What we can deduce from a leaked PDF
matthewbutterick.com
matthewbutterick.com
That's an interesting point!
> But Politico has a strong incentive to protect their source. By making their own scan from a paper original, they wouldn’t open themselves up to the disclosures of confidential information that have tripped up others. (That said, printed documents are not necessarily free of metadata, as Reality Winner found out the hard way.)
If you color-scan a printed document at low-enough resolution, will it corrupt the color-printer dot patterns or are they resilient to that?
> I conclude it must be someone who only had access to a stapled, printed copy of the draft opinion. (If the person had access to the underlying digital file, they wouldn’t have printed & stapled it just to unstaple it.)
IMHO, the author is reading too much into that and many other things. The impression I get is he already has a favored suspect (who is obvious though he doesn't name her), and his whole analysis is looking to find a path to finger that person.
It's totally plausible to me that a moderately savvy leaker with a digital file would leak a printed copy to protect themselves from metadata, and that Politico just used lesser equipment that the author assumes they would have. Quick and dirty is more often the rule than careful and perfect.
Even the meaning of the staple may be very unclear: at work I print everything stapled, because I set it as a default in my print settings. If for some reason I realize I don't want it, it's actually easier for me to remove it than to go back to my desk to print another copy after changing the setting and go back to the printer.
The visibility section of the wiki link suggests that they may be resilient. They are printed using a low visibility color (light shade of yellow) which can be made visible via post processing. While they do note using a high resolution scanner, I suspect that could be made less important by building redundancy into the MIC, a la how QR codes can function well despite having portions be damaged or missing.
Other than it being color, that's what I would have assumed was done here, except the staple holes and relatively decent image quality do seem to argue against it.
The simplest way to get around that would be to retype the whole document, which is a bunch of friction. But to counter that, more invasively, the texts different people would get could be different themselves. Sentences subtly reordered, slight differences in word choice or spelling. Though that makes collaboration more difficult.
Less technical savvy but resourced organizations wouldn't face difficulty using those approaches. It could just be a bit that an IT admin toggles on the GSuite or MS Office admin panel.
I think that would make collaboration impossible. If that were standard practice collaboration would eventually uncover that was occurring, and a leaker would compensate.
IMHO that technique is only valid when the recipients can be assumed to not be in contact, or as an unusual thing to identify a leaker when one is already suspected.
I don't think that's really the issue. Let's suppose you have 64 employees with access to a doc. You can uniquely identify them with 6 bits in the doc. A doc of a couple pages would be more than enough to put in those bits, and many more. Even if you had two collaborators who shared docs for a word for word diff, they'd still miss half the identifying bits, which reduces the potential culprit pool to 8, and that's assuming zero redundancy.
The issue I imagine is more usability. Someone identifies one of those bits as content that should be changed: what happens when they suggest the edit?
That's not really what I'm talking about. It seems like you're focusing on identifying all the exact bits that are being used to identify someone, but that's not important. What is important is the recipients figuring out that someone is monkeying with the documents in a systematic way to trace them. Once a leaker knows that, instead of leaking the exact document for publication, they'd either leak reworded summary of key points themselves, or require the journalist to only publish something similar.
I think the reason you don't do that is that things like the formatting and so on being accurate lend credibility to the document.
OCR also isn't going to be 100% though probably more than good enough in this case. If you really want to implement subtle tracking, you could make changes in the document itself that differ by recipient.
For private individuals, the thresholds for defamation lower. But for public officials, and corporations defamation is nearly impossible to prove. It's not enough to prove that the statements made were false, it's also necessary to prove that they were made with malicious intent. Unless there's some bombshell piece of evidence, like journalists actively conspiring to tear down a target, the journalists can just say "well, we were just writing a piece interesting for our readers."
The 9-0 supreme court case that set this precedence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan
That's not what "actual malice" means. Actual malice means:
> with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not
So its not just that they wanted to harm the person, but that they took reckless disregard to whether it was true or not. Essentially, writing something without even doing a bit of fact finding to try and support it would be considered "actual malice". You don't need to prove the defendant wanted to harm the person being libeled, just that they didn't care whether or not what they were saying was true or not.
Small nitpick: a decision is not precedent until it is 1) challenged and 2) survives the challenge. A decision in isolation without seeing a challenge and also surviving that challenge is technically not precedent (though it still is the Law of the Land, precedence or not).
The fact that a ruling sets the law of the land is what precedence means. It means other rulings follow the previous, preceding rulings.
Roe absolutely was precedence before Casey - that's why abortion was legal in the 1970s and 1980s before Casey v. Planned Parenthood.
Not every finding of the Supreme Count or any court establishes precedent. Only the findings upholding previous cases allow those previous cases to become precedent. Otherwise, the word "precedent" becomes superfluous and has no distinct meaning from "the law."
I think that if you used Fourier analysis, you could identify the frequency generally associated with the dot size, and delete the signal in that band. This can also be used to achieve excellent reduction of the Moiré effect:
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-n...
https://ijournals.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/5.3106-Khanj...
This has the advantage of also not reducing the image quality as badly as when you try to blur the patterns away spatially.
It's not really, it's a misunderstanding of both the US defamation legal landscape and the typical behaviour of large corporations in such circumstances. A news org getting a story wrong is not defamation and statistically nobody sues over stuff like that because it's nigh-impossible to win.
Exactly, and neither is a journalist outright lying as long as it's not harming someone's reputation. I have no idea why the author says: "I trust the journalists, because there are still serious legal consequences for news organizations that publish falsehoods"
There are zero legal consequences for news organizations who knowingly lie and mislead as long as they do it with a little bit of care.
I also wouldn't assume Politico has full staff in office yet, and it wouldn't surprise me if they made a scan-of-a-handed-off-copy on a personal device to get to their web staff. It's pretty brave of them putting it online as a scan still, I think I'd have retyped or taken closer care to crop out the edges and all that just in case (source: Am journalist.) But maybe they handed it to someone in digital forensics and ensured any sort of microdots were stripped out. I worry about words being switched on a per-copy basis as a trap (Tom Clancy used it as a plot device ages ago and it stuck with me,) so maybe they knew it was a copy that floated around and couldn't be traced, or they're not as paranoid as me.
So you support leaking Supreme Court draft opinions and prefer leakers not be caught?
You realize the consequences of legitimizing this for the rule of law, right? If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.
Are you saying that the rule of law is already so degraded in other areas that further degrading it with this kind of action is of no consequence and therefore if it happens to advance what you consider to be a good policy then we should welcome it?
Like I said at the start: If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.
If the law is working against the society - like in this case - then it needs to be fixed, not blindly obeyed.
Beyond that, the law says the Supreme Court and legislature decides what is or isn't a violation of the separation of Church and State, not activists deciding for themselves what law should or should not be observed.
>>If the law is working against the society - like in this case - then it needs to be fixed, not blindly obeyed.
There is a legal process for changing the law. What you are attempting to justify is undermining the rule of law with haphazard rationalizations.
Beyond that - the courts exist for a reason, because of the mandate given by society. When the society realizes they aren’t working properly, it should be possible to fix said courts.
And no, in US there is no working legal process for fixing the court, even in very obvious cases, like a judge protecting its wife, or just being a straight out human waste, like Scalia.
There are so many reasons why this is wrong.
Under the Constitution, the tenth amendment clearly reserves powers not expressly enumerated for the federal government, to the people and states, and the only exception to that is powers expressly denied by the Constitution to the states, which defining human life as beginning before birth is not one of them.
Moreover, defining human life as starting at a heartbeat or before birth can be an entirely secular belief, your dogmatism denial notwithstanding.
>>You’ve just demonstrated that yourself, by ignoring the fact that the opinion was based on works of a professional witch hunter and marital rape apologist.
This is just ad hominem / character assassination, and not relevant to this point.
>>When the society realizes they aren’t working properly, it should be possible to fix said courts.
And you're arguing for fixing said courts through illegal acts. Like I said:
If the law is only respected and observed when it agrees with one political platform, it's no law at all.
>>And no, in US there is no working legal process for fixing the court, even in very obvious cases, like a judge protecting its wife, or just being a straight out human waste, like Scalia.
Of course there is a way to fix the courts: legislation can dictate the jurisdiction of courts, and legislatures can appoint new justices to the court, and the legislature is democratically elected.
Of course the latter takes time, as Supreme Court justices are lifetime appointments, but that is the Constitutional process, and that can also be changed if a supermajority vote for a Constitutional amendment.
Your expressions of hatred and disgust toward those who through the Constitutionally legitimate process, became Supreme Court justices, is not a moral argument. It's just a manifestation of the moral superiority complex exhibited by those on the political left who support this subversion of the law.
Like I said - there are no logically valid arguments for abortion ban, other than strictly religious.
We put mothers and mostly fathers in prison for not providing child support. The latter never even had an option to abort their parental responsibilities the way mothers did during pregnancy. The idea that a non-religious argument against abortion can't exist in light of this is absurd.
>>Like I said - there are no logically valid arguments for abortion ban, other than strictly religious.
Like I said, believing abortion should be prohibited can be an entirely secular belief, your dogmatic denial notwithstanding.
As for child support - again, nothing to do with bodily autonomy, because the same happens in other directions, for failing to support other family members one is required to, not just one’s children.
You still hadn’t managed to provide even a single secular reason to ban abortion. It’s not that they cannot exist - they perhaps could, but they don’t. “Prevailing legal norms” don’t matter, because they have been largely written to the tune of religious extremists; that’s where churches numerous privileges come from.
It should be completely trivial to destroy any markings in the PDF. Black and white text in particular once scanned can just be thresholded and passed through filters. Heck it seems like a trivial application of deep learning to obfuscate text. For example, it would be interesting to train a transformer to learn degradation from multiple print/scan cycles using the same source using different printers and scanners so that it learns how to fake all sorts of imprecision.
In this case, I think this author ruled out the clerks and other parties too quickly. It is interesting insight to consider that there is a lack of consensus amongst the majority opinion justices and a leak could be to move them back towards the draft, but it has to consider all people with access.
No, people concluded that because there were so many holes in the Bloomberg reporting that didn't make any sense conceptually.
Butterick is being silly here.
They did publish more stories on the topic, which are collected here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/2018-the-big-hack
> IIRC, didn't some of the journalists quietly leave Bloomberg later?
AFAIK the authors of The Big Hack, Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, are still employed by Bloomberg. Riley was even promoted about a year later:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/bloomberg...
> how horrible the PR from suing is and how pointless it is suing the very rich Bloomberg corporation in an American jurisdiction for nebulous damages
Based on what? This past year, for instance, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News and certain individuals for defamation and claimed billions in damages
There is a world in which Bloomberg reported on some of the most serious widespread compromises of scores of companies ultra-paranoid about security who are appalled to learn about the hack long before Bloomberg, triggering countless deep investigations, discoveries of devices & disassemblies, analyses, tracing the APTs back to their Beijing or Shanghai offices (and maybe hacking their office cameras etc), wholesale upheaval of the supply chain, bankruptcy of compromised firms, becoming a touchstone for the intelligence & infosec communities, a cautionary lesson about supplychain hacks & hardware which must never happen again, in which, like the Snowden leaks, the hits just keep on coming, Bloomberg avidly using its deep sources and secret access to report on it every step of the way for clicks, and the naysayers are silenced by public & private evidence and all the experts quietly stop doubting it or endorse it as they learn the truth and leave comments on Twitter & HN about it being legit etc.
There is another world in which the Bloomberg report was ginned up and was some sort of fabrication or Chinese-whispers or severe misinterpretation and nothing like the big hack happened, and so it appears and that's that, and they double down denying there's anything wrong with it while preferring to never talk about it again.
>> “The Big Hack” suffers from something of a time bind: If Bloomberg was on the mark with its claim that about 30 companies were affected by the hack, it stands to reason that further details of this wide-ranging intrusion would surface sooner or later. The Erik Wemple Blog asked Bloomberg if it is aware of any developments on that front. A Bloomberg spokesperson declined to comment.
I am fairly sure which world we live in.
> Riley was even promoted about a year later
Fair enough.
> and claimed billions in damages
Of which they have thus far earned $0, and changed no one's beliefs. Regular people continue to have no idea who Dominion is and think Fox was wrong, security experts continue to believe Dominion is insecure hackable junk, and QAnoners continue to believe that the reincarnated JFK hacked the voting machines to steal the election or something.
I think people underestimate how ideological the legal profession has become. On an increasing number of social issues, liberal lawyers (which is 90% of them) believe that their position is not only correct, but above debate and above the political and legal process. They begrudgingly accept that economic issues are subject to political debate, but moral issues are their exclusive domain, and politics and law are merely vehicles for imposing the moral views of highly educated professionals on the unwashed masses.
It doesn’t matter that Roe is so bad that numerous prominent liberal legal scholars are unable to defend its reasoning: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/honest-pro-choicers-admit.... It must be the law of the land forever because it’s proponents are right and it’s opponents are “on the wrong side of history.” The arc of history bends towards justice, after all, and no institutional norm can override the march of progress.
A breach of trust like this is obviously a serious offense in a profession where keeping people’s confidences is fundamental to the job. But nonetheless there’s plenty of corporate law firms where these leakers will be feted, not condemned.
What is the basis for this claim?
> believe that their position is not only correct but above debate and above the political and legal process
You seem to be accusing everyone who disagrees with you of malice and abandonment of all principles - more or less evil. I would counter that this kind of argument is only ever made in bad faith in an attempt to demonize those who don't agree with you.
> politics and law are merely vehicles for imposing the moral views of highly educated professionals on the unwashed masses.
And one could likewise say that much of conservative thought is an attempt to force people to adhere to certain religious values using state coercion. But that would just be an opinion, not a fact.
What is fact is that many (possibly most?) conservative policies and doctrines do not enjoy majority support in the United States, yet are being rammed down our throats regardless because those policies are a) supported by those in power and b) convenient wedge issues or rallying cries for a small minority of the voting base - a minority that happens to be highly motivated.
Even the current composition of the court was a blatant power grab to deny Obama's constitutional right to appoint a justice with a made-up rule that it was "too close" to an election. Then immediately discarding that so-called rule when Trump was in the same position. In that sense the current conservative majority is illegitimate. Regardless of how you think any specific SCOTUS decision should go I hope you'd agree that a court that the majority of Americans believe to be illegitimately stacked is not a good thing for the stability of our separation of powers.
For that matter the overall tilt toward conservatives in House representation thanks to gerrymandering along with over-representation of conservative thought in the Senate due to the 2-senators-per-state rule undermines the legitimacy of Congress and the entire government. You can only get away with preventing the majority from being able to enact any significant policies for so long before a representative government collapses. Granted that might take tens or hundreds of years but in the long term it erodes the very foundation of our society. I find that very concerning personally but some people would rather win at any cost (witness Trump's recent loss and the fact that some conservatives attempted to sacrifice free & fair elections for a single win of a single presidential term. How cheaply they were willing to sell out!)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secret...
> You seem to be accusing everyone who disagrees with you of malice and abandonment of all principles - more or less evil.
Not at all. I think they have the best of intentions. But their principles are different than the principles of our parents’ generation of liberals.
> And one could likewise say that much of conservative thought is an attempt to force people to adhere to certain religious values using state coercion. But that would just be an opinion, not a fact.
That’s a good comparison actually. It’s reminiscent of the old religious right. The difference is that these new liberals are ascendant, while the religious right is in the decline, being supplanted by the populist right.
> What is fact is that many (possibly most?) conservative policies and doctrines do not enjoy majority support in the United States
The irony is that liberals have consistently used the Supreme Court to overturn the conservative policies that do enjoy popular support.
Roe, of course, overturned laws that had the support of the public. To this day, Roe draws a line—abortion until viability—that the public rejects: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort...
Conservative policies are popular on many other issues. As of 2013, a strong majority of Americans still opposes the Supreme Court’s ban on school prayer: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/13/south-carol...
If the Supreme Court bans racial preferences in the Harvard case, liberals will attack the Justices as racist for adopting a position most Black and Hispanic people agree with: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...
It’s “heads I win, tails you lose.” Liberals invoke the “will of the people” when it comes to Obamacare, but insist on edicts from ivory tower elites to override the popular will when it comes to unpopular liberal efforts at social engineering.
> convenient wedge issues or rallying cries for a small minority of the voting base - a minority that happens to be highly motivated.
When folks call abortion a “wedge issue” what they mean is that liberals feel like that they own that issue so completely it’s not even up for debate. Those issues are a therefore a distraction from the ones that they are willing to subject to the political process. Thus the intense outrage over this draft opinion, while extended ETC benefits passed quietly into the night.
Imposing the social mores of (mostly white) educated liberals on the population is the #1 priority of the Democratic Party. That’s why abortion is a litmus test—rather than raising taxes on the upper middle class—in a party where 1/3 of the actual voters identify as “pro life.” That’s why Democrats are pissing away historic opportunities created by unforced errors by the GOP, and alienating Hispanic voters they depend on, by doing stuff like trying to convince parents to let them talk about sexuality to young kids. Because that’s the party’s actual priority.
Your point about minorities suppressing the majority is ironic. Leaving aside that the effect you’re talking about is small—look at the Congressional popular vote, where Republicans have won an outright majority half the time since 2000–you’re correct. It is a problem when minorities overrule majorities. That’s why decades of liberal Supreme Court rulings overruling the public on issue after issue have been tremendously damaging to our political process.
After decades of beating down the public and doing stuff like forcing small towns to allow strip clubs to operate in the name of free speech, complaining about the Supreme Court “ignoring the popular will” is the height of irony.
That does not say what you think it does.
It kind of reminds me of this nonsense that universities offering liberal arts degrees still pay lip service to: that everyone is there for education for its own sake, oh no, it’s not a giant machine that gates public employment, it’s there for knowledge!
Uh huh.
Likewise, viewing the Constitution as an evolving document that gives great discretion to judges to fashion rules for a changing world naturally favors liberal outcomes, because lawyers and judges are overwhelmingly liberal, even the republicans. (It was, after all, a majority Republican Court that wrote Roe in the first place.)
Indeed, overruling Roe is a good example of the distinction between ideology and partisanship. 1/3 of republicans don’t agree with their party on abortion: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/18/three-in-te.... (And about 29% of Democrats don’t.)
Republicans are heavily favored in the upcoming 2022 elections. Biden’s approval rating among republicans is 7%. Why would a savvy partisan blow up an issue that fractures the GOP and draws attention away from how unified they are in hating Biden? The GOP has the rural, churchgoing mom vote locked up. Inflation is what they want to be talking about right now to win back suburban moms, not abortion.
Nearly every decision of Bush/Trump appointed judges is directly in line with the Republican platform: anti-abortion, pro Christian supremacy, and pro-corporate.
As to why are they trying to ram this decision through? The point of politics is to gain power and then assert your political leanings as law. Tearing down Roe is the final goal of a long-term Republican power surge: first whinging about activist judges in the 90s, then pushing identity politics in their base, then gerrymandering many states to death to control state legislatures, stonewalling the Supreme Court to push it into it's current radically partisan state, and finally asserting the Republican platform into law.
I think that interpreting the Constitution by its literal text yields interpretations different from interpreting according to original intent. And that the literal text reading does not align all that closely with mainstream Republican or Democratic positions.
Consider the text of the First Amendment, for example.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
No abridgment of freedom of speech or of the press. Pretty clear as text. Yet the Sedition Act of 1798 was never overturned as unconstitutional. Nor is there an exception in the plain text for "unless it's obscene" or "unless it's a lie" yet there are Federal laws limiting obscenity and fraud and other kinds of speech that were never struck down on First Amendment grounds. Some such laws were passed in the lifetime of the original framers of the constitution and others are in force today. Some state level blasphemy laws remained in place until the 20th century [1].
As I see it, either the literal text reading of the Second Amendment protects private ownership of machine guns just like it does bolt action rifles and revolvers, or handguns are no more protected than machine guns, whose private ownership was limited by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and then outlawed for all but affluent collectors by the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986.
A maximal-individual-liberty interpretation of the literal text of the First and Second Amendments produces a United States in which there are no Federal laws against publishing pornographic videos of minors, nor against private ownership of anti-aircraft missiles. (Among other startling developments.) That's closer to a fantasy of a certain strain of libertarian than anything aligned with mainstream political factions in the United States, either contemporaneously or at any time since independence. The original framers were (at least mostly) not libertarian libertines, devoid of communitarian feeling, while the literal text gestures toward an uncompromising individual liberty that would be equally outside the Overton window in 1792 or in 2022.
[1] Though it's fair to consider that, pre-Civil War, states had more latitude to pass laws that the Federal government was Constitutionally forbidden to pass.
Roe v Wade being no different. People havent read it, they havent read Casey, they havent read this draft, and they havent read other Supreme Court decisions to know what normal looks like.
There is a wide degree of room for understanding it from a jurisdiction perspective, that have absolutely nothing to do with one of two “camps” or that camp’s correlation to one of two political leanings. From a legal review perspective, that compartmentalizes the emotional aspect away from any desired outcome, its easy to see inspiration for other outcomes and paths that Roe v Wade shutdown all discussion of. Some of those paths actually reach similar results.
I tried once or twice to point that out, but people were just shocked to hear the topic. so I am kind of thrilled that the opportunity to inspire is now forced upon everyone.
What do you think qualifies you to judge if most Hindus have not read the Rig Veda, most sikhs have not read the Adi Granth, most Muslims have not read the Quran, most jews have not read the Torah, etc for every religion?
I find people take the experience they have with one particular religion around them, and then paint all religious people the same way. It's very strange because it makes no sense, yet even in places with very well read people like HN you see it all the time. I certainly agree there is a lot of polarization in the world right now
I think people judge the outcome of these very consequential lethal decisions morally rather than based on their legal merits. In fact I doubt most people are equipped to judge cases on their lethal merits. At the end of the day if a badly supported law is passed that many people agree with, they'll go along with it. If a well supported law that people disagree with is passed, they'll complain until someone finds a problem with it no matter how minor or abstract. Many people don't understand that legality=/=morality, or they desperately want them to be the same
I have read a few opinions of the Supreme Court over the years. I have no specific background in law, and I am not even a native English speaker, but I have found them uniformly accessible to a layman. They use a dozen or so boilerplate latin expressions that you need to get used to, but they are otherwise fairly readable.
The leaked text by Mr. Alito is a masterpiece of English prose and scholarship, in my opinion. In 90 pages or so, it explains the history of the issue and the legal theories that common-law judges have advanced since the 14th century. It analyzes the arguments in favor and against Roe and Wade. It also summarizes the legal handling of the issue in various US states.
Irrespective of whether or not you agree with the conclusion, these opinions are one of the few pieces of contemporary literature worth reading. I myself am looking forward to the final form of this text (should the Court decide to uphold it) as well as all the dissenting opinions, which I expect to be of similarly high caliber.
Thought it was odd and hurried to include Hawaii's 1850 statute. Since it was neither a territory or state then. Wish I knew a news source or discussion board that could find this stuff moderately entertaining, instead of looking for angles to discredit the entire institution.
The country would be a better place if more people did.
Supreme court decisions are phenomenally well written. They usually begin with a clear, short, and accessible statement of the case and the relevant principle(s) before they summarize their decision. I find that they describe the issues surrounding the cases with great compassion for all the major arguments. And the dissents are usually equally informative.
Reading decisions has dramatically increased my appreciation of the nuance that goes into the decisions of the court and the operation of our country. Even for cases where I disagreed with the judgement with both before and after reading the decision, I gained a much greater perspective of alternative views. ... and a feeling that even when I strongly believe we're doing the wrong thing that we're trying so hard to do the right thing that eventually we'll get it right somehow.
For several years I read at least the beginning of every decision and dissent -- there aren't that many. I stopped only because I became crunched for time, and I'm thankful that your post reminded me of this gap from my life now that I have the time to pick up the practice again.
From googling, I'm guessing you're referring to the fact that Barrett's appointment was a week ahead of the presidential election and months ahead of the end of trump's presidency.
Federal appointments down to the last minute of a presidency are lawful, and somewhat late appointments happen frequently. I find the suggestion otherwise in this context particularly amusing, because the fantastic drama over some literally 11th hour appointments-- ones so late they were delivered after the end of the presidency-- is how the supreme court took the power to review laws for constitutionality in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison . Even lame-duck supreme court nominations used to be fairly common (even though supreme court nominations are not that common themselves) -- that they aren't common more recently is because an unplanned vacancy is far more rare.
It's true that Obama failed to make a nomination at the end of his term, but the view that he couldn't or that it would have been improper is just not factually supported by the law or the history of the country, including the history of supreme court nominations. Instead there is a clear political explanation: Given the composition of the senate and the weakness of an outgoing president, Obama would have only been able to get through a compromise nomination. There was high confidence that Hillary would win and that the dems would have greater senate influence, allowing a more politically extreme nominee if it was left to her term. This was a grave political error, one I suspect we'll be suffering from for years to come. (The fact that we had a number of unplanned vacancies of late are also political errors, at least to the extent that you consider the justices political actors.)
I find it unfair to the point of outright incivility though to escalate a debate about the fairness of it the level of calling the appointment _illegitimate_, and is disrespectful to a fine and honorable institution. The fact that some politicians and pundits can't restrain themselves doesn't excuse the rest of us.
> you reading some of these decisions [...] to treat any of these decision
It's a big step from some to any. No person or process is infallible.
> I find it unfair to the point of outright incivility though to escalate a debate about the fairness of it the level of calling the appointment _illegitimate_, and is disrespectful to a fine and honorable institution.
A fine and honorable institution which has upheld slavery, segregation, imprisonment camps, and the list goes on. The SCOTUS is not above criticism, and change can only occur if we treat them for what they are, servants of the people.
You’ve got it backwards. States have a general “police power” and have the right to pass laws to regulate the public health unless it infringes on a federal constitutional right. In 50 years there has never been a “great legal argument” where the right to have medical providers perform abortion appears in the Constitution. You’re welcome to look in there yourself and report back.
How do you account for the fact that the Court has not revised Roe v Wade in the last 50 years if it all rests on a correct interpretation of the Constitution, which has obviously not changed?
The way time passes so long is that:
A) the court declines to hear cases over and over again unless it is forced to have “original jurisdiction” or decides not to decline to hear a case.
B) then when it decides to hear a case, we hope it rests on a solid constitutional ground because thats our only framework. there have only been a couple wild surprises from that court, and people amended the constitution in response just because the judges’ understanding was so wildly different than everyone’s, but the logic they pointed out was so clear that everyone agreed to overrule them by changing the constitution. Here, obviously people don't agree that much because, like you, they believe the means justify the end no matter how shaky the logic is. But for those willing to look, theyll see that court hadnt been doing its job as they didnt use the constitutional at all.
so its easy for us to see that the passage of time cannot be weighted as heavily as you are relying on. the marriage equality ones have very sound logic and have just as clear of a chronology as to why it wasnt ruled on before. your right in that it wasnt magic, but your wrong if you think it was ideological randomness.
Obergefell is a good contrast to Roe. Everyone acknowledges that the "rights" protected by the Constitution includes the rights inherited from the English tradition. (Liberals believe it encompasses an evolving set of rights based on changing moral standards, but they agree it includes at least those recognized in England in 1789.)
Marriage was one of those ancient rights. Even the Magna Carta includes rights relating to marriage. The question therefore wasn't whether there was a right to marriage, but whether same-sex relationships fell within the scope of the concept of "marriage."
On that question, the science changed dramatically in the period leading up to 2015. Science proved in the late 1990s that same-sex conduct was not a choice to reject conformity, but was rooted in biology. And in the early 2000s there was the first research showing that same-sex couples were living in committed relationships, raising children, etc. You'll notice that Kennedy spends a lot of time talking about these facts in his opinion--because those facts are critical to showing that same-sex relationships can be called "marriage" as historically understood.
If anything, "the science" has worked against Roe. The first real-time fetal ultrasound was conducted in 1971, just a couple of years before Roe was decided. Since then, ultrasounds have become routine, and 3D ultrasound technology allows us to see that a 15-week fetus isn't a "bundle of cells" but has a human face: https://youtu.be/sBmXNOG4s4A
> On that question, the science changed dramatically in the period leading up to 2015. Science proved in the late 1990s that same-sex conduct was not a choice to reject conformity, but was rooted in biology. And in the early 2000s there was the first research showing that same-sex couples were living in committed relationships, raising children, etc. You'll notice that Kennedy spends a lot of time talking about these facts in his opinion--because those facts are critical to showing that same-sex relationships can be called "marriage" as historically understood.
Homosexual "marriages" have existed since Antiquity. And marriages do not necessarily have to lead to children, otherwise old people would be restricted from marrying. I think it is obvious that this decision is a result of the fast change in the zeitgeist rather than a careful evaluation of evidence, no matter what the Justices or their clerks deemed fit to write in their decisions.
You might also be surprised at how, compared to the code analogy, informal and even non-legalistic many opinions are. There's a lot of opinions that read largely like well-informed Internet comments for long stretches until legal citations come back in.
They didn't emerge just now, they were pointed out in scholarly discussions of the case immediately after it was handed down, and throughout the intervening 50 years. It was even criticized by pro-abortion people, they wanted something more soundly reasoned.
It is not the first time that a longstanding doctrine has been completely thrown out, even after a gap of decades. Courts aren't infallible. Are they supposed to persist in error forever?
And yes, Roe absolutely was in error, and yes the Court has been deficient in its duties over the past 50 years in not correcting it, undoubtedly for fear of the political impact.
Again, this dichotomy only arises if you subscribe to the view that any decision from the Court is purely technical in the first place. If you think it has been maintained for 50 years because of its political impact, I don't see any reason to discuss the technical aspects at all, as they are irrelevant. What we should be asking is what changed in politics recently, what caused it, and where it is going to take us.
Each political side can always find legal experts and reasonable arguments to justify changing a decision they dislike. Some stones are best left unturned, as there are costs for the Court to act like this. I predict a ton of judicial uncertainty, a weakening of the SCOTUS and eventually radical solutions like court packing.
The Supreme Court and other appeals courts typically are purely technical, across all political leanings and makeups.
On this topic, the Supreme Court reverted to a purely technical view, auditing those two prior cases on their technical merits because they are outliers in being untechnical. They returned it to the states, not taking any extreme approach at all. The extreme options would be: invalidate all state laws that destroy fetuses, prohibit Congress from having any ability to review. Nope, nothing like that was done because overturning roe v wade was never as political as suggested with regard to a child bearer’s body, they simply returned it to the states, and there has always been an absence of a superseding law from Congress, which is Congress’ fault for never even trying
> "One of the most curious things about Roe," wrote liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe "is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found."
> Alan Dershowitz, another legendary liberal Harvard Law professor, called Roe "judicial activism" lacking "clear governing constitutional principles."
> There are plenty more like this. Pro-choice Yale and Harvard Law professor John Hart Ely wrote that Roe "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."
> Why did they wait 50 years to correct this obvious outlier?
Because once a precedent has been set, the Supreme Court isn't obliged to revisit it, even if everyone comes to believe the decision is wrong. Whereas the merits of the original decision are quite technical, whether to overrule precedent or not is highly discretionary. It considers factors like whether the original decision failed to settle the underlying controversy, whether it creates a rule that is hard to apply in practice, etc. See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis
It's this discretionary aspect that made Roe a sitting duck. Liberals obviously had no reason to overrule Roe even if they, like Justice Ginsburg, believed the decision was flawed. And for a long time, Republicans appointed social liberals to the Court who were happy to kick the can down the road because they were worried about the political ramifications.
Note that the politics doesn't matter for whether the decision is correct or not in the first place, but it's an entirely reasonable basis for deciding whether or not to go to the trouble of overruling an incorrect precedent.
> And why did several of the judges lie to Congress when they said they would not change Roe?
They didn't say they "would not change Roe" they said they recognized "Roe is precedent." As explained above, precedent can be overturned.
You are right about this point, upon further reading I see that I based my question on social media bullshit that turned out to be biased. I agree with your distinction.
Regarding the rest, I think you still don't quite grasp my point. I understand there can be a technical way of looking at these decisions. I can also concede that Roe is particularly hated by most scholars. But if we both agree that politics is why these technical aspects were overlooked for 50 years, it seems absolutely pointless to discuss this issue from any other standpoint. Political interference is why this decision was made in the first place, because as another user stated, it fit into the more libertarian ideology of the Court at that time. And politics is why it's getting struck down, technical aspects notwithstanding. You can of course disagree, as I think you do, but from my perspective the political aspect is much more interesting and a more powerful predictor than anything else.
a reality not revisited until the 1950s, where the supreme court bought it back under the federal domain, overruling itself because “obviously this has 1st amendment protections” and creating the “free speech and expression” reality that seems profoundly American, but really hasnt been for long.
you can have an opinion, but you need to incorporate what the court actually says and their logic behind. Just because a ruling is convenient for you or your causes (multiple times) doesnt mean its on solid ground. on this specific topic, its important to repeat over and over again that the federal government and even its supreme court could have reached the same outcome of privileging the pregnant person’s choice, but yes, that outcome would need to be closer to a math proof if from that court factoring in very different variables.
I get that its comfortable (or at least familiar) to view that the means justify the ends, where any authority using any rationale can extend rights that you like. I get that its scary that rights are so flimsy and people dont trust their states and that they will be immediately denied services they expected to be available. None of that lets the incorrect authority do its job wrong.
> Roe v. Wade “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” That was the conclusion in the Yale Law Journal of pro-choice legal scholar John Hart Ely.
> Laurence Tribe — Harvard Law School. Lawyer for Al Gore in 2000. “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”
Roe is the Lochner of liberal jurisprudence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York). It makes sense only under an extrapolation of the broadly libertarian small-government sentiment behind the Constitution that the left doesn’t believe in. (It was penned by a Nixon appointee, and was reaffirmed in Casey by five Republican appointees.)
The reasoning didnt emerge just now, people just didnt want to talk about anything more nuanced than being “pro-life” or “prochoice” and “dont say the a-word”.
If you read the case you’ll realize “hold up, what? I’ve been emotionally led my whole life based on this steamy pile of shaky logic?”
You’ll realize that the same outcome could have been created with more durable consensus. Durable meaning acceptable, less divisive, not based on time.
But now, a major roadblock to evaluating things this way has crumbled.
The primary issues are:
- How the multiple unrelated case(s) got to the Supreme Court and were consolidated for Roe v Wade
- How the Supreme Court acted as a super legislature creating frameworks and edicts (it does this sometimes but they are guidelines, prongs for likelihood of compliance. In this case they were completely uncircumventable rights and restrictions, the area of Congress), instead of finding a part of the constitution to support it. Its out of character and relies on the difficulty of overruling the Supreme Court.
- How Congress has had 50 years or more to do or even just try anything on this topic, but didnt. (Risky for politicians doesnt mean the court can do their job)
- The next time the topic was revisited in Casey, the court was relying on the concept of Roe being precedent while then altering that precedent for a modified framework anyway. (The new draft uses that logic to dismantle Casey before dismantling Roe. And it doesnt take an opposite extreme view, it just gets the federal government out of it and returns it to state regulation. If Congress had opined at all, ever, it would have just returned it to Congress’ national laws, but since it never has then there is nothing to supersede state regulation.)
Reality Winner was caught partly by The Intercept's poor opsec, and investigators reviewing the microdots on the PDF scan.
https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali...
For example, slight differences in the footnotes / case reference numbers that would be very hard to detect on casual glance. Or even traps like displaced punctuation marks unique to each copy.
But somehow I doubt it.
* "it must be someone who only had access to a stapled, printed copy of the draft opinion (If the person had access to the underlying digital file, they wouldn’t have printed & stapled it just to unstaple it.)"
* "I don’t think the leaker was an opponent of the opinion, because there would be no tactical value in doing so."
On the former, that assumes it's less risky to grab a digital copy (copied to some medium plugged into some machine, likely audited, maybe rights protected), than to smuggle out (and smuggle back in?) a physical copy. The latter is super low-tech and in an environment where (as demonstrated by Roberts' press release) the trust level is super high, I wonder how hard it is to smuggle out paper copies. There's all sorts of potential black magic in a digital copy that the tech unsavvy may (rightfully) be afraid of. So even if you had access to both, low-tech may be best.
On the latter, it's usually not wise to put your own rational thoughts into the head of a suspect. You need to understand *their* "rational" thoughts. It's not too hard for me to imagine some perceived benefits that an opponent or proponent of the opinion would see in the leak.
I'd still count this sort of reasoning as evidence, but I'd give it significantly lower weight than the author seems to.
So I'm curious if he wrote this with knowledge about what's been going on around Justice Thomas and his wife's behavior [0]. It fits pretty perfectly with that narrative, though is totally bereft of any actual evidence.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/elections-donald-trump-presidenti...
No idea if anyone offers it as a service. It's unlikely because the primary consumer of the service would be someone trying to prevent documents from leaking, so trusting them to the service is itself a major point of failure.
It might not have been Google, but hopefully someone can chime in and remind me. lol
That news agencies and commentators on the right IMMEDIATELY communicated in Lockstep about "this leak is an egregious affront to the court" points to that.
My money is on "no one knows a damn thing," and everyone who says otherwise is just pointing fingers at their partisan hate-objects.
(Fwiw: I don’t care who leaked or how leaked. I think people should focus more importantly that the legal opinion in the draft uses reasoning applicable to any sense of personal privacy. It’s more than just reproductive rights here, because the reasoning is that any rights logically derived from a right to privacy are illegitimate.)
News media if you think about it is a really small world. If you’re a conservative reporter on national beats how many companies can you work for, actually? The national review, Fox News, Wall Street journal, OAN? Maybe Cato institute? That’s only a small handful of possible employers.
They have lifetime high salary employment, lifetime high salary retirement, lifetime security protection, they openly break laws that other federal judges have to obey (like not associating with political groups)
Point is they do whatever they want. Leaks will annoy them but it's not going to change anything. They do not have to respond to anyone, nor do any interviews, explain themselves, etc.
The time to prevent this was 50 years ago by making it law but then being undone was cemented in 2016 when there were a dozen other more qualified candidates but someone inexplicably was chosen otherwise.
This country is beyond comprehension.
I think they should. The court has been granted extreme power to decide the nuances of our rights.
I think it's entirely reasonable not to post drafts until they're ready.
Hell, even on github, you (generally) don't put up a PR until it's ready for review.
I can almost imagine the conversation between Roberts and Alito: "hey Sam, the debate is pretty evenly split here; why don't you draft us up the text that you'd publish if things lean your way? Then we'd have something tangible to pick through."
This is terrible reasoning. Of course there's tactical value. It would create an outrage before the opinion was official and could potentially turn the tide if justices saw a huge reaction from Americans. The Justices aren't stupid. They know if they release a very unpopular opinion on abortion, it could completely destroy the faith in the Supreme Court. So there's a huge amount of tactical value. For the author to dismiss this is horrible reasoning.
For example, slight differences in the footnotes / case reference numbers that would be very hard to detect on casual glance. Or even traps like displaced punctuation marks unique to each copy.
But somehow I doubt it.
Since our goverment behaves like so many Olympian gods in a perpetual bunfight over the news cycle, one must understand that defelection has a lot to do with the timing.
That's precisely why, if I were the one who did this, I would have printed, stapled, stressed, and finally unstapled the pages before re-scanning them.
It's an incredible coincidence that someone knew to have this website up and running just ahead of the draft leak: https://web.archive.org/web/20220426203219/https://jewishral...
It could be totally unrelated to this abortion controversy, however that would be amazing coincidence.
The site maintained by this group: https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/national-council-o...
I'm aware of the fact that it's run by Jewish organisations will make me the butt of many accusations. All I'm alleging is that rumours have probably been moving around the right circles for a long time.
I mean…people know that. The lie is the point. The distraction is by intention the point of making the false claim.
> If [the majority bloc in favor of the opinion has held together], there’s no reason for a supporter or an opponent to leak an old draft now.
I don't find the reasoning behind this convincing at all. It would make for a good plot twist in a book, but in my opinion the leaker was most likely an opponent wanting to spark national outrage ahead of the final ruling, in an effort to either pressure judges if the outcome can still be changed, or as an act of vengeance against the court in retaliation for a ruling they feel extremely strongly about.
That may be true, but a key issue with this reasoning is that there has been an increasing opinion that the move to overturn Roe v Wade is an explicitly partisan affair precipitated by bad-faith manipulations of recent SC appointments from the conservative side.
They would be more likely to get a legendary amount of shares on facebook while their actual life crashed even if folks didn't find a way to put them in jail based on a usefully broad interpretation of the CFAA for example.
One could imagine that they face merely professional ruin NOW but face actual legal action only years hence when the administration changed for example. It would an extremely dubious position to be in.
I think he's kind of pointing in the direction of Clarence Thomas's wife, who is a batshit crazy right wing activist that was involved in the events of January 6th.
No idea if he's right but it's well within the range of plausibility.
Certainly hasn't been true for those who make up the court. It's one of the least legitimate legal courts in the land.
It certainly seems comprised of partisan hacks these days. I see no other way to describe the recent appointments prior to this year. They certainly weren't endorsed by the American Bar Association.
These three were completely obvious Republican picks a decade ago when I was in law school. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were so-called “feeder” judges on the courts of appeals, meaning they were well regarded and sent many of their clerks to clerk on the Supreme Court. (Just like RBG and Breyer and Garland). And Barrett was a star law professor.
That would be my assumption as well. Clerking at the Supreme Court seems like one of the top appointments one could possibly achieve. Requiring top tier academics and some number of personal connections to secure the position. This stunt would destroy all of their future prospects.
Or is a high-risk, high-reward way to launch a political career. I can see someone running for office with this as a cornerstone of their campaign.
I don't think it's a good plan, but maybe it is or is perceived to be by the leaker.
Anyone can predict that this could prompt protests. It's a no-brainer to put up barricades.
Like your timeline. Please at-least get that right before you go spreading lies. The barricades got setup before this leak in response to the guy lighting himself on fire.
One thing I’ve learned the past few years is that we’ve all greatly overestimated the people in governments. I’m not sure if it’s because of movies or what that influenced that. The reality is that people are, for the most part, as dumb as anyone else. It’s just that the people are generally more private (often because it’s legally compelled) so we don’t see all the mistakes as obviously as we do in other fields.
America is also going through a wave of activism on all fronts, so being naive or unsophisticated isn’t really relevant to that.
I could see relevant skills to nursing at a nursing home?
What if this leak did not come from within? What about the possibility of a certain country with a history of hacking institutions and using that information to create division at key moments? Seems like an obvious play. I have no evidence of this and the simple answer is more likely. Was my initial thought though;
Because working in politics myself, this doesn't seem optimal for either side imho.
So someone on the hard-line anti-abortion side had a motivation to do the leak.
The only element making me question the amateurishness of this leak is its timing, on the eve of bellwether primaries.
Wasn't it?
From the descriptions I've seen of the process, the decision draft starts circulating once the decision has been taken. The language can be softened or hardened, but from what I understand here Roe would be dead regardless.
I'd think the possible changes would have been with respect to the "blast radius" aka the references to (and explicit targeting of) Obergefell, Lawrence, Eisenstadt.
Would also be interesting to see if Roberts received a windfall during his deliberations. Insurance companies surely appreciate the individual mandates … it’s the closest thing to printing money they could achieve.
Earlier today I heard someone state that historically the Supreme Court rules in favor of the large corporate interests. My thought at the time was it did not make sense, since technically supreme court justices are beholden to Noone. What explains this bias on the part of the Supreme Court, if it truly exist?
The people who nominate and confirm them may very well be beholden to any number of interests. Lower federal judges are also appointed for life. It would be logical that those who nominate and confirm would select judges with a record that aligns with whatever issues they (and the ones they are beholden to) find important.
Article V of the US constitution makes them ultimately beholden to the states. It describes how the constitution can be amended. Such an amendment can possibly threaten the supreme court. Seems very unlikely to happen, though.
We are witnessing the same with the "election fraud" Trump populist fervor right now.
And, "the majority believes that Roe is flawed" is interesting information, but it also is not any kind of precedent. Decisions are going to depend on the details of the case before the court.
Overruling that part of Roe doesn’t require a meandering rant about abortion rights writ large.
According to [2], there are 203 countries listed. I'll look at "on request" abortions.
* North Korea is marked "unclear".
* 6 allow abortion at 23 weeks (24 weeks is also an identical list): China, Colombia, Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea, South Ossetia
* 2 additional allow abortion at 22 weeks: Iceland, Vietnam
* 191 ban abortion at 22 weeks.
* Australia ranges from completely prohibited to no limit, depending on region.
* Canada ranges from 12 weeks and 6 days to 24 weeks and 6 days depending on region.
* United states ranges from (ignoring the recent laws that prompted the ongoing cases) 20 weeks to no limit depending on region.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Planned_Parenthood...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Independent_count...
I feel like nobody brings up other countries when it comes to abortion, but the context seems pretty helpful (as it is for most issues, I suppose). Esp since, looking at Australia and Canada, people get on and tolerate internal divergences, and maybe we should too. I suppose is it's because they accept that their federalism is much less centralized than ours.
Among the 43 areas that reported gestational age at the time of abortion for 2019, 79.3% of abortions were performed at ≤9 weeks’ gestation, and nearly all (92.7%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation (Table 10).
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm
So it's not like we're a country of monsters despite what's technically allowed by Roe. Now I want you to imagine for a moment what's happening in the life of a woman who chooses to have an abortion well into her pregnancy, likely after quickening when she can feel movement. Well it turns out you can't, because every case will be different. And I don't trust the state to insert itself into that decision. But I'll bet every one of these women has a story to tell and that it's heartbreaking, and that we don't make those women's lives better by forcing them to carry to term.
Data from the Turnaway Study has resulted in the publication of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies, and the answer to nearly all the questions asked, said Foster, is that the women who got abortions fared better in respect to economics and health, including their mental health, compared with those who did not have abortions.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/21/1074605...
So that's my first point, but I acknowledged some will disagree.
Now, Mississippi's law is to limit abortions to 15 weeks, so you may think it's a reasonable compromise. But with Roe overturned, it will not stop there. It's only a matter of time till some states ban abortion entirely. Some already have:
https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-polici...
Anti-choicers will push for restrictions at the Federal level. They'll try to ban pharmaceutical abortion pills through the mail. They'll try to prevent women from traveling out of state.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/02/abortion-ba...
https://khn.org/news/article/texas-medication-abortion-crimi...
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/03/24/inside-missouris-pus...
Finally, outlawing abortions won't stop abortions. Never has and never will. What it will do is to punish poor women who don't have the means to travel to where abortion is legal. This is already the case under Roe, and w/o Roe it will be worse.
So sure, Roe may have been poorly reasoned. Perhaps a decision based on equal protection instead of privacy would have been better. But it's what we have, and given the virtual impossibility of amending the constitution, it's the only way we can have a Federal standard.
And no, I don't think handing it over to the states is workable, any more than it was workable to allow the states to decide segregation, voting rights, contraception, or interracial and gay marriage.
Women are entitled to equal protection under the law, and that includes deciding whether to carry a baby to term.
Overturning Roe is a travesty.
Disclosure: I'm a guy.
Men and women have similar views on abortion: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p.... Indeed, abortion is one of the political issues with the smallest gender gap in views. Women diverge from men much more on questions like the size of the social safety net. In Mississippi, the State whose law this Supreme Court case is about, the majority of women, and people of all races, oppose abortion.
Abortion advocates are no different than any other kind of progressive advocate--they claim the mantle of an entire group to champion extreme positions that most members of the group don't support, while seeking to suppress the voices of other members of the group. In reality, all the people I know who oppose abortion are women. They're moms, typically religious, and are rarely represented in discussions among educated elites like on HN. (I myself, like most educated elites, support some level of abortion rights, though I find myself favor limiting it to the first trimester, like most Americans.)
The backbone of the pro-life movement is conservative women, just like the backbone of the pro-choice movement is liberal women. Many conservative women--and slightly more women identify as conservative than liberal--deeply care about abortion. Many prioritize abortion more highly than libertarian economics, which is why the impetus for the GOP to take action on abortion has grown as women gain more power in the party. Conservative women almost uniformly love Justice Barrett. Many Republican men, by contrast, (the Justice Roberts type, or the four Republican men who voted to uphold Roe in Casey) would love to drop or at least moderate on abortion to capture more votes in affluent suburbs.
> So this doesn't paint a complete picture. It turns out that 93% of abortions in the U.S. happen at <= 13 weeks gestation. So it's not like we're a country of monsters despite what's technically allowed by Roe.
What the laws "technically allow" are an expression of society's values and sense of morality. Laws create not only legal effects, but social norms. In many cases, the social norms are more important than the legal effect. If we made stealing legal, most people, in the short term, wouldn't steal, because of the strong social norm against it. But over time and generations, we would have normalized stealing.
And even before that, we will have legalized conduct that is immoral and wrong, even if it's rare. by your numbers, you're talking about over 40,000 second trimester abortions a year. Some of which I'm sure would be justified regardless due to fetal deformity or health risks, but you could still be talking about thousands of monstrous acts a year where neither of those factors is implicated.
> And no, I don't think handing it over to the states is workable, any more than it was workable to allow the states to decide segregation, voting rights, contraception, or interracial and gay marriage.
Leaving abortion to legislatures has worked just fine in the rest of the world. Roe was heard within a few years of similar cases in Austria, France, Italy, and Germany, except Germany which found legalized abortion to violate the Basic Law. All of those Courts determined to leave abortion to the legislature. The courts in the EU left same-sex marriage to legislatures as well: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-...
It's fundamentally mistaken to view every social issue through the lens of segregation of Black people. Black people were a minority, brought to the U.S. in slavery, and after they were freed, they were excluded from white society. The white majority had no common bond with the Black minority, and no material interest in their welfare. Segregation laws did not affect, directly or indirectly, the white people who voted for them. Democracy could not operate in this situation.
Contraception, same-sex marriage, and abortion are completely different, because they effect everyone. Women and gay people are uniformly distributed throughout the population. The women who support restrictions on abortion are supporting restrictions on themselves. And the men who support such restrictions will be directly affected if they have to raise an unplanned child. Because the population as a whole has an interest in the outcome, democracy can operate to find a socially acceptable resolution of a contentious issue.
Liberals have used this mistaken analogy to segregation to champion a view of the Supreme Court that wrests control of society's moral and cultural development away from the public and entrusts it to highly educated elites. Abortion is legal to 24 weeks not because the public wants it, but because a bunch of libertarian-leaning Republican judges in the 1970s and 1980s did. Had Roe gone the other way, I strongly suspect we would have reached an equilibrium today that reflects public opinion of supporting elective abortion in the first trimester, but only in exceptional cases after that.
I never made any claim about support for abortion rights of men vs women. My point is only that men should be especially circumspect about restricting what a woman can do with her body.
> Abortion advocates
First of all, I'm not an abortion advocate. I'm an abortion-rights advocate. Let me lay out my position so that it is clear:
The way to reduce abortions is to reduce unintentional pregnancies and to better support women and mothers.
To wit, I want free and universal contraception and sex education. I want better birth control options for men (and I put my money where my mouth is by having a vasectomy after my wife and I had two children). I support a stronger social safety net than America provides.
I believe we can reduce second and third term abortions by making first term abortions easier. But should a woman, for whatever reason, need an abortion after the first term, that should be between her and her medical provider. I don't think any woman wants to have an abortion, especially one after the first trimester, and so I trust women to make that decision for themselves.
> are no different than any other kind of progressive advocate--they claim the mantle of an entire group to champion extreme positions that most members of the group don't support, while seeking to suppress the voices of other members of the group.
Supporting abortion rights is not an extreme position among men or women. A majority of Americans, men and women, support Roe and think abortion should be legal in "most or all cases":
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/06/about-six-i...
I am not trying to suppress anyone's voice. I am arguing against those who aim to restrict what I believe is fundamentally a woman's right.
> In reality, all the people I know who oppose abortion are women.
This is neither here nor there, but I happen to think that women who "oppose abortion in most or all cases" have fortunately never had to face a decision like this:
https://joshandrebeccashrader.wordpress.com/2018/11/15/my-cr...
> And even before that, we will have legalized conduct that is immoral and wrong, even if it's rare. by your numbers, you're talking about over 40,000 second trimester abortions a year. Some of which I'm sure would be justified regardless due to fetal deformity or health risks, but you could still be talking about thousands of monstrous acts a year where neither of those factors is implicated.
In Germany in 2020 there were 2,226 abortions in weeks 12 to 21. There were 648 at 22 and more weeks:
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Health...
Which of those were immoral and wrong? Which were monstrous acts? Who decides?
The vast majority of women who have abortions after the first trimester don't realize they are pregnant, don't have resources to get an abortion sooner, or there is a fetal deformity.
https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2013/11/who-seeks-a...
What's immoral and wrong is to decline them the right to decide for themselves.
> Leaving abortion to legislatures has worked just fine in the rest of the world.
The U.S is not the rest of the world. We either let state legislatures decide or leave it to Congress. It is immoral to leave it to the states because it will disproportionally harm women who do not have the means to travel or who wish or need to obtain an abortion confidentially. It will increase abortions after the first trimester.
Leaving it to Congress is anti-democratic due to the Senate. But say we do leave it to Congress, which presumably has the authority to grant or restrict abortion access under the Commerce Clause. Then we're right back to the Supreme Court to rule on that authority.
> It's fundamentally mistaken to view every social issue through the lens of segregation of Black people. [...] Contraception, same-sex marriage, and abortion are completely different. [...] Liberals have used this mistaken analogy to segregation.
The analogy to segregation is because its supporters defended it as as states rights issue, just like supporters of restricting abortion access. Similarly for the other issues. These are all issues that should not be left to the states.
> Champion a view of the Supreme Court that wrests control of society's moral and cultural development away from the public and entrusts it to highly educated elites.
Do you think that Griswold, Loving, and Obergefell are also issues that should have (should still be?) left to the states?
Here's what I think: Only 6% of the country could vote when the country was founded. Since that time, we've been on a path to greater democracy. But the country still retains anti-democratic institutions, and they are currently held by conservatives and allow a minority viewpoint to restrict the rights of others. At the same time, I think the constitution and representative democracy are what protects us from mob rule.
If resting control away from the states by finding implied rights in the constitution in order to allow interracial marriage, gay marriage and so forth is what is required due to the particulars of America's government, so be it.
> Abortion is legal to 24 weeks not because the public wants it, but because a bunch of libertarian-leaning Republican judges in the 1970s and 1980s did. Had Roe gone the other way, I strongly suspect we would have reached an equilibrium today.
America has highly conflicting views on abortion:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abo...
If Roe had gone the other way, I expect we'd be exactly where we're about to end up with restrictions varying by state, and with constant arguments over it in Congress.
> that reflects public opinion of supporting elective abortion in the first trimester, but only in exceptional cases after that.
Which is where we are as a practical matter in any case.
But given that nobody seriously argues that Roe has a foundation in the text or original intent of the Constitution, it's certainly fair for them to point out that Roe can't be defended by saying, as liberals usually do, that we have a "Living Constitution" that incorporates "evolving social norms." Because what the EU does and what the polls say are certainly evidence of what those "evolving social norms are."
Roe raises the question of "where exactly do those 'evolving social norms' come from anyway?" And I suspect the honest answer is "the opinions of highly educated lawyers."
[1] Just two EU countries, comprising 6% of the EU population, allow elective abortions after 14 weeks: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-t...
[2] 65% of Americans think abortion should generally be illegal after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort...
How could one know about the history and beliefs of these justices, hear their questioning, see who has pushed them onto the bench, read their speeches, hell seen that their significant other believes in q crazy, and yet somehow think they'll change their mind or find some reasonable compromise.
You are correct in the danger of this blast radius.
This is TERRIFYING to me.
I'm skeptical here that this leak any differences though in that:
How can they make this ruling otherwise?
What changes could they make that don't set a scary and dangerous precedent?
without just flat out telling their truth that this is a religious decision and giving fetus' rights greater than actual living humans.
Their argument rests on their narrow view of "deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions."
If that is the logic, as you say, what is left to protect states from outlawing gay marriage, contraception, anal sex, and SOOOO much more.
What moderation could be added to this draft on this fundamental issue?
It's disgusting to me that they argue they are making some ethical stand to overturn 'egregious' decision equating this to Plessy, using this historical traditions argument.
We all know what the constitution actually did say and even worse the practices of the time.
What does history and traditions even mean too. It's obvious to me and not even slightly veiled. Hint it probably doesn't include indigenous history or the history of any non-white, wealthy, christian males in power, nor any traditions created or changed within the last 50 years.
Because if the standard is the status quo of 200 years ago, they will either let a few extreme states say no to basically every right we have lived for the last 100+ years OR they will just be hypocritically veiling their true reasoning.
How is that? There still would be no federal law against killing fetuses, whereas there is a federal law against killing born people.
It's about unenumerated rights and interpretation of liberty under the 14th Amendment.
> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
So in the past the court said liberty includes a right to privacy, which also includes things like having a right to buy and use contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut). This was extended to include women having a right to an abortion, with some qualifiers (the right was not unlimited, it said states did have some interest in protecting both the mother's health and fetus health).
The current court decision says that, while those other unenumerated rights have been found, they're different because they don't involve an "unborn human being".[1]
Thus they imply that a few cells (under some state laws this would be from the moment of fertilization) have rights that supersede (or at least conflict) with an actual person's right to have their liberty protected from the State.
The Louisiana state legislature has a bill introduced right now that seems to make abortion homicide, both for the mother who receives the abortion and anyone who administers it. [2][3]
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21835435/scotus-initi...
[2] https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1276214
[3] https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/legisl...
This is a bizarre misreading. It doesn't say that. It says that the Constitution does not grant them the power to invalidate a state law against abortion, because Roe erred in determining that the 14th Amendment right to privacy entailed a right to abort a pregnancy.
(I'm not against abortion, for the record, but I'm increasingly disappointed with the facile arguments I hear about it. Of course this Supreme Court decision is not a 'religious decision that the fetus is a human being', my God.)
if this ruling's argument is: ( unenumerated && !fit with history/traditions 200 years ago ) == states can ban
then every other 'right' we have like gay marriage, contraception, porn, anal sex, basically anything not written in the constitution that a bunch of white people 200 years ago didn't do regularly, could be made illegal state by state.
OR
This is a sham justification to further their religious beliefs and the ruling should simply write that a fetus has some type of special rights that supersede.
At least that ruling would be honest about their obvious bias and plain intent.
How is that not saying that because abortion specifically involves a few cells then the right to an abortion is not the same as other privacy rights?
Yes, elsewhere they make other arguments about tradition with regards to abortion not being a privacy right. They don't use a singular argument.
Texas passed a law denying abortions in the case of rape or incest, but I guess the notion of having a right to forced inception is hard for something that doesn't exist beforehand.
It's half way there in some states through vague language, using legal system to intimidate, ban by bureaucracy, and religious hospitals who won't even abort when there is an ectopic pregnancy.
This source is an opinion piece, but worth reading imho. The author includes state's legal language on when life of mother exception can be used.
A lot of them are vague or require an immediate emergency. Though to be fair some she includes aren't super persuasive to her argument imho.
When you empower every nut job in the state to sue it intimidates MDs to not use that very judgement.
Medicine isn't black and white and even if it was the government or citizens empowered by the govt should not get to arbitrate in the middle. Every miscarriage becomes suspect. Was her life really in danger? Etc
Basically, I'm no longer shocked at the kind of stuff that is now being said out loud or publicly fought for.
From healthcare, attacking elections, attacks on queer people etc.
I think we will increasingly see a group of states continue this trajectory and push this country to the brink. And the Supreme Court continue to enable all of this dangerous behavior.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/28/the-new-ab...
So then, one view is that the leak of the draft is just a continuation of that effort to hold the line on the full overturning, and that view seems pretty sensible. On the other hand, what to make of the fact that the leak goes to Politico and not somewhere like the Journal? Do you instead see it as a disgruntled partisan opponent trying to counter the likely leaks that led to the WSJ piece? Or simply a minor smokescreen?
I don't think there's any reasonable basis to be particularly sure either way. My gut leans toward the leak having come from the "overturn Roe" camp, but I think most peoples' "gut" on this is pretty highly correlated with their personal views on the topic.
My opinion is that this issue is too contentious and should have been ignored by the court and the entire problem deferred to Congress...but then that expels the court's credibility capital. They can't resist the occasion for authority and pomp.
My biased opinion out of the way, I think a growing population of the body politic feels the Supreme Court takes on too much (way out of its lane), and Congress likes to be able to dodge contencious issues (happy to have the court insulate them) and then soapbox after the fact.
Waffling on long standing pivotal precident after 50 years smacks of a brewing revolution--in any society.
In the words of my sweet little apolitical wife (and mother) after expressing surprise at seeing her participate in discussions about this on facebook: "They are fucking with the wrong people."
More broadly, the ongoing total dysfunction of Congress (and/or the entire political system) has meant both parties have increasingly turned to the relatively-functional court to get their wins. The fact, at least historically, that Supreme Court precedents are seen as quite durable is another factor weighing in favor of the court's involvement. The insulating effect on the politicians is a good point, too.
There's also I think the factor that both parties have found it convenient for the Supreme Court to be very powerful and involved in lots of issues just as a motivational factor for their bases: the dialogue around presidential and senatorial races now routinely revolve around Supreme Court appointments as maybe the only important issue.
They discussed the potential value in an anti-Roe-side leak. It may hold justices to an early decision. I'll let Ms Joh make the case better than I could.
Also, why are you mentioning “ jewishrallyforabortionjustice” completely unprompted?
And no, states rights isn't about giving people control over other's bodies: it's about maintaining consensus and self determination. Last year people were talking about states rights to prevent from being forced to take a medical treatment they didn't want.
Who are you trying to convince with this weak argument? Is the fact that it was anticipated in advance somehow invalidating? Nothing you assert follows from what you’ve proffered (separate from the fact that what you assert is wrong).
> Last year people were talking about state's rights to prevent from being forced to take a medical treatment they didn't want.
Oh, so you mean another thing that most people agree with (compulsory vaccination to participate in society) being made into an issue so an rejectionist core can throw a tantrum and get lots of people killed along the way?
That's extremely far from agreed upon, but if you want to take people's medical choices away as a condition for participating in society I don't see how you can even make an argument for abortion.
> Is the fact that it was anticipated in advance somehow invalidating
It didn't occur to me that they might register the domain in advance of the ruling just in case. That seems a little strange but I've never planned (or even attended) a political protest so I guess I wouldn't know.
Sarah also pointed out that the Chief Justice has, technically, firing power over all of the clerks under any of the Justices, and there’s maybe a case to be made for him exercising that power here to fire all of them if they cannot definitively prove who it was after investigation in order to defend the integrity of the Court’s deliberation process. If they can at least narrow down that it was in fact a clerk and not some other staffer and definitely not a Justice (probably wasn’t, but still better to go through the investigation), then I can’t say I would disagree with that outcome.
By the way, the June-July recess is about when clerkships turnover and they choose to stay on for another term (at the Justice’s discretion) or move on in their careers. Clerkships aren’t forever.
I think it’s incredibly likely if they determine exactly who it is and that person would deserve to see their career ended and at that point you would just fire that one clerk; but I don’t think it is likely at all if they were fired en masse because the Court couldn’t determine the exact culprit. It’s not great, but we’re still talking about a group of people who know how the Court operates because they worked there recently, and I think it would be difficult to make a case for disbarment for the whole lot if the Chief Justice actually did exercise this option.
If the clerk says yes, fire them.
If the clerk says no, they are either telling the truth or committing a felony. Would the real leaker risk catching a felony charge if they don't know whether the FBI actually knows the identity of the leaker?
If the clerk refuses to answer, apply "adverse inference" and fire them, because they are either the leaker or are hindering an investigation.
Is the leaker the fall guy for somebody else?
It’s not just the current Justices and staff that want to know either. There has never been a before-the-fact wholesale leak of a draft opinion, but there have been months after-the-fact leaks that saw the leaker completely shunned by the community around SCOTUS independent of political affiliation or judicial philosophy from former and current clerks to the Justices themselves. They keep it tight, and clerkships, SCOTUS or otherwise, are usually the ultimate networking opportunity. Simply put, it was unprofessional and everyone involved has an interest in determining who it was no matter what the political motivations were or the hoped for outcome.
It is an extreme departure for a profession that historically prides itself on protecting the political process over making substantive judgments—a profession where the representation of nazis and murderers and terrorists in the name of access to the legal system for all is exalted.
In the end only Vermont’s bar, adopted the rule (even Illinois rejected it: https://www.2civility.org/isba-assembly-opposes-adoption-8-4...). But that just seems to me to be a minor bump in the road before the current crop of graduates from elite schools start replacing the folks in those bars as well.
My opinion is that if you have some papers that would hurt your integrity to come out, then their release is never the problem, it is the papers in the first place.
Doubly so in the case of a government agency.
So yeah, this matters, and so does the state of the court’s integrity not because of what the general public thinks, but because if the court is to function at all, the court itself needs to believe in its own integrity.
I am aware that this is not the finished product, but I think it is clear to everyone that it is not.
That would be a batshit bonkers move, frankly.
Luckily, that doesn't seem to be Roberts's style.
This guy is doing some pretty basic 'forensic' work ('ooh, there were staples') and then jumps to a completely self-made conclusion. It's ridiculous.
I only want this to be true and it to be a justice to see how quickly Josh Hawley backs off his threat to impeach said justice.
I'm also curious, what kind of source control / collaborative tools do they use inside the supreme court? These decisions look like LaTeX.
In the same way, it makes sense to leak an "extreme" draft and then modify it after the fires have burned a bit, because you still get the benefit of passing unpopular legislation while seeming like you compromised on the details (when perhaps the final outcome is the one you wished for all along).
On the other hand, it makes some sense to me in some cynical ways for the opposition to leak this. We've already seen e-mail blasts going out asking for fundraising in the wake of this event, which certainly will solicit funds for numerous PACs and midterm war chests. Still, though, it's not like public opinion often ways heavily on the minds of the court -- they are not elected, after all, and do not face the perils of the election cycle very much. In fact, this puts much, much more pressure on the opposition's comrades in the presidential and congressional seats to come together and act. Pressure which may not be welcome ahead of said midterms...
It's a big assumption that it's an old draft. It could also be the last draft circulated, and that everything since has been on concurrences or minority opinions.
Someone really doesn't like that US for once stand united (in support for Ukraine).
That someone pulled some strings to leak (or "leak", has it been confirmed yet?) this document.
I.O.W. a sign that Gerasimov and his ideas aren't completely dead, yet.
(I'm no specialist, this just struck me today as I realized none of the Americans I follow at Twitter care about the ongoing genocide in Europe anymore.)
However, I submit that a supporter of the ruling actually has a smart reason to release it early, namely that it's better for them to let any possible backlash calm down before the midterm elections.
If the leaker is someone who is outraged by the decision, why didn't they leak it in February when it was first circulated? Why wait until now?
Also, keep in mind that the final decision was going to be made public in June, several months before the midterm elections. That's next month -- the outrage was going to happen soon enough. Why jump the gun at such a late date, so close to when the decision was going to be public anyway?
It's a very convincing argument, if you are referring to only this article then try it re-writtern here -
https://mobile.twitter.com/akapczynski/status/15214945538779...
Now that anyone can diff the final version it's very hard to change the draft in a lot of ways.
The best argument against this theory is that's it's too logical and people are not logical. It took a day for the hive mind to think of this.
Pressure and vengeance don't make sense, but nor do people.
Also, the conclusion of the article is that there's basically no metadata in this PDF. This article doesn't mention that it was created something like 7 minutes before the Politico story ran. It's going to be pretty hard to work that fact into any scenario where Politico didn't scan a paper document themselves or have someone assist them in doing so as I don't think they wrote the article in 7 minutes.
More likely is that they were waiting for someone to help them scrub the info from it and they hit the publish button on an already prepared article right after they got the file.
Have you consider grasping at different straws?
there is a group of people susceptible to the idea of trying to tie them all together
and there are opportunities to lead those kind of people on too
I mainly caution against being one of the people susceptible to connecting unrelated strings, and providing an alternate framework on how random things happen in reality
OTOH, if I were motivated to prevent this from affecting the midterms, I'd want it out as soon as possible to let people blow off their steam and for the news cycle to move onto other issues before the campaign season begins again.
Although support for late term abortions is quite low, support for Roe v. Wade itself is quite high (insofar as that it legalizes abortion, in general). As an election season issue, overturning Roe v. Wade hurts the republicans more than it helps the democrats.
>Justices understand that they don’t always end up in the majority. Clerks rely on these jobs as a calling card for the rest of their careers. To be exposed as a leaker would amount to setting that future career on fire. It’s not worth the risk.
To Matthew Broderick, certainly, this risk isn't worth it. To a woman or minority who is genuinely afraid of the consequences for either themselves or can immediately put themselves in the shoes of those who it could harm? I don't know. Maybe it is worth it if they think that public outcry could sway a justice, particularly one who has previously and recently talked about it being settled precedent even if it may come at the cost of her career.
That is awfully optimistic, considering the track record of impeachment in general , and the fact that only one justice has ever faced impeachment and it was over 200 years ago. Not to mention, leaks (as pointed out by the author of this post) are not new, nor are draft opinions protected by any sort of law or classification that would warrant impeachment (that I am aware of, happy to be corrected on this point).
>Furthermore there's almost no reason for any justice to do such a thing.
Some plausible reasoning has been posited here and elsewhere.
My conclusion wasn't that a Justice leaked the document. My conclusion was that is optimistic to think they would be successfully impeached if it ends up being a Justice. What you've written has not convinced me otherwise.
Surely in the previous 200 years, some Justice has done something of similar unbecoming-ness, and yet a successful impeachment of a Justice has never happened.
If something is surely true, then you can surely point to an example of it.
If it makes you happy, I can edit the word "surely" to "moderately probable"?
Furthermore your use of the term "successfully impeached" suggests that you don't understand the meaning of the term, which is fine since it's actually a commonly misunderstood legal term that most people confuse with conviction, but it's a further indication that your speculation on this matter is poorly informed. There is no such thing as a successful impeachment anymore than there is a successful trial, they are both processes rather than outcomes.
A party can be successful at trial, but note here that in any given trial at least one of the two parties will be successful so it makes no sense to use "successful trial" to describe the trial itself, it only makes sense to describe one of the two parties as being successful, which is not how OP used that term.
The closest thing OP could mean by "successful impeachment" is that the judge would be convicted. I am dismissive of OP's use of this word because it's a common misunderstanding of what an impeachment is. An impeachment is not a conviction and I am not claiming that a conviction would be the outcome of an impeachment. That misunderstanding is materially important to the point being made as well as an indication that OP is likely misinformed on this subject (especially when combined with the fact that he has stated he has no evidence to support to his assertion and has no desire to seek any evidence). I don't think it's unreasonable to call someone out on a statement they are sure of when they have no evidence for that assertion and make mistakes of this kind.
The honest truth is, though, that impeachment simply isn't going to happen. If a conservative leaked, essentially no Republican will vote to convict, and if a liberal essentially no Democrat. Impeachment is fundamentally a political process, the issue is partisan, and neither side has a sufficient supermajority. The facts are irrelevant, even if you think a leak is impeachable (which I don't, FWIW).
This seems naive. If Trump can make it past 2 impeachments I have no faith that a Justice would be impeached also not at all clear that this is even impeachable.
What is your understanding of what an impeachment is?
I'm not understanding - these men aren't as upset as biological women are?
The essential oil of the plant that Nirvana sang about is highly toxic. The tea is relatively safe. My friend used a 3-prong approach to inducing her period, not just the tea.
This tweet makes the case that the leaker was probably Justice Bryer's clerk: https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/15216859689396305...
I am a bit surprised that Justice Bryer's clerk is allowed to have a LinkedIn, though. An old classmate of mine clerked for a justice on the Supreme Court of California, and they had to disable all their social media by policy.
I don't think the sort of organizations Chamberlain affiliates with are the sort who'd object to premature and dangerous behavior, as long as it targets the right people: https://fedsoc.org/contributors/will-chamberlain
Please stop sharing nonsense like this, because those people will get death threats as a result of their LinkedIn profile being shared in this context. The tweet isn't "making a case"; it's wild speculation about someone he just looked up on LinkedIn. The whole "case" being made here is that this particular clerk is passionate about abortion rights, and she has some second degree connection to the Politico journalist who published the leaked documents. That's it. That is the flimsiest case I've ever heard in my life. That's a high school gossip level evidence right there.