SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

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datsunaholic
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by datsunaholic »

Gob wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 6:35 am


Nice bit of twisting there., I expect the elected representatives of a country to decide what laws should be passed, and judges to make their decisions based on those laws.
That's not the purpose of the Supreme Court.

The purpose of the Supreme Court is to determine if laws passed by Congress (or by States when the laws end up in federal legal territory) are constitutional, and then only if it's been brought up TO the Supreme Court. Congress can't change the Constitution by itself, any Constitutional amendments must be ratified by 3/4 of the States to become law. The idea there being that a slim majority can't go about changing the Constitution at whim.

The problem is, the Supreme Court is appointed by politicians (by the President) and they are often chosen for their adherence to party doctrine. While Judges are supposed to be nonpartisan, in reality they are VERY partisan if the President and Congress are held by the same party when they are nominated and confirmed. With the court packed one way of the other, you get Supreme Court rulings that aren't based on constitutionality but party doctrine.
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Gob »

datsunaholic wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 10:34 am

The problem is, the Supreme Court is appointed by politicians (by the President) and they are often chosen for their adherence to party doctrine. While Judges are supposed to be nonpartisan, in reality they are VERY partisan if the President and Congress are held by the same party when they are nominated and confirmed. With the court packed one way of the other, you get Supreme Court rulings that aren't based on constitutionality but party doctrine.
So, yet have a body to oversee your laws being allowed by your constitution. Your constitution, a 200 yr old piece of legislation, must be adhered to by laws made in 2022. But, the body you use to make sure the laws you make are allowed is chosen by the people who make new laws, and they are allowed to chose people who they know will do their damndest to twist things to fit their partisan views.

Apart from the sheer waste of effort and expense involved in the exercise, does it not strike you as somewhat lunatic?
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by BoSoxGal »

The United States Supreme Court has operated very well for many decades - the politicization of the nomination process is a recent manifestation of just the last few (since Bork) and it is only with the confirmation of three Trump nominations in the last few years that things have gone upside down. A study of SCOTUS caselaw over time exhibits that the court for the most part has been an independent body as intended by the US Constitution. But that’s the past and going forward we can expect the supermajority of partisan hacks to churn out more and more questionable opinions.
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

What made sense 230 years ago just does not these days. The Second Amendment - the right to bear arms - was written in a time of flintlocks and blunderbusses. There is nothing in it to forbid individuals from owning nuclear weapons and I kind of wish that Gates or Bezos or Musk might seek to buy a few megatons for personal use and we could see how SCOTUS would handle that one.

The Founding Fathers (FFS as I call them) sensibly put in a procedure for altering the Constitution. Yes many of them were slave owners with primitive attitudes to women and non-white people (despite Jefferson's much-touted 'all men are created equal' thing from the DoI) but for its time it wasn't a bad start. But let's not forget that freedom of speech and freedom of religion and due process and cruel and unusual punishment and pleading the Fifth were NOT thought to be important enough to be in the original Constitution but were amendments in the first few years. I like to think - and maybe this is just me being an optimist - that the FFS did that deliberately: instead of rewriting the Constitution to insert a few words which probably should have been there in the first place they chose to point out how readily it could be changed by reasonable folks.

They could not have foreseen the extent to which people would become polarized or how one quarter of the states with maybe 15 million people could legally bully the other three quarters with over 300 million. (Maybe they did foresee it - that may be what prompted Franklin's famous remark about 'A republic - if you can keep it.'). The fact that the smaller states have way outsized power over the rest is enshrined in the composition of the Senate, the Electoral College and the amendment procedure and of course SCOTUS - which is itself a product of the EC and the Senate - sees no problem with this.

Regardless: the procedures eventually adopted for amending the Constitution were, in the end, a compromise intended to make it not too easy nor too difficult. The original (I can't find it now) suggestion for approving amendments was that a unanimous vote in all state legislatures was necessary for adopting a proposed amendment but at some point they watered down this procedure to the 3/4 and no longer unanimous now in force.

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

And of course no less than five of the current nine SCOTUS justices were appointed by Presidents who were elected by a MINORITY of the population. (In the interests of accuracy, Roberts and Alito were GW Bush appointees during his second term for which he was elected by a majority of the population but his first term was by minority vote.)

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Sue U »

We should not pretend that the Supreme Court has ever been anything but a political institution, considering that its first major opinion cementing its role as constitutional arbiter was in a highly partisan case of court packing: the outgoing administration attempted to appoint a slew of new federal judges specifically to frustrate the incoming administration. In seizing the power of judicial review and anchoring it to the letter of the constitution, John Marshall threaded a political needle to give the court legitimacy by declaring that the Federalists were right under the law as enacted, but giving the Republicans the result they wanted because the constitution as written limited the legislature's role in judicial affairs.

The perception of the court's "judicial activism" largely depends on whose ox is being gored in any given case, but it cannot be denied that the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs is a sweeping attack on principles of judicial restraint, precedent and stare decisis that had (at least nominally) constrained the court's previous decisions. What is particularly galling about this draft is that it pays lip service to those principles while eviscerating them to reach a blatantly partisan political result. This court has shed any veneer of neutrality (Roberts's "calling balls and strikes") in passing on the constitutional validity of laws.
Last edited by Sue U on Thu May 05, 2022 3:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Sue U »

Gob wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 11:47 am
So, yet have a body to oversee your laws being allowed by your constitution. Your constitution, a 200 yr old piece of legislation, must be adhered to by laws made in 2022. But, the body you use to make sure the laws you make are allowed is chosen by the people who make new laws, and they are allowed to chose people who they know will do their damndest to twist things to fit their partisan views.

Apart from the sheer waste of effort and expense involved in the exercise, does it not strike you as somewhat lunatic?
ex-khobar Andy wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 2:07 pm
But let's not forget that freedom of speech and freedom of religion and due process and cruel and unusual punishment and pleading the Fifth were NOT thought to be important enough to be in the original Constitution but were amendments in the first few years. I like to think - and maybe this is just me being an optimist - that the FFS did that deliberately: instead of rewriting the Constitution to insert a few words which probably should have been there in the first place they chose to point out how readily it could be changed by reasonable folks.

They could not have foreseen the extent to which people would become polarized or how one quarter of the states with maybe 15 million people could legally bully the other three quarters with over 300 million. (Maybe they did foresee it - that may be what prompted Franklin's famous remark about 'A republic - if you can keep it.').
The constitution as originally drafted was nothing more than a schematic for a system of government, setting out the composition and responsibilities of its constituent branches. A Bill of Rights was not included not because it was "unimportant," but because the drafters assumed that the people and the states retained all such power (see.e.g., the Virginia Declaration of Rights) not specifically delegated to what was seen as a limited federal government. (Remember, the brand-new States were just coming from the Articles of Confederation, under which central government was kept intentionally weak, and there was no "federal law" as we conceive it today.) But right off the bat Madison foresaw the need for specific guarantees and limits on federal governmental power -- not incidentally because the government was controlled by his (and Jefferson's) political rivals. Deep and bitter political divisions have been at the root of American government since its creation.
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

And Madison's original idea, when it became clear that the rights outlined in the Bill of Rights were necessary, was that they should incorporated into the Constitution as constituent items as not as amendments. From the Heritage Foundation (which I would not normally look to for the truth and whom I am generally loth to quote) (but in my defence I knew this from something I had read a while ago but this was the first hit when I went looking for it on Google):
Madison had wanted the amendments that became the Bill of Rights to be interwoven into the relevant sections of the Constitution. More for stylistic rather than substantive reasons, though, Congress proposed (and set the precedent for) amendments appended separately at the end of the document.
So if you can believe the Heritage Foundation (and yes, yes, I know, that's a huge 'if') the reasons those things (freedom of speech, due process etc etc) are not in the body of the Constitution are more stylistic than anything.

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Bicycle Bill »

ex-khobar Andy wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 2:07 pm
What made sense 230 years ago just does not these days. The Second Amendment - the right to bear arms - was written in a time of flintlocks and blunderbusses. There is nothing in it to forbid individuals from owning nuclear weapons and I kind of wish that Gates or Bezos or Musk might seek to buy a few megatons for personal use and we could see how SCOTUS would handle that one.
They don't even have to go that far.  How about just dropping a billion or so on a couple of brand-new, fresh-off-the-assembly-line, fully militarized F-35s (and after what Musk paid for Twitter, that's just pocket change), or he decides that he's being bugged by drone overflights and it's his Second Amendment RIGHT, by God, to have a half-dozen shoulder-fired Stinger missiles on hand to knock those pesky things out of the sky?

And it's only got a 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) HE warhead; hell, he can always claim he's just shooting off fireworks on a slightly larger scale...
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

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Scooter wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 11:41 pm
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So will I. Don't need to know your name.

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by BoSoxGal »

Jarlaxle wrote:
Fri May 06, 2022 12:22 am
Scooter wrote:
Thu May 05, 2022 11:41 pm
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So will I. Don't need to know your name.
Ditto, but since we all live in places with abundant access to camping services, let’s just hope there are a lot of people in the anti camping states who are like minded as us and will help campers get to the campsites they need.
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Uhhh....  I know that the members of the Repugnicunt Taliban have never been coy about their desire to eviscerate Roe v Wade, if not wipe it off the books entirely, and the leaked draft seems to confirm that they have finally been able to do so, BUT —

1) It is only a draft; it is not the actual decision (at least not yet).
2) Since it is only a draft, there may be changes in part or in whole before the decision is reached/released.
3) According to other sources I've seen, there have been other times in SCOTUS history where it has later come to light that during the course of in-camera debates amongst themselves, one or more justices have been swayed or, for some other reason, changed their initial opinion.

So the way I see it, there is a chance — certainly, it's a VERY slim chance, but the possibility is still greater than zero — that the decision we see now is not the decision that will finally be rendered.  The court may even do an about-face and uphold Roe v Wade, or merely modify certain points of it.
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Econoline »

As it stands right now, abortion prior to fetal viability is a Constitutionally guaranteed right. As far as I know (someone correct me if I'm wrong?) the Supreme Court has *NEVER* actually taken away a right (which has already existed for almost 50 years, and has already been recognized by the SC and enforced by the federal government). If the SC actually decides this case as the leaked draft indicates, this is truly a very scary precedent. :arg :evil:
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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Burning Petard »

As I understand it, the leaked version is a 'draft' of the majority opinion--the stuff that comes the law. NOT an individual opinion circulated to the others for comment and discussion. I am not a lawyer and certainly am not fluent in lawyer-cant ('terms of art') nor have I studied the actual document. If the stuff I have read about it represent it accurately, it throws the 9th and 10th amendments back to the states to do with as they might--in other words, the Confederacy finally wins the war over states rights. The fed is a government of limited powers, but not the states. The people are no longer sovereign.

Some of the commentary on line today says the GOP now realizes they are riding a tiger on this--they know the majority of voters support Roe v Wade as settled law. Now that killing that right to abortion seems to be a dawning reality, the GOP leadership is running away from it as fast as they can. Sort of like they screamed to abolish Obama Care, until they actually could, and then they suddenly became silent.

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Big RR »

The fed is a government of limited powers, but not the states. The people are no longer sovereign.
Why do you say that? Who is sovereign in the states but the people? indeed, being smaller units than the entire country, it would be logical to assume the people have more control that state government than they do of the national one. Not that I think states rights are a panacea to all the ills of the country, there clearly are some rights I think the federal government should protect for all (or what is th epoint of national government), but I don't think they remove the people from their position in the government system.

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Re: SCOTUS to women: You have no rights to autonomy and security of your person

Post by Burning Petard »

RR the matter of sovereignty devolves to the state constitutions. In many the people within have surrendered their sovereignty, or it as a creature of the King of England, they never had it in the first place. Look at the official state seal. When there are 'supporters' on each side of the shield (like the farmer and the hunter for Delaware) this is a symbolic announcement that the government, not the people, is sovereign.

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