months (or ever).The threat of ‘being silenced’ is the only thing that struck fear of popular opinion into the conservative justices.
Kay
I wondered why we hadn’t seen them already. It so naturally and inexorably follows that if there’s a state power to monitor and enforce pregnancy surely there’s a father’s right too, now that the womens rights in that 9 month period have been erased. I suspect they waited on that deliberately- anti-abortion activists have never been honest about their intent- not once. I used to think -“these are complex, interlocking rights! Surely they realize how profound it will be to take the woman out of it?” thinking they were just reckless. But I’m sure they’ve got it all planned out.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Yep. It’s about policing pregnancies. The current SCOTUS let us know they were fine with that when they let the TX bounty law stand.
Suzanne
@Kay: Property claims, yes.
The right is terrified of a collapsing white birth rate. They are terrified of the decline of marriage among the white working class. This is all taking place in front of that backdrop. They want more white women to make their babies and they will do it by force if necessary.
Elizabelle
@MisterDancer: Very good point.
Dred Scott was a terrible decision that helped bring on the Civil War. [The deplorable] Chief Justice Roger B. Taney: we must call Roberts by that name if we ever meet him. Or maybe now, online.
Elizabelle
I’d say this is like the dog catching the car, but dogs are frequently honorable creatures. (Go, Patron!)
Another Scott
I hope that we see more stories about how restricted rights were until the 1970s, and that the reasoning to gut Roe and Casey can put most of the country back in a box with little power over their own lives. History’s greatest monster did good work on those issues before she became a Justice.
This is a teachable moment. Let’s do it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Soprano2
@hueyplong: I don’t see any way the court can overturn a constitutional amendment. Lucky for women, that’s how we got the vote.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: For the both of us, this issue is like a sore thumb we keep hitting.
And I agree we all need to resolutely face the Republicans. But those brickbats some people behind us are throwing are not meant to skip off our heads and hit the Republicans.
Another Scott
@Jinchi: Make DC a state and the problem with Manchin solves itself.
Cheers,
Scott.
Soprano2
As usual, the press is missing the important part of this ruling. They’re signaling their intention to roll back the 20th and 21st centuries, it’s all right there. I guess if a bunch of white men in the late 1700’s didn’t give you a right, or you couldn’t get a constitutional amendment to pass to codify a right, they think that right shouldn’t exist. That’s how I read what Alito wrote, anyway.
Emmyelle
It’s astonishing that anyone is astonished by this. Mitch McConnell bent over fro Trump, a man he clearly despises and who has clearly harmed the GOP, because of this moment.
I’m stunned that this will actually hurt the GOP in the midterms and that the right wing noise machine is acknowledging that. This tells me that some people vote republican without really knowing that this is where Mitch McConnell’s sad boner is pointed, and that they know this.
at the risk of sounding moderately offensive to my side, I will observe that the moderate right votes without thinking of the consequences, whereas the lazier, more purity and outrage driven folks on the left don’t vote, without thinking of the consequences.
Denali
It is all about making sure that white men have the power. The Catholics and the Evangelicals latched on to the abortion issue to make sure the religious right voted Republican. They succeeded in dividing a country which at one time welcomed all. These are very sad, dark times.
Emmyelle
@The Thin Black Duke: I hope the Bernie boys who sat out 2016 are happy as well.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: I’ve always thought the Dred Scott suit showed the “state’s rights” argument for the hollow argument it was. If states in the South had the “right” to have slavery, shouldn’t the states in the North have the right to not have it, and to pass laws like the ones protecting former slaves from capture? The South wanted it both ways.
satby
@Another Scott: Those who don’t remember the past (or read history for those too young to remember) are condemned to repeat it. The momentum for Roe built on years of stories about “good” (aka white) girls and even married women dying of botched back alley abortions or ruptured ectopic pregnancies. A physician who died in Ireland from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and the subsequent hemorrhage pushed that country to legalize abortion finally in 2019.
Edit: I am old enough to remember the pre-Roe times very well. I was graduating high school when that decision came down. It’s going to come as quite a shock to younger people how things go in that climate.
Betsy
@Kay: As I keep saying on here, probably ad nauseam, the conservative concept of liberty is the right to control other subordinate people to oneself.
That’s why Republicans feel they are being oppressed whenever any court or legislature safeguards the rights and due process of someone else. That’s why these rights are “special rights” whereas the Republican is experiencing “tyranny.”
Desargues
“No, we are not going back to 1972 when it comes to reproductive rights.”
What the fuck is wrong with you white liberals in this country, man? You’ll go to back way before 1972, starting next month:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/04/abortion-bans-out-of-state-missouri-texas-oklahoma.html
After that, contraception. Then gay rights. Then rights for brown people. Then everything, until it’s 1855 again. “No, they won’t dare!” “No, they’ll lose politically!” Are you really that fucking daft? They don’t need democratic legitimacy to govern anymore. They’ve rigged everything up so that they get to govern with just 30% of the actual population’s support. Get a fucking clue, will you? How will you stand up for women and the rest when The West Motherfucking Wing lives rent-free in your head? Jesus.
Soprano2
@satby: Yep, this. They weren’t expecting a clear overturning. Maybe some of them are actually aware it might put their right to access safe, effective contraception into jeopardy also.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: They’re saying the 9th Amendment means nothing. It seems to have been generally ignored so I’m not particularly surprised, but it strikes me that conservatives like to make very maximalist states’ rights arguments from the 10th Amendment while ignoring the very similar 9th.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Alito wrote that he doesn’t know what will happen after the decision. He doesn’t know. No one does.
I don’t know how it can’t be really profound though- it’s a complete reordering of a set of very complex rights and it will be wholly directed by far Right religious people. They’re driving this train. Anyone who thinks that turns out well for women are not familiar with the role of women of children as glorified property in far Right religions, so probably most of national media.
Starfish
Roe has been dead for months now. The states would not be passing increasingly banana pants anti-choice laws if Roe was not already dead.
Soprano2
@Kay: You know this is how conservatives have always seen pregnant women – as an incubator for the man’s baby. She’s no longer a person, she’s just the thing being used to grow another person.
New Deal democrat
@MisterDancer:
“there were rights, if very imperfectly applied. Scott took that away, thus why I argue it meets this rubric, if not in the same way we’d think of it around Roe, today.”
I can agree with that. Scott explicitly disallowed Congress from forbidding slavery in the territories, or making the banning of slavery a prerequisite for joining the Union. The North immediately understood that the same reasoning could apply to all Free States. If property rights were sacrosanct, and a slave was the owner’s property, and he was entitled to keep it when he moved to a Territory, then he ought to be able to keep his property when he moved north from Virginia to Ohio or Pennsylvania, for example. Leaked documents subsequently showed that Taney coordinated with Buchanan to (paraphrasing from memory) “settle the issue once and for all” before the latter was inaugurated.
Instead, the North’s immediate, visceral response was, “NO EFFING WAY!” And Abe Lincoln was elected President four years later.
I think something similar is going to happen now.
artem1s
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us:
contraception and abortion were popular with young Republicans too up until the televangicals and GOP decided to weaponize it. they will come for marriage rights again. count on it.
an FWIW it isn’t young Republicans who are writing these decisions or passing state laws. It’s old dead white men
Betsy
@Desargues: Exactly. The tyranny of the minority.
We don’t talk enough about the first principle of government (whether conceived by a founding father or anyone else). The first principle of popular government is accountability: does the one governing govern with the consent of the governed? Or not?
The founders may have been patriarchal slaveholding landlord-class flawed characters, but they got that much profoundly right.
And then the Obama presidency was all about reinforcing that connection between the governed and those who are chosen to govern. That’s what made Obama so brilliant. It wasn’t that he was playing 11 dimensional chess; it’s that he understood this, the core of all first principles in our system of government.
Than the corollary is protection of human rights. So that the popular government doesn’t end up oppressing a minority by majority rule. You can’t have minority rule; and ALSO, you cannot have minority rule. The key is to have legitimate popularly-accountable government WITH protection of those who are outnumbered.
Today’s Republican Party safeguards neither; in fact it does the opposite for both — they seek minority rule without accountability, AND to limit the rights of everyone else.
Soprano2
@Kay: There’s a whole history of the father having dominion over children. Most people don’t realize that the idea of children naturally belonging with their mother is relatively recent; for most of recorded history, men saw their children as their property. It’s why lineage is traced through the man (this never made sense to me logically, why not trace it through the parent who we know about for sure, the mother?). Until recently, the man usually got custody of children if there was a divorce.
satby
@Soprano2: Just like with senior citizens voting Republican when Republicans have repeatedly said they want to limit or gut Social Security, lots of people hear the rhetoric but think that, and I quote numerous people here, “they don’t really mean it”.
Lots of squishy anti-abortion people are actually only anti- late term abortion but are quietly ok with very early abortion (lots more are very firmly against all abortions). Lots of those same people are pro- birth control. Since Griswold is the decision that underlies all the privacy rights, and is specifically next on the right wing hit list, this may motivate the apathetic middle in a way that no amount of warnings did. Up to now, the media and most of the public have treated the warnings as repeated cries of “wolf”.
New Deal democrat
@Soprano2: “if a bunch of white men in the late 1700’s didn’t give you a right, or you couldn’t get a constitutional amendment to pass to codify a right, they think that right shouldn’t exist. That’s how I read what Alito wrote, anyway.”
It is certainly consistent with the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment only codified those rights that were widely recognized in the 1860s.
[a completely circular, logically nonsensical argument, by the way. If that’s all the Fourteenth Amendment (or the Fifteenth, of the Fourth or the First) did, then why did we even need it?]
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve wondered about that, why the 9th Amendment isn’t referenced more in the decisions expanding rights. It says right there that just because a right isn’t delineated in the Constitution doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!
Betsy
@Soprano2: That’s right and almost forgotten. 19th century: man commits adultery, wife sues for and is granted divorce; she now has the right to go away, leaving all her minor children with the ex-husband (unless they are “of a tender age,” meaning not weaned by her). Father has automatic custody.
Feathers
@Jinchi: Nope. What I’m saying is that, unfortunately, there are women who would see this and see it as a lack of solidarity from the trans community, and thus become less likely to support trans issues. If someone can’t see that shaming people who are heartbroken and enraged at the news over the loss of Roe is wrong, then they aren’t an ally in the abortion rights issue. Wait 24 hours and follow up for fucks sake.
People keep asking what happened to the momentum from the Jan 2017 Women’s March. Well, it got shut down for being racist and anti-trans over the damn pink hats. And the people who made that argument were never were able to rebuild that coalition. If white women had declined to get the vote in solidarity with blacks who had uneven access to the ballot box, how would the battle for civil rights have played out?
The weakness of the left is that because it sees the moral correctness of its side so completely, the distance between this world and the world of equality for all can only be because mistakes were made. The vast array of the powerful set against the rights of the many are simply disappeared. The right has been fighting for this, single mindedly for all of my life. The left has repeatedly sabotaged the Democrats and then complained when their desires haven’t made it into law.
I support trans rights wholeheartedly. I just recognize that they aren’t going to exist, legally, in this country, unless we have a large enough Democratic majority for long enough to push back on the structural advantages Republicans have, due to the slaveholder’s advantage built into the constitution. Anything else is Green Lanternism.
Betsy
@Soprano2: That’s for STATES’ rights, dummy! /s
But seriously, that’s the actual Republican argument
Soprano2
I think it’s more that none of the proposals so far cut the benefits of people who are already receiving Social Security; they cut the benefits of younger people. That’s why they can vote that way, they know that their benefits are secure, or at least they believe they are.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: It’s really pissing me off that as usual, the press is missing the forest for the trees. As far as they are concerned, it’s all about overturning Roe; evidently they haven’t talked to any lawyers who have actually read the damn thing, because they are all over Twitter laying out the ramifications of this opinion if it’s truly their opinion that’s published. Even I, a layperson, can understand what that means for everyone.
New Deal democrat
@Jinchi:
If one sees that one’s entire lifetime project has been unsuccessful, then does one stick around while it is completely destroyed, or step aside to hand the baton to somebody else who might be able to resuscitate it?
Roberts’ project to limit or overturn the liberal turn of the Warren and Burger Courts without having the Court lose its legitimacy in the eyes of the nation has been upended by the reactionary Five. He can either stay and go down with the ship, or else give somebody else the chance to keep it afloat. That person would have to be a moderate to liberal who could command respect, and potentially craft a more moderate majority, particularly if the Democrats pick up one more seat.
brendancalling
@Dusty Confetti: make it a terrible day for them!
Betty Cracker
@Feathers: Can you tell me where you saw the statement that seemed to put trans’ and abortion rights into conflict? I missed it and am curious about what raised the issue.
satby
@Soprano2: People, lots of them, have said specifically those words to me. Certainly some were fine with future cuts, but most thought it was just signalling, not an actual intent.
Complacency is humanity’s basic state. Most normal people just have trouble visualizing threats until they’re immediate. I’ve told younger women since the Clinton presidency that Roe and ultimately Griswold were being methodically targeted by the right wing, and have been regarded as a tinfoil hat wearing nutter for my efforts. But I’m a lover of history and the lessons it can teach.
MisterDancer
As a Black man who’s tussled with folx here on the regular (just see my comments in this thread alone!) , you’re misreading what Anne is saying.
The ability to obtain an Abortion does not rely on having a willing medical professional in all cases, anymore. Weirdly, what’s happening is something like the “wise women” era in some ways, where herbal abortifacients were used.
That hasn’t “democratized” Abortion. We know that poorer people, esp. of Color, basically have a ban now in many areas of the US, and functionally have for years.
But it’s also not the same as rolling back to 1972, or even 1872. This is a new age, for better and worse. It’s crucial to approach it as such, and not to just align the old bromides and metrics willy-nilly to what’s happening now, today, much less if Roe is “legally” dismantled.
There’s real need to remind people that, yes, Roe is already dead in the water for a lot of people not represented on this blog. Yet Anne still has the right of it, in pointing out that we are working in a very different space, in some key ways, than the constraints people seeking Abortions faced decades ago.
And that this applies to a lot more, at the end of the day, than Reproductive Rights.
Steeplejack
@Matt McIrvin:
Isn’t the LGM commentariat mostly men?
NotMax
@satby
Any names of particularly virulent nutballs on today’s primary ballot to be on the lookout for when it comes to us here in more distant areas of the country? Indiana coverage has been so overshadowed by Ohio’s.
Feathers
@Betty Cracker: Apologies if that is what it seemed like. The issue for me is trans rights advocates not having solidarity with people grieving for the upcoming loss of Roe. There’s a time to care about language and a time when not caring about people really shows a true lack of compassion. It truly does hurt the coalition. Rules of analysis are not revealers of truth. Yes, intersection needs to look to who has power and who does not, but there are times when realizing that allyship does need to run in every direction is important.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@MisterDancer:
Do you realize that even if you only look at the population of the US that is center to very left, there are probably more pro-choice people who have a problem with the way the Trans community have redefined gender than there are Trans people? Red lines like that are how we have ended up in the spot we are in. The religious right understand that people like Trump despise them. They don’t care. They will ally with anyone and crawl over broken glass to get what they want. Our people have conflicting demands on what the rules of engagement should be and if they don’t get what they want, they refuse to participate. That’s why they now dominate the Supreme Court.
Elizabelle
I wonder if this decision will have an impact on the Ohio Senate GOP primary today. As in, voting in the least mouth-breathing of the Republicans.
Because the mask dropped, overnight, if you were willing to see it.
I hope we get Senator Tim Ryan — and a whole passel of other incoming Democratic Senators — out of this “leak.”
Elizabelle
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: A lot of this is on Mitch McConnell, and refusing to give Merrick Garland a hearing.
I bet Obama wishes he had handled that situation a lot differently. No one elected McConnell king, yet here we are.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Elizabelle:
What would that have looked like ?
Soprano2
@satby: I’m the same, I’ve been telling people for years that they’re going after contraception once they get abortion outlawed, under the theory that it causes abortions, and people mostly look at me like I’m crazy. “Republican women use contraception, they’ll never go along with that!” they say, without realizing that it’s not Republican women of childbearing age who are actually in control of this. They’ve been saying for over 40 years that things like the pill cause abortions, but no one took that seriously! These people think “The Handmaid’s Tale” was an instruction manual!
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Just sat Merrick Garland, and had the Supreme Court decide if the Majority Leader was the de facto decider on who gets to sit on the Supreme Court.
It would have been worth a shot. McConnell set a horrible precedent.
If you are going to tell me I am a green lantern person, save your whingeing breath.
Another Scott
@satby: +1
“Only around 2 people will be paying into Social Security for every person getting benefits! It’s obviously not sustainable! We have to cut future benefits now or, er, we’ll have to cut future benefits in the future!!!1ONE”
It’s all nonsense (the actuaries aren’t stupid and they know the math and planned for it and minor tweaks (if any) will put everything into balance again for 100 years or whatever). But the relentless framing means that you’re painted as a nutter if you don’t want to cut Social Security for those who follow later.
“I’m responsible! I paid my taxes!! It’s all those irresponsible bangers who wear their pants too low and color their hair weird colors that are the problem!!!” While the plutocrats dribble out their allowances to the think tanks and “universities” that poison the body politic.
(sigh)
If we let them gut Roe and Casey without consequences, they’ll come after the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (women who can’t freely regulate their reproduction obviously cannot be trusted with financial decisions), and everything else that guarantees equality in the USA.
We have to fight them every single day.
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
taumaturgo
What should the opposition party next step be? Pack the court? Bust the filibuster and codified a woman right to choose? Maybe set a vote in the Senate that would clearly identify the conservative anti-woman among the democrats? What should the democrat’s next step be? More of the ineffectual same? I hope against hope that this time it is clear that all the rules and procedures they operate under are out the window. Civility gone, incrementalism gone, bipartisanship gone, rule of law ignored, middle of the road bullshit gone.
Elizabelle
I think we are actually watching the end of the Republican party. And I hope it implodes more quickly than we think.
MisterDancer
If those folx have that level of power, then you integrate them into the movement. Hell, pulling Black folx into a coalition is how Biden won the Presidency! Why wouldn’t you work to ensure those communities are part of your movement from jump, and avoid the fight you claim derails?
We know that partnerships work. What you’re proposing is not that, and it needs a forceful pushback.
You’re being neither strategic nor intersectional. This isn’t about moral correctness in and of itself; it’s about how you treat the groups you claim to want to support, and the ability to build coalitions to get shit done.
Instead of building a Biden-like coalition, you’re just lashing out at groups more margalizined than White Women, and claiming them to have both nigh-infinite power, yet not enough power to be worth considering as partners. That Black Women, and Trans folx, need to just shut up and let the White Women “drive”,and we’ll magically all get a car at the end.
That’s never worked in our past, going all the way back to the rise of the Suffragette movement out of Abolitionist movements. It didn’t work in the 1970s. And it sure as hell won’t work, today.
We’ve seen the blame placed on Black Women, on Black people, to “derail” movements time and again. TERFs are happy to blame Trans people for derailing Women’s rights, egged on by The Right.
It’s exhausting, it’s way past any sell-by date, and it’s honestly infuriating to read anyone present it with a straight face.
And, at the end of the day, this kind of rhetoric is far more divisive, far more harmful, than the commentary it purports to control.
Feathers
@MisterDancer: Sorry then. You aren’t an ally to the abortion rights movement. Which is sad, because there is no one who is both for abortion rights and against trans rights. They flow from one to the other.
Here’s a look at what we are up against:
I am part of the coalition that supports abortion and trans rights, but also realize that neither will ever be reality without winning elections.
Betty Cracker
@Feathers: No worries — thanks for clarifying! I had not run across anything like that in my doom-scrolling so far.
Another Scott
@Feathers:
Eh? News to me.
I was at the rally in DC. It was huger than all possible expectations. It was a great success. I think the organizers tried to keep it going, but I’m sure many people knew that that alignment of the stars and the moment was not sustainable at that level. Even the Science March a few months later was far smaller.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@MisterDancer:
Which can work. However, I’ve also seen the absolute opposite. In the early 90s in St. Louis, the religious right were really going after gay people. Violence against LGBT people was spiking. It was bad. There was a lot energy there to fight back. I went to a meeting of a new metro area gay rights group. There was a big crowd who were ready to work. Instead of harnessing that energy into concrete actions people could take in their communities, they spent the entire 2 hour meeting bickering about whether their board was sufficiently representative. That group never got a single thing done. They did not produce a single rule change, big protest, nothing. Other previously existing LGBT (which were mostly white) organizations did the real work, getting municipal laws passed which provided some protections. My college LGBT+ group was more productive and there was only a handful of us.
catothedog
This is Dred Scott II. Abortion is just the leading indicator. At its core it’s about minority rule, to preserve the privileges of the minority white race.
This is the Rubicon event from the “thug rule” side. There is no going back. The pretense is gone, because it’s not needed anymore. The future will be thuggish to the extreme. Liberty for thugs, and the rest can fend for themselves. Ask Indians or Hungarians. Orban and Modi’s rule are playbooks. That is what is coming to this country.
The left is still trying to parse this in the framework of the existing order — pass new laws, expand the court, win elections. There is no way you can politically, via civic action, work out of the present because that only works in the political system of government, that existed till yesterday. And that system, that political order, just got demolished.
The rightwing court is ready to adjudicate future elections on whatever reasoning that will allow the right to win. This should already be clear – gerrymandering and voting right cases have already paved the way, and all elections in the immediate future will be contested in court and adjudicated in favor of the right.
There is only one goal of the right now – get absolute power, and crush the opposition to the level that it cannot win ever. The right will crush all the political institutions and organs of the left, ruthlessly and without qualms. Everything – government regulation, social welfare, civil rights.. all are dead men walking as of now.
Unless the left declares war, they will be left wondering why they are losing, and will get trapped in a cycle of failure. Cannot fight to win, win, cant get anything done. They will be seen as ineffective.
I am not arguing for defeatism. But you cant bring a knife to a gunfight and win. The left has no unity to declare war, and by the time it figures out this is a war, there wont be any political left to organize such a fight. I am arguing that only a no-holds barred politics to fight the right is the only winning strategy. No more norms. No more civility. If not, then white liberals can prepare for irrelevance and minorities of all kind and women can prepare for a subjugated second class existence.
This kind of political turmoil is exactly Adam Silverman’s territory. I wonder what he has to say.
Alison Rose ???
Late to the thread, but two things: As I mentioned last night, donating to abortion funds is a very very important thing to do right now. If you go here, you can either donate to NNAF broadly or you can customize your amount for a specific fund(s).
And: God, I’m lucky to live in California, and I hope anyone who needs to escape a tyrannical anti-choice government elsewhere is able to make it here:
Emily B.
@Betty Cracker: Agreed. Now that we on the left formed our usual circular firing squad, let’s try something different and focus on the fact that the Republicans have just handed the Democrats an extremely powerful weapon. Maybe we need to figure out exactly how to use it, but let’s get to work.
I feel that there’s a powerful message that needs to get out: America has REAL PROBLEMS—inflation, climate change, attacks on democracy, inequality—and the only thing Republicans are doing is legislating how to run people’s personal lives.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I just think it’s profound legally and will have broad consequences. It’s why I’ve grown impatient with “work arounds” – women will use medication abortion, they’ll get around it. I’m sure they will but that doesn’t speak at all to the loss/denial of the right, anymore than telling same sex couples they couldn’t marry but could enter into a contract to allocate property rights did.
I mean, I guess we can set up some kind of outlaw distribution system for medical abortions, but there’s a huge difference between people operating furtively, as outlaws, and people exercising a right.
It’s the loss of a right. We had it for 50 years and now we don’t. We don’t know the repercussions yet. IMO they will be major and “medication abortions” won’t fix it, nor will telling women they can all travel to a blue state. The right was there, now it’s gone. No “practical” patch or “solution” remedies or compensates that loss. The Right expects this from us. They’ll establish sweeping legal norms and we’ll get right to “policy”- the nuts and bolts. Taking out the ol wrench and tightening up some connections. “Policy” is premature. “Fixes” are premature. None of us have our arms around the reach yet.
We’re allowed to make big sweeping arguments about bodily autonomy and agency and rights. That’s not the exclusive province “moralist” Right. We have a moral argument. It’s autonomy, agency for grown women to make their own decisions. Ours won’t persuade anti abortion people, but it might persuade people who find the moralist Right suffocating and intrusive and over reaching. Coercive.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I guess the reversion to childish fantasies about executive power was inevitable.
Joe Manchin’s popularity has gone up almost twenty points among West Virginians in the last year. I guess this genius wants to bump it up another ten. Because then….. what?
There are no One-Weird-Tricks around the hard work of politics. The slow boring of hard boards. Again and again. In every election.
debbie
There has got to be some sort of immediate, tangible consequences for these justices’ outright lying during their nomination hearings about respecting precedent and whatever the fuck else they lied about.
Feathers
@MisterDancer: I’m talking about waiting 24 hours before jumping in on Twitter to complain about the use of the word “woman” to talk about a judicial decision that is explicitly about the control of women’s bodies. To be able to say that at this moment, what is needed is to focus on abortion rights. That this person is probably an ally who is grieving.
As a white person, I can tell you the racists and the misogynists are the same people. There is a lot of misogyny on the left, even if it is far less than the right. The left needs white women as part of the coalition. It needs to recognize that just like not all white men are open to the left’s message, not all white women will be either. There does need to be a recognition that misogyny is harmful to the overall progressive message and that people need to ask, am I being misogynist here, before jumping into a conversation. As I said, I have a lot of young lefties in my feed. I saw a fuckton of shut up about women, you are erasing trans people.
This isn’t really about your post, which was very grounded. It’s not about centering white women, it’s about not trying to actively insult them. And just like Blacks can recognize racism, women can see misogyny.
geg6
@Matt McIrvin:
This is why you should never read the comments there. Worst commenters in the liberal blogosphere. Eeyores as far as the eye can see.
Kay
Giant far Right meltdown here. The bar codes on the primary ballots are wrong. Won’t affect Democrats because the Ohio Senate primary is a done deal and they’re not all election fraud conspiracy theorists, but expect one of the GOP candidates to be screeching about fraud.
I hope they scratch each others eyes out, but please, for God’s sake, don’t involve the rest of us this time. Keep this shit intra-Right. We’re sick of your tantrums.
debbie
@Feathers:
It also serves to divert attention, which is very much needed a this time.
MisterDancer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony/@Feathers: As others have noted, we do have a big fight ahead.
I disagree sharply with your approaches, here. But I’m going to be a good boy, and shut up, for now.
Feathers
@Another Scott: Nope. There was a huge and active movement to denounce the march for the hats and the “centering of white women.” Part of it was that the original organizers were, of course, far more to the left than the vast majority of the women who showed up. However, the aftermath was about pushing away the “non-believers” rather than trying to build a larger coalition. No recognition that insistence on a certain language reads as snobbery rather than trying to be inclusive.
I’m in reasonably lefty circles in academic Boston, which could be why I saw it.
UncleEbeneezer
@MisterDancer: Thanks for this. It’s really not difficult or in anyway diminishing to change the framing on this from “Women” to “People With Uterusi” or “Their Body, Their Choice” (which would include Trans Men and NB people who can get pregnant).
That said, I’m not gonna take issue with people who still use verbiage like “Women’s Rights” personally, but I’m also not gonna lecture those that do.
debbie
@Kay:
Hadn’t heard this yet, but good. It’s exactly what they deserve. Their own incompetence magnified by others’ incompetence. Any idea who designed/printed the ballots?
Betty Cracker
@Emily B.: I agree an all-out push is needed, and I like the way you’ve framed it because it’s true: so many real problems, and these goobers are trying to run our personal lives. It resonates with me here in Florida because what Republicans are trying to do nationally has been accomplished at the state level: the executive is ignoring incredibly pressing issues to coopt institutions and consolidate power via culture war bullshit.
The only question I have — is it too late? Are voters so thoroughly demoralized, and have Republicans gerrymandered and suppressed votes sufficiently, that minority rule is already a fact? I honestly don’t know. There’s nothing to be done but work as if saving democracy is still possible.
Kay
Let the wheeling and dealing on basic bodily autonomy begin! Play this hand exactly right, or you’ll lose it all and also be blamed for it.
Have they mentioned if they’ll allow “life of the mother”? They’re adding weasel language. That’s going too. Welcome to far Right Catholic doctrine enshrined as laws.
chopper
“oh look, it was a republican justice”
“did i say impeached? i meant…made chief!”
Kay
@debbie:
Ohio ballots are printed on site now. So they got a bad file. It’s not the fault of the Bds of Election workers, who aren’t allowed to do anything but receive and print.
The Moar You Know
@Soprano2: The history of the 4th amendment since the late 1960s shows that this is an entirely false notion; the Court has basically eliminated it. It stands in name only.
Kay
@debbie:
I genuinely feel sorry for the workers. It’s just been chaos, with the unlawful wrangling of the leg and the Hail Mary interference of the far Right federal court.
They’re ruining elections. Maybe that’s the objective. They don’t believe in them anyway.
Kay
@debbie:
Correction- they’re using an outside printer – they need replacements fast. They’re preserving the voted but flawed ballots- they have to. They’ll get them counted. They’ll do it by hand.
Betty Cracker
@Feathers: I also saw the post-Women’s March organization melt down, though mostly through the lens of Twitter. Maybe it was inevitable but it was still sad to see because there genuinely was a lot of energy at the march itself, which I also attended in DC.
@UncleEbeneezer:
I understand what you’re saying, I really do, but there are many, many women — maybe even a majority — who DO see it as erasure. I’m not suggesting we have to cater to them, just pointing out that it’s real.
DougL (Formerly EmperorofIceCream)
@Another Scott:
Your comments are always thoughtful, but the insight about the billionaires dribbling out allowances to the intellectual ecosystem (perceived to be) of the center left and it’s poisoning effect is particularly important imho.
Elizabelle
John just put up a fresh thread on Roe.
@ Kay: good luck with your election work today! We look forward to your reporting on it.
The Moar You Know
@catothedog: he’s already said in no uncertain terms that Dems are going to lose the war, and lose it hard.
He’s not wrong. Playing for the votes of numerical minorities at the expense of the votes of an overall majority is always a losing stratagem in a democracy.
The left, in (no sarcasm) a noble effort to secure the good things of this society for everyone, has forgotten that you need an actual majority of voters, not just nationally, but in every district, state, county, city. The fifty-state strategy was at least a start in that direction, a strategy which we utterly abandoned.
Chris Johnson
@catothedog: One thing that comes to mind here that might or might not be relevant is this: Russia, losing a war with Ukraine, has long done most of its work fomenting civil strife and division in its enemies, through concerted effort to identify and heighten tensions. Russia also works with Republicans and has many allies on the R side of the fence.
If they want civil war to make sure that America can’t effectively ruin them over their imperial ambitions, this in all aspects is just what they would need to do: either direct, or take advantage of, right-wing overreach, and then be sure and direct the left wingers towards abandoning all forms of civilized government, with an eye to trying to get both sides to go to literal open war, combat with weapons and abandonment of any form of law or government.
Part of this is insisting that the structures we live under, so embattled, have already collapsed and can never be of use again. The whole point is to try and get us to abandon our law and our government and fall to fighting in the streets and despairing.
I think it’s a salient point that this is specifically what Russia is trying to foment, using exactly this sort of moment.
Fuck these people. They are overruled. We will work around them without declaring rule of law null and void just ‘cos THEY see fit to fuck it up.
Chris Johnson
@Kay: We will work around the renegade court, it’s not solely about giving up and letting the renegade court set the rules. Society sets the rules, and we won’t let our people be abused in this way: we’ll work around that, not just work around the outcomes (that will happen too, but it’s not at all the point)
DougL (Formerly EmperorofIceCream)
@Emily B.:
Couldn’t agree more re the message. We have real problems to address. People sense that. Don’t promise to fix. Promise to try. Together with them. Like adults do. Make the GOP the party of crazies and emotional children. Propped up by corrupt money. Because that’s what it is.
Feathers
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, but women can’t be trusted to recognize misogyny, or erasure. Right?
I knew this was a big problem when I saw a comedian pull out his old misogynist jokes, which wouldn’t have been OK for a while, and make them palatable to the audience, and censors, by starting it all off with “Let’s talk about white women…” And all the old bullshit came flowing out, but now socially acceptable.
ronrab
@Tony Jay: Big points for ‘Coward of the County’.
debbie
@Kay:
How the hell does that not get checked during the print run? I always had to do press checks for every printed piece I’d ordered, mostly so the printer could avoid being blamed for anything.
The GOP isn’t smart enough to be in charge. I am, however, enjoying the drama.
artem1s
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
You are assuming the clerk (if it was a clerk) was working for one of the pro-Roe Justices. I’m assuming some upwardly failing white dude or dudette clerking for COVID Barrett or Boof was boasting about how they were getting ready to pwn the libs for Jeebus. They aren’t bright enough to use a burner. They assumed they would get brownie points for breaking the story.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
I agree with you and despair for the consequences. If a person can’t support and be an ally to those who are impacted by this decision without having to be made a part of the aggrieved masses, where are we, really?
I don’t feel the need to become Ukrainian or to be included as a Ukrainian to totally support Ukraine and totally hate Russia.
Ruckus ??
Are Republicans scared of being the dog that caught the car?
Yes, yes they are. They know this is a radical reverse and that, even if it is held quietly by many, women’s rights are not something that will go quietly. They have loaded the court and screwed a large portion of the country with this not unexpected disaster for them. I don’t think it will go well even in the short term. Long term it could be worse for them. Not all of them see this but many of them, even some of the most craptastic do or will. It may take a few years but I see this as very bad place for them to hang their hats. It is obviously a very bad place to put the country into.
Bill Arnold
Need the vocabulary to be more harsh.
These Christian Dominionists are Enemies of the United States of America. They should be treated as such.
Jen Rubin says “Christian Nationalists”; that is not harsh enough. These are not good Christians; they are power-hungry authoritarians who believe that it is their mission from G_d (no, they are led by Satan/The Adversary/Evil Ones(/Russia?)) to transform the USA into a theocracy. Since the US constitution is quite clear about this and the 75 percent of states threshold to remove freedom from state religion from the constitution is unachievable, their tools are low-grade civil war, including grotesquely blatant misinterpretation of the US constitution. They need to be stomped into the ground via the voting driven by outrage.
Etc. (There are many True ways to frame this.)
PJ
@Betty Cracker: The modern conservative movement got started in the 1950s, as a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education. The goal is to get us back to “separate, but equal”.
Ruckus ??
@Suzanne:
OTOH, many men who want wives and kids are more desperate.
Maybe they should look in a mirror….and grow up.
Soprano2
@UncleEbeneezer: I will say, this is one of those things that drives me crazy. So I can’t say “women” anymore without being attacked as anti-trans? That is just nutballs. We keep parsing language while they’re unpersoning us, that seems like a problem to me.
debbie
@Soprano2:
Seconded, and thank you. Isn’t this what cost the Women’s March their momentum? Memory failing at the moment.
gvg
@MisterDancer: I think you are wrong. It has worked out in the past, because more groups got rights in their turn. Waiting till everyones rights are accepted is no progress ever. It would not be any women getting the vote ever if they had waited until black women actually got the vote too. Instead white women got the vote and that made more people used to the idea things could improve, that the world didn’t end when some kind of perceived inferiors got rights.
Trans people are an extremely tiny minority. They will never have the numbers to impact an election, its going to have to be with help from lots of others. It will start with family and friends but again they are such a small number that even those won’t gain them enough votes. They are going to have to build awareness and familiarity for decades before they can be safe. Most people liberal or conservative, in my experience have no actual knowledge of who they are and mostly just think ick and men in a women’s bathroom. Really. Nice older liberals too, they just don’t know anything real. It’s worse than it started for gay people IMO. Well that isn’t acceptable, and we here know better, but this is an exceptional place, not……the rest of the world. So it’s up to us to educate, but it’s going to take a lot of time.
Women’s rights can be fought for with a lot of support now and we should take the wins if we can get it.
A country where women are second class citizens is going to be a lot meaner with a lot of violence. It won’t be a good place for trans rights. A country where this repression gets defeated and women’s allies are triumphant, can actually help trans people.
satby
@NotMax: Sorry for the late reply, I wandered off. Honestly, I don’t know specifics, they’re all uniformly awful and I vote straight Democratic on everything.
Ruckus ??
@Soprano2:
How many daughters are Jr. or the II, named after the parent? I’ve never met one or if they were they never claimed it. I know of 2 other males with my same name and I’m a II. I know lots of Jr as well. The males were the inheritors of the family name and mostly the family fortune. The daughters married someone. And took that family name. And divorce was extremely difficult. Especially for “someone with little access to money,” the woman. For most, back not all that long ago, the woman was basically still property, because if for no other reason it was extremely difficult to change the situation of men being in charge. In the lifetime of most on this blog. Look how well that’s gone for the parts of the world that still think that way. There is a war being waged by someone who still thinks the old ways, that his manhood is the key to the world, when all it is, is a big stinking pile of rotting shit.
Ruckus ??
@Elizabelle:
I’ve thought this for a bit now, they keep looking backwards, as if that was a great time. For most people the past sucked donkey balls. That’s the story of humanity, the past had too many issues to count and we’ve made the world a bit better in the last 75 yrs, and yes before that and there is a ways to go but the concept that money is what insures equality is wrong, although it is practiced in most parts of the world. What insures equality is us, everyone. Some will fight that to their last breath, which they should take soon BTW. I don’t need laws to make me better, I need to be better and to vote for people and laws that actually make all of us better. Because it doesn’t get better until we understand that we are all, every one of us, equal. Our value is not by the tasks we accomplish or the numbers in our bank accounts, our value is in living as an equal member of society. Our existence is what makes that equality, not societal markers. A skid row wino is equal to Elon, no matter what Elon thinks.
VFX Lurker
@Feathers:
I’m a white woman who marched in 2017, 2018, and then much more reluctantly in 2019. The original woman who sparked the first March left early. Some of the national leaders who replaced her made questionable decisions and were not inclusive, which left me ambivalent towards the national March and more interested in supporting my local March.
Since 2017, I’ve put more of my energy into donations and Postcards to Voters.