It’s official. Apparently, Justice Roberts has been missing Justice Stevens so much…
…that he has decided to become him.
There’s some interesting legal reasoning from Roberts in the case, which struck down a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges. Roberts was relying on precedent:
“The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike,” Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion. “The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
What’s he’s saying there is that the Louisiana law was almost exactly the same as a Texas law which had been declared unconstitutional by the Court in 2016, and therefore absent some sort of unusual circumstances the present case had to be decided in accord with the previous one. And yet, in that 2016 case, Justice Roberts had voted against declaring the Texas law unconstitutional. Now he is saying, essentially, that he is required by precedent to vote against himself – not to mention against the legislature of the state of Louisiana. And this is the same Justice Roberts who just the other day had no problem whatsoever overturning precedent to find that “sex” means something quite different, legally, than it has in the past.
Justice Thomas remarked on today’s ruling and pointed out the liberal wing’s (and I include Roberts there) situational and shifting allegiance to precedent:
The plurality and THE CHIEF JUSTICE ultimately cast aside this jurisdictional barrier to conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents. But those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text.
Absolutely true. The proper way to have gone about making abortion legal would have been to have an amendment to the Constitution, or to just accomplish it state by state. Instead, the Court reached deep into its creative inspiration and created a federal right that did not previously exist and had no foundation in the Constitution.
[ADDENDUM: Much more here.]
Seems that Roberts isn’t even pretending anymore.
Why that is is an interesting question.
Of course a lot of people on the Left aren’t even pretending anymore.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rush-judgment-how-recent-stories-barr-left-relevant-facts-and-law-behind
“You have to destroy the state to save the state” appears to have morphed into a Liberal talking point and proof of their partisan virtue.
Or perhaps the progressives are showing us their version of “Kill ’em all and let God sort it out!” Except it couldn’t be the Almighty in this case; so perhaps they’d prefer to reference Marx instead?
To be sure, Marx HAS already “sorted it out”. Countless times…
…and continues to do so, at least in places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and (it seems) California, NYC and Chicago.
With results that have been consistently less than spectacular.
Just why the citizens of these (and not only these) places have to countenance the death wishes of their elected leaders remains a mystery (unless one is a Freudian, I guess; but the latter have their own issues, certainly…).
There’s been a certain amount of speculation that he’s been blackmailed. I’d think this nonsense if we weren’t living in such crazy times.
Art, wait until you watch adrenochrome.
Roberts is a tortured human being, just like many else and on this world.
More or less the same, all trapped as human livestock cattle in this matrix they don’t even believe exists.
For the last 30 years or so, conservatives have undertaken one of the greatest political movements in our nation’s history. It was a focused and determined effort to first build an intellectual legal community on the Right and then work tirelessly to win elections so that legal community could be appointed to the U.S. judiciary. A lot of people have devoted years of their lives, all of their energy, and lots of other people’s money to this project. Some have wrapped up their entire careers in it.
John Roberts has murdered the movement and is now desecrating its corpse. That is going to have very awful long term consequences for American culture and politics. Maybe Trump can pull the fat out of the fire by getting re-elected and appointing two more Justices to fulfill the original promise. If not, an entire generation of right wing intellectuals is going to feel betrayed and humiliated and the Right will NEVER AGAIN try to play by the rules in this way.
Mike
If you read the constitution with any sort of attention to detail, you might notice that there is no phrase like
“ … and after a president signs a bill into law, or the congress overrides a president’s veto, the supreme court may, by majority vote, veto the bill, in whole or in part, if a case concerning the bill is brought before it, without either the president or congress being able to override the veto.”
There’s a good reason for this, of course — it would obviously give the supreme court way too much power, establishing the republic as an oligarchy of judges. Yet this is how “judicial review”, a doctrine elaborated by the supreme court over the last several centuries, works in practice.
Now the constitution as written allows the supreme court to rule any way it pleases on the cases that come before it, without any way to appeal its ruling. So if they want to find every person or group indicted under some law innocent — all the time — they can. However, without the doctrine of judicial review to erase that law from the books, prosecutors could still use that disliked law to indict, and lower courts could still use that disliked law to convict. Those violating the law would still be punished by having to pay lawyers and spend lots of time in court (until their case reached the supreme court of course). And the supreme court would have to spend more and more of its time acquitting those indicted under that disliked law.
How did those who wrote the constitution think this sort of impasse would be resolved? Well, congress has the power to impeach and remove as many supreme court justices as it takes to get the court to see things its way, and the voters have the power to elect legislators who will be sure to remove those judges — or elect a congress and president who will change the law. Voters could elect a president who pledges to stop wasting the government’s time indicting people under the law — but they could also elect a president who insists on continuing the indictments. The voters, not the supreme court, would have the final say on what happens. In my opinion that would be the constitutional way. Judicial review is BS — worse than that, and ironically enough, it’s also (wait for it) unconstitutional.
I am not intelligent enough to understand the reasoning behind Roberts’ ruling.
If I understand, a bad precedent, set by a politicized court, must stand in perpetuity. We must give that little bit of sophistry a clever name. How about stare decisis? But, what confuses me is how to reconcile stare decisis with Dred Scott. What an inconvenient circumstance.
Drain circling. That’s what liberty and the Rule of Law has been reduced to.
The only useful speculations about treacherous, shape-shifting Roberts at this stage involve Long Drop, Short Drop, or Piano Wire.
There is something inherently fishy about the man and he’s clearly being blackmailed about something or some things. More likely the latter.
Sorry folks, but we *are* ruled over by what might as well be Lizard People who hate us.
“I am not intelligent enough to understand the reasoning behind Roberts’ ruling.”
The “reasoning” is…what will cause Roberts any social discomfort in DC? Roberts can make pro-corporate America rulings ’til the Sun comes down and that won’t bother anyone on the Washington cocktail party circuit.
Mike
If not, an entire generation of right wing intellectuals is going to feel betrayed and humiliated and the Right will NEVER AGAIN try to play by the rules in this way.
Quite simple to shut down the Supreme Court, but politicians like McConnell never think to do it.
There has to be evidence of his thinking prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Medically speaking, abortion providers in LA, and by extension the entire US, were just allowed by SCOTUS to provide less than customary care because their patients (women, not unborn children) were deemed medically safe from any complications of abortion. By the Court. Which has no docs on the panel.
There are just two abortionists in LA, one in Shreveport, one in New Orleans.
Too bad they did not review the patient care practiced by Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who is now serving multiple life terms in prison for his way of delivering essential abortion health care in Philly.
Roberts is a real POS. Stare decisis? Whatever happened to the Dred Scott decision?
I looked up Roberts’ current clerks: save one, the other seven are from Harvard or Yale, and the majority did prior clerkships for DC District or 2nd Circuit Appelate judges. They do the research, write the opinions. Roberts just blesses them and signs off. Need we doubt they are secular progressives?
Impeachment is out the window as long as the Dems run the House.In January they will run the country.
TexasDude:
Why does there have to be evidence of his GloboHomo thinking prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court?
Why would a person consumed with Promethean ambition not tailor their entire personal life and career toward achieving a certain goal? Just because you’re a normal decent human being and find this notion utterly insane and literally un-human doesn’t mean that such types don’t walk amongst us. They do.
The notion that Roberts is being blackmailed, which appears twice in these comments, is beyond absurd. That notion pretends he is a good man being forced to do bad things.
Nonsense.
Roberts is a POS, a disaster-maker for America, one of George W.’s great mistakes, of which there were many.
Cicero:
One wonders how many Men of Goodwill with zero dependents, late stage terminal cancer diagnoses and a strong desire to make their final days count for something are living in Louisiana.
Cicero:
There is ample circumstantial dirt floating around about photos of Chief Justice Gayface in hot tubs with the boys, etc. Also some doubt about the legality of his family’s adoptions.
Added to that, everybody who has been online is blackmailable. You may have led a totally blameless existence, but nothing on earth can stop the bad guys from uploading compromising material to your devices and stitching you up.
Granted that I too think that it’s highly probable that Roberts carefully crafted his persona for his entire academic/personal career so as to have a clean shot at the Brass Ring.
I’m afraid I have to agree with MBunge 5:19. When the constitution is untethered (as it has been) from various bedrock assumptions, it means whatever the Supreme Court says it means.
In the future, Roe v Wade will be seen as one of the three or four decisive events in the disintegration of the American Republic.
Speaking of which, have you noticed how Democrats almost universally use the phrase “our democracy” now? It finally dawned on me a few days ago that it isn’t accidental. They believe they have or will very soon have the numbers, and that they therefore can, will, and should rule.
Zaphod @7:38pm:
Huh? What?
“Maybe Trump can pull the fat out of the fire by getting re-elected and appointing two more Justices to fulfill the original promise.” – Mbunge
“At this point it looks as though Republicans will need to appoint all nine members of the Supreme Court to stand a 50/50 chance that five of them will rule sensibly.” – Steven Hayward of PowerLine Blog
Cicero: Was merely wondering why those two abortionists you mentioned remain upon this earthly plane of existence plying their evil trades. If I had 4 weeks to live and inhabited same zip code I know what I’d be about.
Regardless…
cue the sudden realization that all their support and work will mean naught once the saints go marching in… if the mob wins, the supreme courts heads will roll and be put on pikes, they wont be needed, as their existence is at the pleasure of the constitution they nary support.