Confidence in U.S. Supreme Court Sinks to Historic Low
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
In reality, Roe was the left’s Lochner. A pure exercise of judicial law making that could not point to anything in the Constitutional text or history to support a sweeping rule. It’s a precedent that even folks in the left have taken to defending merely by virtue of its existence as such. It’s protection of second trimester abortions is out of step with public opinion, and out of step among the law in other civilized nations.
Not all liberal precedents are like that. In fact most aren’t. There’s a huge difference between Brown and Loving and Obergefell and Roe both legally and in how the relevant issues have played out in domestic and international politics. Nonetheless, it will make political hay to act like overturning Roe will unleash the floodgates of rolling back everything else. Never mind the fact that, even though Roe was so vulnerable from the very beginning, it took conservatives 50 years of single-minded effort to overturn it.
There’s a spectrum of opinions among legal conservatives on many decisions. Kennedy wrote Obergefell and Gorsuch wrote Bostock. But no legal conservative thinks that Roe was correctly decided and a fair number of legal liberals don’t either. (Alito quotes a liberal legal scholar in this opinion who said of Roe at the time that it wasn’t Constitutional law and didn’t even try to be.)
Because commenting on other cases is generally not something the supreme court finds acceptable, heavily preferring to only comment on the questions directly before them.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/roe-v-...
You don’t have to agree with overturning Roe, but that’s no excuse for third-world country style rhetoric. As a matter of legal process, overruling Roe is unremarkable and consistent with longstanding principles of the kinds of cases that can be overruled notwithstanding stare decisis.
If the law doesn’t produce an answer through legal reasoning, then that means the public needs to decide. Having the supremes sit as a moral Guardian Council isn’t how it’s supposed to work.
The more things differ...
That legal tidal wave could very well come.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/roe-v-...
It has nothing to do with "benevolence," but Roe being uniquely vulnerable in that its shortcomings as a legal decision made it a target even for the quarter of the GOP that disagrees with the party line on abortion.
> This is not the pattern we are seeing, or else explain the other religion-related decisions.
The explanation is that the Establishment Clause precedent is the next weakest after Roe. The U.S. was founded on religious pluralism, not French-style secularism. The absence of religious belief is, from the Constitutional perspective is not "neutral" but instead just another belief system. Excluding religious organizations and schools from public funding is plainly unconstitutional.
This is neither controversial in the US (a country where 2/3 of people disagree with the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer), or most other countries. Religious schools can get public funding in Sweden. Why not the US?
> More importantly Roe was universally accepted as real.
A real what?
Actively playing favorites with a religion is not religious pluralism. Besides reality-wise how would all the fundamentalist stance about what America founded on, and how this and that should be interpreted based on that is useful if the country can't serve it's people. Nobody back then really thought that the country should not adapt to thrive.
Americans reasonably feel extremely strongly about this. When a perceived right is forcefully taken away by one's state, the legal argument for or against the federal mechanism that was preventing that takes a back seat, to put it mildly.
If you are against "If we say so" rule of government, you might like this supreme court opinion.
There is plenty of precedent for overruling constitutional decisions. From a legal perspective this is not new, see Brown v Board overruling Plessy v Ferg.
There’s nothing in the Constitution that comports with this philosophy. You can’t “see” gay conversion therapy or whatever physical characteristic such therapy aims to target, and yet it’s eminently reasonable (and most would agree Constitutional) for State legislatures to outlaw its practice.
I’m as pro-choice as anyone else, but it’s pretty clear that the Constitution has always been mum on the subject. Sometimes things can be good and important, but not currently a Constitutional right.
That's exactly the point; and those "oh so many things" are left to the States.
> Perhaps a constitutional amendment that gives people their privacy back is in order?
Perhaps, I'd be supportive of something like that!
> "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
This just means that the absence of an enumerated right doesn't imply that the right is absent by default. The fact that the Constitution doesn't outline a right to drive a car (or consume heroin) doesn't mean that driving a car or consuming heroin is by default illegal; it's just left to the States (and the people) to decide what to do with those things. But (importantly), just because the Constitution doesn't outline a right to consume heroin, the 9th Amendment does not confer a Constitutional right to consume heroin — that would be absurd. It's still something that can be decided upon by the legislatures, and if a legislature decided to outlaw the consumption of heroin, you can't point to the Constitution to invalidate such laws.
> It stands to reason (in Roe) that, unless someone's religion (separation of church and state?) believes a life begins before birth, the right of a woman's privacy and control of her own life and happiness is primary.
I agree with the normative assessment that the right of a woman's privacy and control of her own life/happiness is primary (at least up to a certain point in the pregnancy); I'm pro-choice. That said, the fact that people may use their own religious views to come to a different conclusion and pass laws to that effect is NOT a violation of the separation of church and state. All "separation of church and state" means is that there's no official state religion, and policymaking isn't delegated to the clergy without democratic input — that's it.
To illustrate with an example, it doesn't really matter that (historically) the majority of people derived their beliefs on the morality of assault/murder from the Ten Commandments, the fact that murder is illegal is not a violation of the separation of church and state.
> Any other logic, as in Dobbs, is superseding her right to privacy, life, and happiness, with the religious belief in the life of an unborn child.
Except this belief is not exclusively religious. There are plenty of atheists that are pro-life, and similarly believe that (at least after a certain point of a pregnancy) the right of the unborn child should be balanced with the right of the mother.
If the so-called "religious zealots" were duly elected through free and fair democratic process, then yes absolutely. The "separation of Church and State" does not mean "secularism", it means religious pluralism, with no favorites for a particular religion. The absence of religious belief is not "neutral" but instead just another belief system, and all belief systems are treated equally. This is why we don't administer religious tests to enter office, which allows atheists to enter office, but (importantly) also allows religious people to enter office regardless of their faith. All that said, the Constitution disallows religious zealots from explicitly codifying religious scripture into the legal process or from establishing a state religion.
> What if Afghanistan were a state?
Afghanistan's problems stem from 1) the fact their religious zealots have taken over the country by force rather than via free and fair elections and 2) the fact that they have an officially established state religion that explicitly operates on Sharia law.
> Would our nation allow them to stone harlots, and behead adulterers?
It would not, but that's not because of some abstract commitment to secularism, but because that would likely violate the 8th Amendment which proscribes cruel and unusual punishments. In fact, the Constitution likely permits States from outlawing adultery if their citizens so desire. One might choose to support such laws because they think "cheating is bad", but it doesn't matter which book made them think that "cheating is bad". The Constitution places guard rails on which human rights may not be violated — and unfortunately abortion isn't one of those human rights enshrined in the Constitution.
> Let's face it: The right of women to privacy, life, and happiness runs directly afoul of a religious belief (not shared by all religions, not even by Christianity, Judaism, or the bible, only Christianists) in the theoretical life of unborn children. Who but the mother is best suited to choose the right balance of rights?
Again, one's opinion on how society should choose the right balance of rights is a function of the core belief system they operate off of. One may derive their belief system from secular sources, like reading Harry Potter as a child or being raised a particular way, or from religious sources like the Bible or the Quran. "Separation of church and state" does not mean that the government cannot regulate behavior based on religious beliefs, it just means that the State cannot establish a state religion.
In Islam, gambling is a sin, and one may choose to personally vote to outlaw gambling because they are Muslim, but that doesn't mean that outlawing gambling is a violate of "separation of Church and State". It doesn't matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible.
As it relates to abortion, yes you're correct that the majority of pro-lifers are religious, and likely derive their views on abortion from non-secular belief systems, but there are also many secular pro-lifers (https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0018333/), even Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim pro-lifers (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...). Even though they're in the minority among their respective groups, they apply some belief system to derive their moral views, and then use those moral views while participating in democracy. Again, it does not matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible. Conversely, if one's religious beliefs were that "free speech is bad", and they attempted to vote to regulate speech based off of their personal beliefs, the Constitution would invalidate any laws that came about that way because the end result is not permissible by the Bill of Rights.
I personally agree with you that the mother is best suited to choose the balance of rights, but that's because I (probably) derive my morals off of a similar set of core beliefs as you do, and therefore we are able to agree on the issue of abortion. The fact that this is not true for everybody is not a violation of "separation of Church and State", and is to be expected in a religiously pluralistic country.
To be clear, the “right” only came into existence because the Supreme Court in the 1970s conjured it out of thin air. Several other high courts in advanced democracies took up the abortion question around that time. None found a legal right to abortion. Most found it to be an issue for the legislature. Germany found abortion to violate the Basic Law’s Right to Life (and that precedent still stands!)
But if abortion were truly a violation of law (not to speak of the Basic Law) it would necessarily open the perpetrator to acts of self-defense (or self-defense of others, not sure about the English phrase).
But our Constitution Court specifically ruled that "other-defense" is not applicable, even when the abortion violates the 12 week limit.
It's just as political here as over there in America. And the legislative and courts are also muddling through.
Side note: on the very same day Roe v. Wade was overturned the German parliament legalized advertising for/informing about abortions (depending on who you ask).
With modern polarization, "confidence" actually seems to mean "confidence I'll get the result I want from it" (e.g. how ideologically aligned it is to me).
If laws were changed due to new information and were consistent with other laws regulating things like shutting down life support for brain dead adults when compared to abortion, I doubt the SCOTUS would have lost the confidence of the nation.
This Supreme Court is blatantly corrupt.
>Americans' confidence in the court has dropped sharply over the past year and reached a new low in Gallup's nearly 50-year trend. Twenty-five percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court, down from 36% a year ago and five percentage points lower than the previous low recorded in 2014.
The Gallup poll shows pretty much that?
> Americans' confidence in the court has dropped sharply over the past year and reached a new low in Gallup's nearly 50-year trend. Twenty-five percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court, down from 36% a year ago and five percentage points lower than the previous low recorded in 2014.