Well… your solution is to ask a court to interpret a text that says nothing of the kind to say it guarantees the right to abortion while acting all high and mighty when a court decides to interpret that same text that still says nothing about abortion to say it excludes that right.
While changing nothing at all…
Look, if any court can interpret any law to mean what it wants it to mean what meaning does law even have then?
Enough with despair. Enough with the handwringing over our dystopian future. Enough with investing the GOP with ominous unopposable super powers.
FUCK that noise. Jam it in a cannon and fire it on a low energy orbit to Venus.
We got to this point because conservatives spent the last 50 years not giving up on attacking abortion. Planning, fundraising, organizing. They were smart about it, and relentless.
It’s time to give up the BLARGH BLARH SUSAN SARANDON BLARGH SUSAN COLLINS BLARGH I TOLD YOU SO IN 2016 BLARGH score-settling shit. That doesn’t help. We need to keep our eyes on the goal and do the things necessary to win lawsuits, win elections, repeal bad laws and make good ones.
You know what? A LARGE majority – 70% – of Americans support abortion rights. This is something that Democrats can run on. They can use fear of Texas’s draconian snitch laws to smear every Republican candidate – local, state, and federal – in 2022 and 2024.
We need to make the GOP regret this.
Meanwhile:
Me? Before 10 am yesterday I donated $100 to the Texas chapter of the ACLU, and another $100 to an ActBlue campaign that divides donations among TX based abortion enabling groups.
Really just this asshole:
Theoretically both sides could, in practice both sides don’t do it at anything like the same level. https://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-1-busting-the-both-sides-do-it-myth/
Have you actually read the transcripts and ruling? They pretty clearly lay out a few thousand years of jurisprudence on abortion, how abortion fits into the landscape of American constitutional rulings, and the arguments around the 14th amendment and personhood. Texas, in arguing the case basically tried to skate by with unsupported claims that they admitted having no proof for.
Text: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113
And a podcast that actually goes through the arguments in the courtroom. We'll Hear Arguments, Season One: 'Roe v. Wade'
Re-writing the Constitution from top to bottom still won’t solve the problem when we have people in power who refuse to participate in a good faith implementation of that Constitution.
For example, when a Republican controlled legislature refuses to let a sitting President fulfill his Constitutional role in selecting new SCOTUS appointees even though he has a year left in office.
The Constitution is a bunch of words written on paper. It has no real power in and of itself. It cannot protect the rights of a society that has chosen to abandon rule of law.
Thank the spirits we just got rid of a president who shit all over the document, wiped his ass with it and then set it on fire.
We (in the U.S.) live in a common-law system. That means that judicial precedent is a key component of our law. The decision to use that system instead of a civil law system like that adopted in much of Europe recognizes that legislatures act slowly and cannot foresee every factual circumstance that the statutory law might affect. As a result, courts’ interpretations of statutes and the Constitution, as well as their interpretations of other common law (i.e., other earlier judicial precedents that may but more often do not have a basis in statutory law) are always going to be important parts of American law (at least so long as our current form of government remains our form of government).
What you appear to be arguing for is Scalia-style textualism, which is superficially attractive but does not take into account that the Constitution is a general document that must nevertheless be applied to specific factual circumstances that were not foreseen at the time of the Constitution’s drafting. For example, the right to freedom of the press protects journalists who will never use an actual printing press. Freedom of speech includes freedom to use electronic means to communicate even if nobody is actually saying the words out loud. The right to be secure in one’s papers from unreasonable search and seizure includes the right to be secure in one’s electronic communications.
Those are judicial interpretations, not things that are written into the actual words of the Constitution. You may disagree with the idea that the Constitution enshrines a right to privacy that further protects the right to abortion. But that has been the law for 50 years, and it’s the law because the Supreme Court said it was. It’s not anything close to a perfect system, as your arguments recognize. But arguing for textualist purity is even less perfect.
It’s possible to rewrite the constitution completely, and there are people working on this project.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Convention_of_States_Action
Welp. This is messed up. If these people really cared about ending/reducing abortion (which they don’t, though most of the people pro-choice are actually for ways to reduce abortion) then you would have earlier and more informational sex education and access to free contraceptive for both men and women at any age with no parental consent needed. Not just condoms, but oral and internal contraceptives like IUDs.
Maybe this will ignite a wave of people campaigning to repeal the law, and it will give enough people the gumption to vote for them. In the meantime, this is bullshit.
Go to polling stations in predominantly black areas with guns and make sure they aren’t voting.
I can’t even make a joke. This … Is… The fucking next step.
Ah sure - both sides.
That’s why you have a right of private action to sue people for assault weapons and 3D printed gun ownership
to the forum denizens of boing: there is at least 1 thing you can do. You can throw money at the problem - hear my out. Use your american incomes to sue the doctors to collect your abortion bounties. Texas is a state where you don’t have to reside there to have cause to litigate. Patent trolls do this all the time. You don’t have to have a case, you can make the facts up, submit the case, don’t show up, waste the court’s time. If the court wants to hear these cases, make sure they can’t, for instance, hear anything else. I give it 3 months of legal harrassement.
Alas, even people of color can now roam around Texas openly carrying guns. No permit required. No license. No training.
This is going to be fun. /s
Some food for thought…
Both of these “should” are doing a lot of work masking some assumptions about how society has agreed to agree on change. I mean, sure, it sounds great in theory but breaks down in practice because clearly not everybody shares your assumptions on how things should work.
The “legislating form the bench” meme introduced by bad faith actors was always meant to be something that sounds sensible on its face, but completely unworkable in practice and far removed from how the law actually works.
Clerical DDOS
Even so, it’s still an excuse for LEOs to shoot them on sight because they felt threatened.
Right now it seems like TX and FL are in a race to see which state can become a dystopian wasteland first.
We may really need to form a second ‘underground railroad’ to help people leave them.
