Worries in the New Yorker about what a "brazen conservative majority" on SCOTUS would produce.
I for one doubt that Donald J. Trump, of all people, is hot to use this opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump has affairs with porn stars. If the Left had succeeded in impeaching and removing him from office, and Mike Pence was picking the next Justice, then I'd think that overturning Roe was a priority. But c'mon. Donald Trump is not the guy who is going to impose a chaste sexual morality on the United States.
Trump, also, was openly pro-gay-marriage well before Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were. Like 2005 earlier -- ask the NYT.
Conservatives of all stripes are glad to have Trump rather than Clinton picking the next SCOTUS justice, but not because we expect an activist. I don't even want an activist. I want an originalist, textualist Justice who will attempt to understand what the ratifiers of the Constitution or its amendments intended to enact, rather than attempting to impose a meaning that the Justice might prefer. I want someone who will be very disciplined about that, even though that means there are cases -- 16th Amendment cases, for example -- where the Constitution does not say what I would wish it might say.
The reason I want that is the same reason I always wanted it. We can change the Constitution through Article V processes, but those require a large degree of consensus. Attaining that degree of consensus before altering the basic law of the nation means that the result is stable. Imposing rapid, radical changes on society without that degree of consensus results in the instability and anger that we see in our politics today.
That is not to say that strictly interpreting the Constitution might not produce radical changes in and of itself, especially where the 10th Amendment is concerned. Those changes will push power down to the people in the States, though. That means that liberals will be able to live as they wish in many states, especially the highly populous ones they tend to dominate. It will protect their interests where they tend to live; and those who do not live there now are free to move.
Be at ease, liberals. It won't be that bad.
9 comments:
Roe is a fundraising tactic. It's also a strategic shout-out to Sens Collins, Murkowski, and that other old prune (R) that they better be ready to vote against ANY Trump nominee, especially that Catholicwomanthreat!!!!
My guess is that Trump doesn't care much about Roe v. Wade one way or another, and will pick a candidate who hasn't let himself be tied down publicly on that issue. He's a realist, and will focus on a candidate who won't get a "no" vote from either the Collins/Murkowsky camp or the handful of vulnerable D senators running in R states. But it will be a candidate from the vetted list, which will mean some kind of originalist. My guess would be that whoever is seated will be open to restrictions on things on the crazy fringe, like very late-term abortions, but less likely to interfere in what most voting Americans think of as fuzzy zygote territory. In other words, some deference to local opinion and some willingness to let states define the grayer areas.
I for one doubt that Donald J. Trump, of all people, is hot to use this opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump has affairs with porn stars.
I used a similar argument shortly after the 2016 election when I re-assured a worried adult son of a friend about birth control. I reminded him that the one thing we were pretty sure we knew about Mr. Trump was that he liked to have sex with lots of women. Therefore, he was the last person on earth who was going to make birth control unavailable. I don't know if I convinced the young man but I did make him laugh so I count that as a win.
It will be a tragedy for them: the arc of history will be thwarted, the inevitable march of progress will be shown evitable, people might even come to their senses and realize that progress can be defined in more than one way. And where would we be then?
That means that liberals will be able to live as they wish in many states, especially the highly populous ones they tend to dominate. It will protect their interests where they tend to live; and those who do not live there now are free to move.
Like the old saw about the Puritains, that they lived with the fear that somewhere someone was having fun, so too do liberals fear that someone somewhere is thinking thoughts and pursing a lifestyle they would like to forbid. Getting to impose their beliefs within the jurisdictions they control doesn't help since people living successful and fulfilling lives without them are example to the rest of the polity that it doesn't have to be that way, and causes them to resist liberal control.
Don Surber has written up a generic editorial in advance:
"The Senate Must Reject This Monster
"President Trump -- a vain, deranged, and impulsive man elected by Russia and not a majority of Americans -- has nominated the worst judicial candidate since Roger Brooke Taney, the chief justice who authored the Dred Scott decision. [Nominee's name] may be worse. Not only does [he or she] view African-Americans as chattel, but women as second-class citizens! . . ."
Christopher B:
I have heard some plausible arguments that progressive politics don't admit of an alternative. It's easy for me to say "Sure, go have higher taxes in return for more government 'services' if you want them. I'm happy to do without." But then businesses can move to where lower taxes are, and thus 'dodge' the taxes that the progressives 'need' to pay for the 'services' they insist are necessary -- yay, even rights. Things like free housing, free health care, free college, these things are being blocked by people like me living in jurisdictions with lower taxes. (Though my taxes are not nearly as low as I'd like them to be.)
Tex:
It's telling that it's so easy to do that. We could play bingo with the lines from that thing once the confirmation hearing comes up.
As expected, we're starting to hear that Coney Barrett belongs to a scary cult.
*Shock*
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