It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar.
While I knew that the left would wax apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I was fully aware that Amanda Marcotte would go off the deep end far worse than some of the others. Miss Marcotte wrote:
As many who watch the Supreme Court closely suspected, it now appears all but certain that the draft decision was probably leaked by a conservative trying to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts into joining the majority opinion. That pressure, if that’s what it was, worked.
This is factually untrue. From the conclusion of the Syllabus in the Supreme Court’s release of the decision, found on page 8 of the document:
ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed concurring opinions. ROBERTS, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., filed a dissenting opinion.
Translation: while the vote to reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals, 945 F. 3d 265, was 6-3, the Chief Justice did not join with the majority opinion, but wrote separately. While Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh also filed separate, concurring opinions, they signed onto Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion. One thing is clear: Miss Marcotte did not actually read, at least not carefully, the actual decision.
It is also that, of the six justices who voted to uphold abortion bans, only one — Justice Clarence Thomas — was appointed by a president who won the majority of the vote. Both Trump and Bush obtained the White House, and the ability to nominate justices, because of the archaic electoral college system that overweighs the votes of rural whites and marginalizes the majority of Americans who support reproductive rights.
Again, this is factually untrue. While the younger George Bush received fewer popular votes than Vice President Al Gore in 2000, he not only won the popular vote in 2004, 62,040,610 to 59,028,444 for Senator John Kerry (D-M), but with a 50.7% to 48.3% margin, he won an absolute majority of all votes cast. John Roberts was appointed by the younger President Bush on July 19, 2005, which was in Mr Bush’s second term. Justice Alito was nominated on October 31, 2005, also during the President’s second term.
To compound the injustice of this, one of the Trump-nominated judges, Justice Neil Gorsuch, has no right to sit in his seat. He is only there because Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., illegally used his power as then-Senate Majority Leader to refuse to hold hearings for then-President Barack Obama’s 2020 nominee to the court, Merrick Garland.
“Illegally used”? I wonder: did Miss Marcotte ever claim that Senate Majority Leader Ton Daschle (D-SC) was “illegally us(ing)” his authority over the Senate’s schedule to deny votes to several of President Bush’s lower court nominees, stating that if they did not have the support of at least 60 members, the number required to break a filibuster, he would not allow a vote at all?
Of course, there is no law which compels the Senate to vote on any particular nomination. The Constitution, in Article I, Section 5, specifies that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”
Instead, in a direct violation of his constitutional duties, McConnell held the seat open for a year. All so Republicans could install someone who could be counted on to ram through endless amounts of reactionary policies rejected by the American majority that wants a clean environment, sensible gun safety regulations, fair labor laws, and human rights.
Senator McConnell took a real gamble, a gamble that the Republican nominee would win the 2016 election. At the time he did this, Donald Trump was surging and leading in the Republican primaries, and all of the polls had him losing against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In refusing to allow Mr Garland to be confirmed, he was gambling that the (supposedly) more moderate Merrick Garland wouldn’t be replaced by a flaming leftist appointed by Mrs Clinton. We got lucky, and Mr Trump defeated Mrs Clinton.
And there’s no sign that the restlessness is going away. In his concurring opinion on Dobbs, Thomas openly invites lawsuits to challenge “all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” i.e. the decisions that secured the right to use birth control, the right to have sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of your home, and the right to marry someone of the same sex.
It is true that Justice Thomas has long been an opponent of the concept of “substantive due process,” not that Miss Marcotte has any flaming idea what substantive due process actually means, but it is also true that none of the other Justices joined Mr Thomas’ concurring opinion.
Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey themselves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852; see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently different from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procreation”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.
Miss Marcotte has long claimed that evil reich wing conservatives want to take away the right to use contraception, but when she tried to document this in her book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, the most up with which she could come is Quiverfull, a small sect about which Wikipedia said, “One 2006 estimate put the number of families which subscribe to this philosophy as ranging from ‘the thousands to the low tens of thousands’.”
Even taking the extreme position of Miss Marcotte that we evil reich wing conservatives want to ban contraception, it fails the logic test: while we might want our wives to bear us as many strong, fine sons as possible, we really don’t want our mistresses to get knocked up and cause us problems, or cost us child support.
Of course, if our mistresses are married to other men, we do want to get them pregnant, so other, weaker men will have to pay to rear our progeny. 🙂
Is there a sarcasm tag for the previous two paragraphs?
Of course, the author had absolutely no problem with vaccine mandates for COVID-19.
As I have said many times before, I am opposed to capital punishment. We should not kill anyone unless it is absolutely necessary, and if we have a prisoner securely and permanently confined, to the point he is unable to resist his execution, then he is sufficiently helpless enough that it is no longer necessary to kill him.
It can get amusing when the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Examiner decides to appeal to His Holiness Pope Francis to get rid of a Catholic Archbishop who is actually, you know, Catholic!