US Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade [pdf]
supremecourt.gov
supremecourt.gov
This decision overturns this whole 50-year old framework. Decisions based on 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause are now open for banning contraception, banning interracial relationships, family relationships, right to intimacy (sodomy laws), the right to personal control of medical treatment. It will even have data collection limit consequences.
Some states are even more radical than current SCOTUS. They have sodomy laws considered invalid that can be activated. How Dismantling Roe Puts Interracial Marriage at Risk https://www.aclu.org/podcast/how-dismantling-roe-puts-interr...
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[1]: The idea of unenumerated rights is clear and sound. The Ninth Amendment suggests that the rights enumerated in the Constitution do not exhaust “others retained by the people.”
Basically...legislating from the Bench. This has no place in constitutional jurisprudence.
Pretty much as Newton's laws existed before Newton, the "rights" exist regardless of the laws (so is the philosophy underlying Common Law). The legislature can "discover" these laws, or — failing that — a judge can.
The Continental law is based on another philosophy — you have no rights except the ones that are explicitly given to you by law, and the only way to have more rights passes through the legislature. There are many countries that employ Continental law, but the US is not one of them.
Uhm, no — “precedent” is a judicial decision which may not be grounded on any text whatsoever. It’s a common thing in Common law, and of course it doesn’t exist in Continental law.
Well when your job is to interpret the constitution, it should be grounded on the text. That's why there are textualist who disagree with your interpretation of the role of the court. It is supposed to be the foundation.
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This country couldn't pass a constitutional amendment making spam calls and email illegal. And didn't pass an equality amendment making women equal.
There is no prior example of a right being conferred and then taken away like this. That the Court now has a 25% approval rating following this past week, which rivals that of Congress, it is deeply delegitimizing to representative democracy that the minority keeps making the rules, and the majority keeps having to acquiesce, per the rules.
In Lincoln's 1st inaugural address he pointed out that in all constitutional disputes, either the majority or minority must acquiesce, or the government ceases. The majority can't be expected to suck it up all the time, it's just too obvious we don't have anything approximating a representative democracy so what's the incentive to acquiesce?
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So if a right is not explicitly enumerated, it still exists and is retained by the people, NOT the States, the PEOPLE! A right to privacy, to control ones own body is fundamental to freedom.
Read the Thomas concurrence, lots more individual freedoms are going to be killed off by these theocratic fascists on the court.
"The largely limitless reach of the dissenters’ standard is illustrated by the way they apply it here. First, if the “long sweep of history” imposes any restraint on the recognition of unenumerated rights, then Roe was surely wrong, since abortion was never allowed (except to save the life of the mother) in a majority of States for over 100 years before that decision was handed down. Second, it is impossible to defend Roe based on prior precedent because all of the precedents Roe cited, including Griswold and Eisenstadt, were critically different for a reason that we have explained: None of those cases involved the destruction of what Roe called “potential life.”"
For reference: Obergefell allowed equal-marriage, Lawrence decriminalised sodomy, and Griswold decriminalised buying contraceptives.
Wouldn't the right of people to marry someone of any race be assured under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment?
(It's all bullshit! The court will rule ideologically how they want, regardless of precedent.)
Regardless, Loving v Virginia (1967) was decided by unanimous decision--and that's back in the 60's--just three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I don't know of anyone seriously suggesting that the holding in Loving is in jeopardy today; it's literally the direct application of the 14th Amendment.
The parent asked why equal protection is not sufficient to protect interracial marriage. I answered. You don't like the answers, either:
a) Make a legal argument. To the extent you agree with this current decision, "it's old" lends it strength. But "it's old" isn't actually a legal argument, despite what the Supreme Court thinks. (That's how you know their purported theories of jurisprudence are bullshit.)
b) Make a real moral argument not rooted in made-up shit like textualism - and admit moral arguments for abortion rather than hiding behind "this is just jurisprudence."
I’ve thought a lot about this, and it does make sense for it to be up to each individual state. I don’t like it, but it’s in line with the principles that the country was founded on.
It’s strange suddenly waking up one day and not being able to do a thing that you used to have an option to do.
It might be better for the country if those principles were applied to other questions, like "How should a militia be regulated?" and "Which plants can adults consume?". Unfortunately the loudest proponents of states' rights don't seem to think the principles should go quite that far.
And, of course, the rights that they always take issue with are when the federal government is permissive with them. Apparently, in some strange backwards logic, the federal government granting you a right is tyrrany, but the state taking it away from you is not.
My point was that the Constitution might (or maybe just should) allow individual states to apply their own regulations to the militia within their jurisdiction, beyond the minimal Constitutional requirement/justification that the militia be readily functional.
The primary motivation for states' rights seems to be not to actually let states decide, but to enact policies at the broadest possible level they can do so.
Also, Mike Pence is already calling for a national abortion ban. So much for the party of 'states rights'.
There is a compromise somewhere, but it’s a very difficult negotiation.
Check out Article 1 Section 8 of the United States Constitution, which enumerates the primary law-making jurisdictions of Congress.
https://twitter.com/MZanona/status/1540363376584495104
They also plan on making it illegal to travel to states where abortion will be legal for the purposes of receiving one.
First of all as a wedge issue there's a certain percentage of independent voters who wouldn't allow that to happen.
Second there are Republicans who support abortion and make that a public stand.
One easy example, the Trump EPA attempted to ban states from setting their own fuel economy standards via an administrative ruling: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/trump-administration-announ.... It also went further banning other states from adopting California's standards for vehicles by unilaterally deciding that emissions rules can't apply to greenhouse gases that are emitted from cars....
Oh, no, not an uproar
And perhaps hopeful; it shows a large fraction of Republicans and right-leaning independents supporting keeping abortion legal.
Many believe, myself included, that women should have the right to control their own bodies, and access to abortions is part of that right. You don't leave rights up to the states. Rights are supposed to be guaranteed at all levels of government.
I can see how, if you are absolutely convinced that the unborn human is a human just the same as anyone walking on the street, you'd mirror the argument you made and say, you don't leave it up to the states to protect the lives of the unborn humans, and ban abortions.
I'm not taking a side here btw. I feel like the pro-life vs. pro-choice argument is low on arguments targeting the opposite side, only more and more rallying its own supporters.
Its like being against slavery. You could say, what's that to anyone, if you're against slavery then dont own slaves but don't stop others. And yet it's reasonable to be against other people enslaving others.
Your comment suggests you think abortion is "obviously" ok and perhaps you'd agree that slavery is "obviously wrong and different". Perhaps because enslaved people are "obviously" humans with rights and fetuses are "obviously" not. I don't know of course but it seems like a reasonable guess.
But so long as the debate is about what people hold as obvious and naturally correct, all you get is more polarisation.
If you question whether or not a slave is a person, then I don't know what to tell you.
https://www.liveaction.org/news/steve-jobs-adoption-connecte...
It is the same argument used to justify any opinion without proof
[1] "Multiverse" vs. fine tuned universe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe
[2] "Choice" vs. responsibility: https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
Our minds can justify anything
[3] "Interpreter" mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31737462
You offered an opinion without proof, which is that Apple wouldn't exist. This is why these "debates" are so unproductive. Both sides have unfalsifiable positions.
Seems strange that most pro-abortion advocates would probably be in favor of tenants rights to protect them from being evicted from a rented house but are fine with a living human being lethally evicted from a womb as long as the “owner” says so.
In both cases there are two humans, both of which have rights and whose interests have to be balanced - I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend otherwise. One might also want to consider other situations where humans have decided other people are “not really” human in order to justify doing terrible things to them, including killing them. In every situation I can think of, that thinking was wrong - seems unlikely that abortion is an exception somehow.
Second, why start defining someone a human at conception? Isn’t birth control depriving a possible person of their rights too?
I won't argue with your belief, but please share your opinion (if you don't mind, of course) on this: whether a homicide of a woman and a homicide of a pregnant woman should receive the same punishment?
The same argument was made about slavery, but a large and powerful subset of the country decided that slavery was not tolerable even in neighboring states. I don't see a reason that forcing a woman to expose her medical records to the government or forcing her to carry a baby (at the risk of her own life) is not on similar moral ground.
> I don’t like it, but it’s in line with the principles that the country was founded on.
The country was also founded on disenfranchising women and minorities, and it's deeply undemocratic in the way that land votes rather than people.
The founders strongly urged the country to allow laws to evolve and to amend the Constitution. That is also a "founding principle".
And they didn't do it through the Supreme Court, but through an amendment. If abortion is a right then it should be passed as an amendment declaring it as a right.
Why isn’t my bodily autonomy my right?
Is there a constitutional amendment that recognizes the right to a vasectomy or appendectomy?
Why should anyone but myself have any say in what I do with my body?
Having different laws for different individual people seems like a really bad idea though.
I guess the former slave owners of Missouri could somewhat share your sentiment.
>> Remember HN's rules of etiquette <<
If you want to engage using different norms, there are many different places on the internet to do that.
It's almost mind-blowing considering I've spent my whole life observing the push to federalize everything: Healthcare, College, UBI, Transportation, Wages, Firearms, Infrastructure, etc...
This is what I was hinting at. The marketed solution to Americans is that local government is always bad and we need a single government entity to rule universally.
By removing the federal governments negative power, the states have de facto been given a positive one to decide whether people receive abortions, rather than people deciding themselves if they will get abortions.
But the power to ban abortions has not been moved from the Federal government to States, because the Federal government never had that power to begin with.
Rather the power to decide to have an abortion has been moved from the individual to the state.
This takes rights from people and gives it to individual States.
And that being Progressive is even a pre-requisite for voting for abortion rights.
Moreover that voting is a solution to anything. As an independent, I find both parties particularly despicable. And it doesn't matter what I vote for, since with the Electoral system my vote doesn't count, and due the closed primary system and dominance of one party statistically, my vote doesn't count for local elections. Our ballot only has one party on it ranging from mayoral to city council to judge and DA elections.
Blaming non-voters for all the bad decisions of government is a scapegoat.
The Supreme Court is an unelected political entity. Can this be fixed?
The difference with recent rulings is that they've abandoned any pretense of political independence or legitimacy.
To be clear I am very moderate on abortion, I believe in the first trimester. But this is a states right issue and is a made up constitutional right.
Roe was that. Dobbs is not.
Of course the bigger problem according to this perspective is that there are many more layers of indirection before it even comes to the point where "your" elected representative nominates a judge. Some of them are more prone to "shaping" than others (e.g. via gerrymandering, disenfrachisement, voter suppression in all its forms) but the goal is generally to generate "favorable" election results regardless of what the people currently want.
Not really. The Senate and possibly House are expected to flip this fall. Our supreme court is taking a crack at reducing civil liberties and empowering conservative culture war positions. Precedent doesn't matter apparently. Only literal, conservative-justice interpretations of the constitution matter now. They're unqualified and unfit to run our nation's highest court. Radical and idealogical. Libertarians should be angry about this development of encroachment upon personal liberty and rights.
As I assume you aren't asking for ways to bring about either of those scenarios in ways that would incur legal issues, the more appropriate answer is that the government can appoint additional judges, which I think is called "packing". Right now the general consensus among Democrats seems to be that they don't want to do it because it would set a precedent Republicans could exploit, although history has shown that the Republicans don't require precedents to "play dirty" (e.g. while Obama refused to appoint a replacement judge because he was on his way out of his second term, Republicans happily appointed replacement judges when Trump was on his way out, not to mention that a significant number of Republicans supported the claim that Biden "stole the election" and Trump was the real winner).
If you're asking for a systemic long-term solution: no, it can't be fixed. The problem is that the Supreme Court lacks a clear mission statement and effectively acts to reinforce whichever party is in power at the time. The current SCOTUS majority leading to these decisions are "constitutional originalists". While you can argue that this is bad (or that this is still relying on interpretation and inferrences), it's impossible to say that this is wrong because it's an entirely valid interpretation of what the SCOTUS is for.
If you want to "fix" the SCOTUS because it's undemocratic, the problem is that it's only one of many aspects of the structure of US government that's undemocratic. The system was never meant to allow all people to equally influence the government. The system exists as much to curtail the power of the ruling politicians as to curtail the direct power of the people.
In other words SCOTUS isn't broken, you just don't like the political system itself. That's fine, but it requires a different framing in order to understand your goals and options.
They can be impeached by congress.
What are you talking about? I'm just pointing out that retirement and death are not the sole means of leaving the bench.
Seems a fair reason for the house to conduct an investigation to decide whether to send the matter to the senate for trial. Note none of that actually depends on Gore having won the vote, BTW.
I'd also like to know more about said justice's wife's role in the last election and if she involved her husband in any way to prepare for yet another Supreme Court intervention.
Plenty of discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258
The USA are regressing
You can't conflate both things .
Abortions on the 14th amendment.
Now it's up to the states (people) to decide.
With same logic the right to bear arms doesn't mean all kind of arms.
And the people are precisely those who are now no longer allowed to decide if they get an abortion.
If the current decision that states may decide is not a restriction on privacy rights, then it would not be a restriction on gun rights if the same applied to the bearing of arms.
As for the 2nd amendment many people think it didn't necessarily refer to an individual right
No.
Nor is it likely (though many are suggesting it) that Congress can effectively change it by legislation.