Grasping at Straws on Dobbs
“You could at least slow down a bit before engaging in such broad, sweeping changes.” -- Roe was the sweeping change!
The boorish left is having a full-blown meltdown over the leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and its impending official release by the United States Supreme Court. Justice Samuel Alito’s unassailable, monumental takedown of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s complete lack of constitutional underpinning has them panicked.
It is certainly not the result they want. That is the reason for all the screeching, weeping, and gnashing of teeth we have seen in front of the Supreme Court and at the constitutionalist justices’ homes in clear violation of federal law. But the worst part about it is that Roe’s legal reasoning is such a dud that all they are left with is trying to manipulate what they see as the internal soap opera at the Court. Their target, as usual, is Chief Justice Roberts, who they hope can somehow swindle other justices into keeping Roe alive.
Politico’s Senior Legal Affairs Reporter Josh Gerstein’s latest “What a Roberts compromise on abortion could look like” is the latest not-so-subtle attempt at this. “It’s a longshot,” says the tagline on the piece, “but court watchers are closely eyeing the chief justice for middle ground on Roe.”
Gerstein acknowledges no one wants this middle ground. The pro-abortion side emphatically rejected it at oral arguments. Still, they can dream. Here is how he summarized the feeble argument of this dream opinion: “The central organizing principle for a Roberts opinion is likely to be one he has articulated many times: that the court shouldn’t issue a sweeping decision when a more modest one would do.”
For non-lawyers, imagine you let a friend who’s fallen on hard times crash at your place for a while. Then, you get home after a hard day’s work, and he’s changed every furniture, picture, and decoration in your house. But then, when you go back to changing everything to how you had it, he cries foul because you are changing things too fast. “You could at least slow down a bit before engaging in such broad, sweeping changes.”
That is the essence of this argument.
Roe invented a constitutional right that was nowhere to be found in the text of the Constitution and that had never existed in the history of mankind, based on the personal preference of a few justices. It transformed the lives of every American, forcing every state in the union to circumvent its laws and adopt the Supreme Court’s bizarre policy delineation (even as they changed it throughout the years from a trimesters framework to viability, etc.), and that has resulted in the death of more than sixty million babies inside the womb.
But now the Court is not supposed to make “sweeping changes” to rectify this abominable precedent?
Roe was the sweeping change!
They’ve tried a similar unprincipled idea regarding this decision being perceived as “political.” If you remember, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the most rabid abortion promoter in the Court, wondered whether the Court would survive “the stench” of overturning Roe. This, of course, plainly ignores the fact that the imposition of abortion on demand on the whole country by judicial fiat was the political action.
Roe's undoing finally removes the Court's politicization of the issue. If the leaked opinion becomes the official opinion of the Court, the justices will be simply saying, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested during oral arguments, that the Constitution is “scrupulously neutral on the question of abortion, neither pro-choice nor pro-life.” The states, and the people, therefore, would be free to enact legislation that best promotes the values and interests of their state while holding their elected officials accountable whenever necessary.
The left is merely grasping at straws at this point. It’s time. Let Roe fall.