Trying to iron out the meaning of that confusing Kansas amendment vote on abortion

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a little more background on the confusion.

In 2019 the Kansas Supreme Court had ruled that the state constitution includes a right to abortion, based on reasoning such as this:

The decision, in which one of the seven justices dissented, cites in its first sentence the first section of the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The decision continues: “We are now asked: ‘Is this declaration of rights more than an idealized aspiration? And, if so, do the substantive rights include a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, including the decision whether to continue her pregnancy? We answer these questions, ‘Yes.’ ”

The court continued that “this right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life — decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy.”

“The State may only infringe upon the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy,” the ruling continued, “if the State has a compelling interest and has narrowly tailored its actions to that interest.”

That was in the Roe days, of course. Obviously, the state constitution is not explicit in protecting a right to abortion; this was something the judiciary decided, as a sort of “penumbra” (they didn’t use that word) of some fairly standard American rights language.

On Tuesday, the voters of Kansas had this to ponder:

[The] Legislative Power to Regulate Abortion Amendment was on the ballot in Kansas as a legislatively referred constitutional amendment on August 2, 2022…

A “yes” vote supported amending the Kansas Constitution to:

–state that nothing in the state constitution creates a right to abortion or requires government funding for abortion and
–state that the legislature has the authority to pass laws regarding abortion.

A “no” vote opposed amending the Kansas Constitution, thereby maintaining the legal precedent established in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt (2019) that the Kansas Bill of Rights provides a right to abortion.

I doubt that most people are even aware that the language in the state constitution which the Kansas Supreme Court said provided a right to abortion was the same general language in the US Declaration of Independence, which says nothing about abortion rights. I certainly wasn’t aware of it until I did the research for this post; a lot of articles just mentioned language in the Kansas state constitution that establishes a right to abortion, and I assumed that language was explicit. But it is not. So the new amendment had to do with clarifying that there was no such language, contrary to what the Kansas Supreme Court had ruled in 2019.

Right now, Kansas law allows for abortion under the following circumstances:

Kansas’ abortion restrictions already include limiting abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy to cases where the pregnant person’s life is in danger. The state also requires an ultrasound before a procedure.

There’s a lot of propaganda being written about what the Tuesday vote meant or didn’t mean. Plus, I doubt it’s fully understood by most people, and the MSM (including that link in NPR) doesn’t even try to make it clear. But as far as I can tell, what was actually being voted on was whether the previous decision by the judiciary that the state constitution should be interpreted as establishing a right to abortion ought to remain as is. The new amendment – which was defeated – was an attempt to clarify that the constitution of the state actually does not grant such a right.

In that sense, at least for now – as a result of both the earlier Kansas Supreme Court decision plus this week’s vote – the state can’t ban abortion entirely. That doesn’t mean Kansans couldn’t amend the state constitution in the future to specifically say that abortion could be banned entirely. Then, after that, the legislature could pass such a banning law if it saw fit (I doubt it would do that, but it then at least could do it). Then the Kansas Supreme Court could revisit the question, if necessary, if there was a case that challenged the new legislation. Or, even without such as amendment and new legislation, the Kansas Supreme Court could take on a new case if one arose, and re-interpret the present wording of the state constitution differently than it did in 2019, effectively reversing itself.

However, I believe that even now the state could restrict abortion somewhat more than it does right now, for example to a shorter gestation period than 22 weeks, or make other changes – if the state has a “compelling interest and has narrowly tailored its actions to that interest.”

DeSantis makes a bold move…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and fires a state prosecutor who pledged to defy the law.

What a novel idea – that state prosecutors cannot overrule the legislature and act as the judiciary, thus rolling all three branches of government into the executive branch!

This is what happened:

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis announced Thursday the suspension of rogue Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, who pledged not to enforce a number of state laws including a 15-week abortion ban and prohibitions on sex changes for minors.

“Today we are suspending state attorney Andrew Warren effective immediately,” DeSantis declared.

Warren was one of 83 prosecutors nationwide who in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade signed a letter promising not to prosecute those who perform, abet, or seek abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

“This 15-week ban is an unconstitutional law. The Legislature is hoping courts ignore the Florida constitution. But I’m upholding the law and protecting the fundamental rights of all Floridians,” Warren said in a statement provided to the Tampa Bay Times.

The DeSantis administration has argued that the governor has the authority to suspend a state officer under Article IV, Section 7 of the Florida Constitution, according to a press release. Susan Lopez has been appointed as interim State Attorney during the period of the suspension.

By that provision, the governor can suspend from office a county officer for “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension.” At any time before removal, the governor may reinstate the suspended officer…

“If the law conflicts with your idiosyncratic vision of social justice,” that doesn’t mean you have veto power over the law, he asserted.

The suspension came after DeSantis’s office conducted a survey of how certain laws are being received by district attorneys in Florida. Warren’s actions, he determined, are “beyond exercising discretion when you make an individual case and decide it shouldn’t be prosecuted.”

“Where it goes across the line is when it’s being used to effectively nullify what the legislature has done,” he said.

He’s absolutely correct. The proper action for Warren himself, by the way, ought to have been to resign, if his conscience troublee him about enforcing laws with which he disagreed, and then to campaign for the repeal of those laws.

My guess is that Warren didn’t think that DeSantis would have the cojones to do such a thing. Or that, if he did, the blowback against DeSantis would be fierce. I am virtually certain the left will excoriate DeSantis for this, but they do that every day that ends with a “y.”

I also wonder whether any other governor will follow suit.

ADDENDUM: In line with whether any other governor will follow suit, I’ll add that, as far as suspending state prosecutors goes, I think DeSantis was in a fairly unique position. He’s a conservative governor in a reddish state, and the prosecutor was a state prosecutor refusing to prosecute duly passed laws. Most of these progressive prosecutors are in blue states with Democrat governors, and in counties and not the whole state. So there’s no real conflict there, and until DeSantis and this prosecutor in Florida there wasn’t really a situation where a suspension like this could happen.

The only exception I can think of offhand is in Texas, with this:

Travis County District Attorney José Garza on Monday denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s move to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision and reiterated his promise that his office will not prosecute people under the Texas law that will make it illegal to perform abortions.

The latest opposition to the ruling by an Austin public official comes days after City Council members pledged to vote on a resolution that calls on Austin police to make abortion investigations their lowest-priority cases.

Garza is one of several district attorneys across Texas to make the same promise, including John Creuzot in Dallas, Joe Gonzales in Bexar County, Brian Middleton in Fort Bend County and Mark Gonzalez in Nueces County.

However, legal experts said moves at the local level aren’t likely to give clinics enough reassurance to reopen their doors and begin performing abortions again. Officials at the state level could still enforce civil penalties against abortion providers and revoke licenses.

So I’m not sure whether Abbott could suspend Garza or the others, since they function at a country and not a state level. Perhaps he could, but I don’t know whether he’d bother to do so, because it may not matter much since the state can take over if it wishes, as described in that last sentence of the quote above.

A vanished world

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this post is taken from the title of a book of photographs by Roman Vishniac, of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Here is the story of how the photos were taken:

…[B]etween 1934 and 1939. Vishniac walked across Poland, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania with his camera, preserving for posterity images of a Jewish way of life fated soon to be destroyed. Of the 16,000 photographs he managed to take — secretly and under dangerous circumstances — he was able to rescue only about 2,000. Some he sewed into his clothing when he came to the United States in 1940, most he left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. A Vanished World brings together nearly 200 of these images…

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the photos and the situation. This is indeed a world that will soon vanish – not just vanish but be violently, cruelly, and purposely obliterated, with great suffering to its inhabitants.

And yet they’ve not all vanished. In fact, some of the former inhabitants of that vanished world are still around, although they are very elderly and won’t be here for much longer. This is an article about a recent get-together of 56 of them, and some of their reminiscences:

“You come home from Auschwitz like you fell from the sky,” [Auschwitz survivor Einhorn] recalled. He had “no parents, no siblings, no nothing.” He worked in the Tel Aviv port, but there was a time when he had to sleep in a public park. He had no living connections to the rest of the world and no one to guide him, just people who seemed eager to evade what he’d been through and what it might represent. For decades, no one asked Einhorn about the numbers on his arm, or seemed to care very much about them.

In New York, Einhorn worked at a kosher butcher shop on the Lower East side and raised a family. Most of a century later, the horrors of the Holocaust are still recent enough to be able to cause nightmares in the people who experienced them, Einhorn included. “You know, I still dream of Auschwitz,” he said. “My mind is still in Auschwitz … I’m still crying. I cry in the night, I cry in the day. I’m still not finished from there.”

It is indecent, not to mention inaccurate, to imply any neat ending to the survivors’ stories, as if living through the Holocaust were a fair price to pay for getting to spend the rest of one’s life in the United States making womens’ belts or selling kosher meat. If one insists on extracting any hope from the experience of the war and the subsequent decades, it shouldn’t come from the inevitable need to salvage meaning from evil, or from the psychological impulse to vulgarize tragedy in order to make it comprehensible, but from forces beyond the merely human, far outside our meager range of understanding.

If you’ve never read Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, or its less-well-known sequel The Reawakening, about Levi’s return to the post-Holocaust world, I highly recommend both. In my opinion they are the most brilliant things ever written on the subject.

I wrote a lengthy previous post discussing Levi – and his probable suicide. It contained this quote from Survival in Auschwitz, which gives you a flavor of his work:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

RIP Representative Jackie Walorski

The New Neo Posted on by

Republican House member from Indiana’s 2nd Congressional district Jackie Walorski was killed in a head-on collision today in Elkhard Country, Indiana. It sounds as though it was a horrific accident. Everyone involved was killed, including two of Walorski’s aides (ages 27 and 28) and the driver of the other vehicle, which apparently “traveled left of center” – meaning perhaps that it crossed into oncoming traffic.

I had never heard of Walorski before today, but reports are that she was highly thought of and very popular in her district.

Thomas Sowell sounds the alarm

The New Neo Posted on by

Sowell remains clear-thinking at 92 – and he’s always been among the clearest of thinkers. His latest essay is called “The Point of No Return.”

Here’s an excerpt:

This is an election year. But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans. The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us.

If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying “You won’t know what hit you!”

There have always been irresponsible demagogues. But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.

You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue. If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge’s children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

There is also not much point in expecting to have freedom. Threats and violence were the way the Nazis came to power in Germany. Freedom is not free. If you can’t be bothered to vote against storm-trooper tactics — regardless of who engages in them, or over what issue — then you can forfeit your freedom.

Primary reflections; plus Joe Manchin

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday was primary day in many states and a lot of Trump-endorsed candidates won. You can see some of the results here, here, and here.

There was also a vote in Kansas on abortion rights. The wording of the ballot measure was confusing, in my opinion, although I don’t know whether that was a factor. Here’s what happened:

Kansas voters came out in big numbers to support abortion rights on Tuesday, rejecting a ballot measure that would have said abortion rights are not protected by the state constitution.

Note the double negative.

The ballot measure—in language that abortion advocates criticized for being confusing—asked voters to decide if they wanted to amend the state Constitution to specify that it “does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion,” allowing the state to enact abortion restrictions.

Those who tout this as a repudiation of Dobbs either don’t understand Dobbs or are lying. What Dobbs did was throw the issue back to each state, and Kansas was making its own decisions as a state.

Other states will be voting on abortion, too, and that is exactly the way that Dobbs was meant to work, and exactly the way the entire process would have gone had Roe not interfered and created a federal right long ago.

The following is unrelated, but it’s as good a place as any to put it. Joe Manchin continues on his merry way, betraying his constituents in West Virginia, but (a) he’s done it before and been re-elected (for reasons I’ve never quite understood – the re-election part, that is); and (b) I’m not so sure he cares if he’s re-elected or not. He’s probably getting (or has been promised) some sort of reward for what he’s doing, plus most people may not realize he’s about to turn 75. He looks younger than that, but in 2024 he’ll be 77 and he may be fine with retiring at that point, even though he’s sometimes said he’d like to run again.

The war on lawyers who would defend the right

The New Neo Posted on by

The left doesn’t like the adversary system when it’s used to fight them, so they are determined to destroy the opposition’s ability to do so. From Legal Insurrection:

We covered the effort to attack Republican lawyers previously, Operative David Brock To Launch Attack On Republican Election Lawyers: “make them toxic in their communities and in their firms”.

The issue is even more important as we approach the November elections. Democrats are trying to deplatform the Republican legal team…

The home page of The 65 Project ever-so nobly frames itself as “A bipartisan effort to protect democracy from abuse of the legal system by holding accountable lawyers who engage in fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results and fuel insurrection.” Bi-partisan, huh? Actually, it is “is a dark money-fueled nonprofit tied to Democrat Party bigwigs.”

Note the word “bipartisan.” The NeverTrumpers are incredibly valuable to the left, enabling them to claim bipartisanship in the endeavor.

More from the project’s website, and note the re-framing of their endeavor as the protection of democracy against the Big Lie of the Right. And here I thought the goal of the adversarial system was to air disputes in an objective forum with both sides doing their best to plead their case, a process which, although imperfect, was supposed to end up with the closest we can come to truth and justice. But that’s so 20th Century. This is now:

Following Biden’s victory an army of Big Lie Lawyers filed 65 lawsuits based on lies to overturn the election and give Trump a second term. While the nation’s legal institutions stood up to this attempted “coup-via-courtroom,” Trump has worked to further seize control of state and local election processes and ramp up malicious election litigation efforts — which only embolden future fraudulent legal actions aimed at overturning legitimate elections. Simultaneously, the lies and disinformation included in these lawsuits continue to give oxygen to the Big Lie, which festers in right-wing political and media circles and social media discussions and is a long-term threat to American democracy.

When Trump supporters file cases it’s a “coup by courtroom” When leftists intimidate lawyers into not defending those cases out of threats and fear, this is the defense of democracy.

Got it.

NOTE: I happened to have been reading an article by Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review on a somewhat different topic, the FBI and its bias – something I plan to write about, probably tomorrow – and I saw the following paragraph in the comments there. I want to quote it because I think it encapsulates the mindset of a supposed Republican Never Trumper and how such a person somehow manages to justify what the left has been doing:

I…am willing to grant the deep state mob a little compassion. [I concede I’m a vociferous Never Trumper] I still believe if the Hunter laptop had been “discovered” by anyone other than Rudy Giuliani, and if the incumbent President had been anywhere close to being within the ambit of acceptable leaders, instead of a delusional nut out beyond the Van Oort belt, the trajectory of these events might have been different. Andy is a fine lawyer, and his talent in pointing out peccadillos and debater’s points is beyond complaint, but he ignores the elephant in the room. Trump was manifestly unfit to be the leader of the free world and had to be stopped.

This person is totally unaware that his/her statements about Trump are not “manifestly” self-evident. The assumption is that any thinking person can see their obvious truth, and that therefore anything is justified to stop him. The mindset is that expressed by Roper in this scene which I’ve embedded in blog posts here many times before:

Then again, it didn’t go all that well for Sir Thomas More, did it?

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

When someone writes an paragraph he/she keeps the idea of a user in his/her brain that how a user can know it. So that’s why this piece of writing is amazing.

Okay, bot. I hear you.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s another one of those days with lots to talk about:

(1) Mark Judge on how pop music criticism has become wholly taken over by wokeness. An excerpt:

Spence Kornhaber almost got there. He almost let himself admit that “Renaissance,” the new album by Beyoncé, is awful. “Renaissance” is an hour of clattering dance beats with no melody or direction, lyrics that mine the same tired tropes about loving yourself, and dull profanity.

Sounds fab.

Kornhaber’s review notes that in “Renaissance” “conventional songwriting rules, polite-test paradigms, and the best practices for headache avoidance were clearly not priorities here. The songs scatter, wobble and lurch into each other while Beyoncé wavers between singing and doing silly voices, in multitrack.”

Even more fab!

But then Kornhaber adds as a corrective:

‘Renaissance’ will play, to many, as exhausting, as indulgent, as ridiculous, as childish, as oversexed, as too much. But committing oneself to pleasure as fully as Beyoncé has here takes defiance and guts—and, more deeply, faith in the preciousness of one’s own experience. Somehow she has found a way to make messages of individual empowerment, which can be so trite in pop, jolt again.

Count me as one of the “many” in that first sentence, and please don’t limit it to the music of Beyoncé. Almost all of music of the 21st Century leaves me cold, but then again I’m not its target market. And I would expand that to include all the arts today, and I mean that literally. I cannot think of an art that hasn’t been ruined by a combination of vulgarity, the need to shock, wokeness, and a vapid emptiness that speaks of a general cultural enervation and disintegration.

(2) Outsourcing Europe’s energy to Russia was a very obviously bad idea. But when Trump warned Europe about it, they mocked him. Has any European country’s leader ever apologized for that? No? Quelle surprise.

We outsourced our medical supplies (as well as computer components) to China, another obviously terrible idea that was highlighted during the COVID pandemic. Has it been corrected?

Apple may be “headquartered” in Cupertino, but more than 90 percent of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks are made in China, albeit “designed in California.” Despite their endless virtue-signaling, these corporations are indifferent to the national economy. Instead, many have become China’s ultimate cheerleaders and enablers, with venture capital firms raising billions to fund new firms in the Middle Kingdom—in other words, subsidizing the competition…

De-industrialization means more than just losing some “crappy jobs.” It means losing the critical skills required to design and produce products…

In accordance with this trend, U.S. medical equipment producers have left en masse for abroad, notably to China. As a result, Chinese dominance of the medical supply chain undermined our initial pandemic response, exposing us to the reality that we’re unable even to produce masks for our own people. Instead, we were forced to genuflect to Beijing, while they refused to share critical information on the pandemic…

As observed by Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, “China’s decision to block exports of these goods led to widespread shortages.” Moving forward, “there is also the concern that an increasingly assertive China might seek to exploit the world’s dependence on it for political purposes.”

Who could ever have imagined such a thing? And yes, that’s sarcasm. And Joe Biden is the last person on earth to address it, for a host of reasons – including his own enmeshment with China.

(3) Why is Pelosi in Taiwan? Byron York tackles the question – and fails to answer it. More speculation here, by Niall Ferguson. The bottom line? We don’t know.

(4) With monkeypox, the response is all about politics. There was a lot of this with AIDS, too, for quite a while.

(5) California’s war on independent truckers leads to demonstrations at the port of Oakland, but they’ve been dispersed and not covered much by the MSM. The Democrats want to destroy such entrepreneurship “for our own good,” and since in California Democrats have all the power, the truckers probably haven’t a chance. One-party Democrat rule, it’s great, isn’t it?