The Supreme Court and abortion: on the brink?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday the Court heard arguments on a Mississippi abortion law in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but the decision won’t be handed down till this spring. I don’t often write about SCOTUS oral arguments and make predictions, because I’ve learned that it’s a difficult game and many such predictions turn out to be wrong.

However, I sometimes make exceptions, and this is one of those times – not because I feel certain what will happen, but because this is potentially a very big case. Even before yesterday, it seemed to me that the subject matter of Dobbs, which is whether a state can pass a law limiting abortion to pregnancies under 15 weeks in duration, would be likely to be decided narrowly or broadly. I believe answer would be likely to be a narrow, “Yes, a state can do that.” In other words, I think there will be a compromise decision in which the Mississippi law is upheld but Roe and Casey, the two main laws establishing a national right to abortion, are not overruled in their entirety.

Prior to yesterday, it also seemed likely to me that Justice Roberts in particular, who doesn’t like to upset any law he considers settled (which is just about any law and precedent), would take the lead in guiding the Court to that opinion and leave the larger questions untouched. This still is my prediction, for what it’s worth – in other words, that there will be three liberal justices for invalidating the Mississippi law, three conservative justices for doing away with Roe entirely and upholding the Mississippi law, and three for just upholding the Mississippi law but leaving Roe, resulting in a 6-3 ruling that is limited to the Mississippi law and is written by Roberts. But it’s also the case that such a solution would open the door for further erosion of Roe and further expansion of the right of states to limit abortions beyond the parameters set in Roe and Casey (the latter relying on the viability standard rather than Roe’s trimester standard).

That’s why this case strikes fear into the hearts of abortion advocates. The question is what standard would be left that could not be further challenged with success.

I’ll add that in my opinion and that of so many others, Roe is a case built on air and the political desires of the left, with no constitutional underpinnings other than rhetorical ones. That is something that seems obvious, if you study it (see this as well as this). That is another source of the consternation experienced at the moment by abortion advocates, because they are well aware of the shaky grounds for Roe. The more conservative majority of today’s Court is also an obvious concern for them, and one of the reasons they were so vicious in trying to stop the nomination of Kavanaugh and Barrett.

Some of that shakiness apparently came out during yesterday’s arguments. For example, from Roberts:

“If you think that the issue is one of choice — that women should have a choice to terminate their pregnancy — that supposes that there is a point at which they’ve had the fair choice, opportunity to choice. And why would 15 weeks be an inappropriate line? Viability, it seems to me, doesn’t have anything to do with choice. But if it really is an issue about choice, why is 15 weeks not enough time?”

In other words, how does viability make sense as a legal standard, if the legal basis is about a woman’s right to choose? The answer seems to me to be one of competing interests – the interests of the woman to choose and the interest of the unborn child to live – but that argument is subject to a similar challenge, which is why does that right of the child only become determinative once the child can live outside the womb (see also this thread by Jonathan Turley on viability)?

Roe advocates also employ the defense of Stare Decisis, the rule of binding precedent. But that’s not something sacred, especially for SCOTUS, which has overruled its own precedents before. If a case was poorly decided in the first place there is no requirement to keep it going in perpetuity, and the same is true if there have been relevant advances during the intervening years, such as those in medicine since Roe and Casey to learn more about fetal development and also about how to keep younger and younger infants alive.

Yesterday’s proceedings also featured a strange and repellent argument by Justice Sotomayor – the self-described wise latina – who bizzarely and repulsively (and illogically) compared the reactions of fetuses to painful stimuli to the reflexes sometimes shown by so-called brain-dead people:

Virtually every state defines a brain death as death. Yet the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dead, responding to stimuli,” Sotomayor said. “So I don’t think that a response [to pain by] a fetus necessar[ily] proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness. “

But it certainly tends to strongly suggest it, and there is no reason to think that there is any analogy whatsoever between a growing fetus and a person whose brain is so damaged as to be nearly inoperative.

To me, it’s clear there are only two ways that abortion should be legally regulated. The first is to overrule Roe and leave the decision to the individual states, which was the situation prior to Roe. The second is to pass a constitutional amendment. That amendment could either ban abortion, limit it in some standard way, or prohibit states from banning it.

However, when I did a quick search on the matter, I found surprisngly little discussion of this latter idea of passing a constitutional amendment in order to create any federal (rather than state) rule on abortion. It seems to me rather obvious, however, that this would be one way to go, and should have been the way abortion advocates went instead of SCOTUS deciding Roe as it did. It’s obvious why abortion advocates didn’t go the amendment route, however – it would have been too difficult at the time, and perhaps even now.

Is there some glitch in my reasoning? It seems to me that if there is no constitutional basis for a nationwide right to abortion in the Constitution, but if people want to give it such a basis, an Amendment would be the answer, wouldn’t it? Likewise, if there is no constitutional basis for a nationwide ban on abortion, but if people want to give it such a basis, an amendment would be the answer.

[NOTE: None of this has to do with my political or moral opinion on abortion, merely my legal one. If you want to read up on my personal opinion, please see this post, as well as this and this.]

Joe from Scranton understands

The New Neo Posted on by

With his – and/or his speechwriters’ and handlers’ – uncanny knack for understanding the plight of the little guy, Joe Biden tells America, in a voice oozing with compassion and concern:

Indeed, I remember.

Confession: I was one of those 80s parents frantically searching far and wide for Cabbage Patch Kids. I don’t recall the desperate quest being limited to Christmas, either. Parents would follow rumors and get in line, and that’s how we finally procured a rather hideous Cabbage Patch Kid for our son and another for our niece – quite a score, and a largesse they both appreciated.

Needless to say, Biden’s analogy is as absurd and as insultingly tone-deaf as most of what comes out of his mouth, and especially ironic because of the way he always presented himself as a man of the people.

COVID panic is mostly based on unscientific speculation…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the phenomenon has been present from the start. In my opinion, it’s done intentionally, and it continues with each new variant that has taken hold to any marked degree.

I’m not a scientist, but very early on in the pandemic I noticed that principles that really don’t seem to apply to most viruses were being applied to COVID.

One of those principles was that people who had already had the virus and recovered from it could give it to others. This is ordinarily not true of viruses causing illness.

Another was that people who already had the virus could get it again. This also is ordinarily not true of viruses in all but the rarest of cases, usually people who are immune-compromised in some way.

Another was that new variants would be not just more easily transmitted than the original – that could probably be true – but more virulent. But the pattern of most viruses is that later variants are more easily transmitted and milder, although there are exceptions to that rule.

Those principles are rather basic. And yet we see the MSM talking about them anew for Omicron, even close to two years into the COVID phenomenon. I believe that the goal is to drum up panic and/or keep the panic going, and they’ve been remarkably successful although that success is finally waning to a certain degree. More people are tired of this, and more are onto the leftist’s game.

I’ve written so many posts about COVID that to go back and see where I’ve written these things, and how long ago it was that I did so, would be very labor-intensive. So consider this post from late February of 2020 (one of my earliest about COVID) representative of the whole. Looking back on it now, I’m rather pleased with how well it holds up. Here’s an excerpt [emphasis added]:

I haven’t written too many posts on the new coronavirus (COVID-19) because we know quite little, and much of what we read about it in the MSM probably is incorrect. Nevertheless, it’s what we have to work with right now.

You keep hearing “don’t trust the Chinese on this.” And I agree. But that also means that we can’t trust the people who at least theoretically know the most about it, because they’ve had the largest numbers of cases. And it also sets the scene for cinematic apocalyptic imaginings to rush in, ideas that many in the MSM are only too happy to entertain, the better to raise ratings and to hurt Trump. A twofer.

Prognosticators don’t want to be caught flat-footed if this becomes a much much bigger deal than it already is. People have learned more and more in recent years not to trust governments and bureaus and bureaucrats. So all of that is operating, too.

But here’s what I’ve gleaned so far.

First, some general statements. I’ve read that for infectious diseases, lethality and ease of contagion are ordinarily (not always) somewhat in opposition. That makes sense, because if a disease is quickly and highly lethal, the sufferer will have much less opportunity to be walking around with it in his or her most contagious stages, and therefore will tend to infect fewer people.

That’s why many illnesses that are highly widespread – take the common cold, which is called “common” for a reason – are usually mild (although tell that to the cold sufferer). And yet even such seemingly innocuous illnesses have some lethality, in that (for example) a cold can lead in the susceptible to pneumonia, which is far more likely to kill.

Pneumonia is something we’re all familiar with because, like the common cold, it’s reached a relatively stable rate of infection and, although far less common than the cold, it’s something not especially uncommon. And unlike COVID-19, it’s far from new. But pneumonia can kill, and you might be surprised to learn how often. Pneumonia statistics are as follows:

“For US adults, pneumonia is the most common cause of hospital admissions other than women giving birth. About 1 million adults in the US seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia every year, and 50,000 die from this disease.”

That’s a death rate of 5% [for serious cases]. And not all these people are old or ill to begin with, either (see the link for more), although many are…

Most estimates I’ve seen so far about the death rate in COVID-19 are that it’s around 2.5% of people who are infected (not of the general population). However, there are several possible problems with this. One is that doctors may be missing a large number of mild or even asymptomatic cases, which would make the actual death rate much lower than that. Another is that it’s not just the death rate but the pattern of deaths that’s important. Most of the deaths have occurred in the elderly and especially the very elderly.

I want to emphasize once again that that was written in February of 2020, and it wasn’t rocket science either to figure all of that out. It was also obvious already that the MSM and the Democrats had huge motivations for making the situation seem as bad as possible.

It’s impossible to know for sure – but without COVID, I think Trump would have been re-elected. And even if you think that fraud was implicated in his 2020 loss, that fraud was encouraged by the enormous increase in mail-in voting that was supposedly justified by the COVID pandemic. No pandemic, no Joe Biden, no undoing of all the good things that Trump accomplished.

The eternal victim: Jussie Smollett

The New Neo Posted on by

Does it seem as though there have been a great many high-profile trials lately?

That’s because there have been. And the latest involves actor Jussie Smollett. He originally claimed to be a victim of a racial hate and homophobic crime. Now he claims to be the victim of a race crime hoax that was engineered by others and fooled him into thinking it was real.

He happened to have known those “others” and happened to have been caught communicating with them, paying them thousands of dollars (he says for meal planning?), and even perhaps rehearsing the crime with them. But no matter. Jussie is the victim:

On the first day of the trial, Dan Webb, the special prosecutor brought in to replace the hopelessly compromised DA Kim Foxx, claimed that Smollett conceived of the hoax and held a “dress rehearsal” with the two brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, including telling them to shout racial and homophobic slurs and ‘MAGA,’” according to the Associated Press.

Smollett bankrolled the caper, giving the brothers cash to buy the props — red hats, rope, and ski masks. They bought bleach to splash on Smollett because the gas they originally planned to use was too dangerous…

And, lo, on Monday we found out who the real racist and homophobic attackers were.

The black guys.

That’s right, the Nigerian brothers, who will testify during the trial, were the real brains behind the caper, according to Smollett’s defense attorney, Nenye Uche.

I wonder if Smollett will take the stand in his own defense. Perhaps, because as an actor he may think he can pull it off better than most.

Activism on the right: alumni power; keeping red states red

The New Neo Posted on by

University alumni have been increasingly using their power of the purse to put pressure on universities to defend academic freedom of thought and expression. Note the links there to organizations supporting and helping to organize the effort.

Here’a another worthy cause:

At FEE, we know the principles and their resulting policies that create prosperity for all. But we also know not everyone has had the opportunity to gain an education in these elements. With the Fresh Start States Project, we plan to provide that information to new residents in key areas through educational mailings, an interactive website, and world-class seminars. But we need your help to make this vision a reality.

Your donation will help us get this project off the ground by funding pilot projects in two cities, Nashville and Atlanta. In the first phase, we will work to gather data on new residents and contact them with materials introducing them to FEE. These materials will cover basic “how-to’s” for keeping the cost of living, housing, and taxes low in their new home states, as well as information on factors that impact education and crime. From there, we will develop these materials into an online portal and social media content so that this project can be rolled out in cities across the US.

It’s very late and getting later, but better late than never.

Andrew Branca will be covering the Kim Potter manslaughter trial at Legal Insurrection

The New Neo Posted on by

I had to think a moment before I remembered what that case is about. It’s the tragic situation in which a veteran police officer named Kim Potter thought she was reaching for her taser (yelling the warning “Taser, taser, taser!”) and instead reached for her gun and shot and killed Duante Wright, who was resisting arrest, instead of tasing him as she had intended. Potter is white and Wright was black.

I wrote three previous posts about the case, this, this, and this.

Attorney Andrew Branca writes especially insightful and thorough reports, and he will be covering the case day by day, as he did in the Rittenhouse case. You can find his initial post here, and today’s livestream post – regarding jury selection – is here.

Usually Branca has at least two posts on the trial every day. The first is a livestream and the second is an analysis.

Leftist Arizona State students don’t want Kyle Rittenhouse around

The New Neo Posted on by

Where does Kyle Rittenhouse go to get his reputation back [see *NOTE below]?

There’s a group of Arizona State students who have discovered that Kyle Rittenhouse was enrolled in some online ASU courses, and are incensed by this terribly distressing information. Their campaign against him involves exactly the people you’d expect to be launching it:

At least four student organizations at Arizona State University are calling on the school to remove Kyle Rittenhouse as a student. Students for Socialism, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition and MECHA de ASU plan to protest Rittenhouse’s enrollment on campus on Dec. 1.

The clubs have a shared list of demands for the university, including that Rittenhouse be withdrawn from ASU and the university release a statement denouncing white supremacy and Rittenhouse’s actions.

Students for Socialism, following in the footsteps of their illustrious predecessors.

The article was later updated with this announcement:

Kyle Rittenhouse is no longer enrolled in classes at Arizona State University, a university spokesperson told McClatchy News. Student groups upset that he was enrolled at one point say they still plan to push school officials to denounce white supremacy, Students for Socialism at ASU said in a Tweet.

As though white supremacy has anything whatsoever to do with the Rittenhouse case or Rittenhouse himself. But the fiction that he’s a white supremacist – which was pressed by the MSM and pushed by Democrats such as Biden – is so very useful.

Whether Rittenhouse (who was never a regular student there) un-enrolled himself or whether the university caved to leftist demands – which would be another example of what Allan Bloom called “dancing bear” administrators – is not clear. However:

“Students don’t feel safe with the prospect of having someone like Kyle Rittenhouse at ASU,” the anonymous member of ASU’s Students For Socialism said.

The student groups participating in the rally created a list of demands for ASU leaders, including that ASU releases a statement against white supremacy and acknowledge that Rittenhouse is a ‘racist murderer.’

That’s what leftists do – they lie and attempt to destroy lives, and sometimes they succeed. So these groups are doing the tried and true, under the now-popular rhetorical banner of “feeling safe”. They pervert the idea of education, but they are legion at universities across America. I wouldn’t “feel safe” with Students for Socialism at my university, but I never thought that feeling safe was the goal of education.

Nor do they, of course. It’s just something they claim in order to make their enemies feel very unsafe indeed.

This entire incident could be an opportunity for some actual education on the part of the ASU administration and faculty on the meaning of a public educational institution of higher learning, whether psychological “safety” is the goal, and what the rule of law is all about. I doubt that will happen, however, and I don’t think most administrators and faculty these days even care about those things. Many are simply leftist activists themselves.

I think Rittenhouse could find a nice home at Hillsdale, and I think they should offer it to him. He’ll have to provide his own security, unfortunately – for the rest of his life.

From the article:

Local attorney Dwane Cates is not connected to the school or the groups involved with the rally. We asked his legal opinion about what those groups wanted from ASU as it relates to Rittenhouse.

“If they went through with the rest of the demands and called him a white supremacist and other things, they would be setting themselves up for a libel slander suit,” Cates said. “Which, he’s already got a lawyer, and there’s already going to be a lot of people sued over this, and I don’t think ASU wants to get in line.”

I’d like to see Rittenhouse win a defamation lawsuit and get a lot of money. But I don’t think he’d prevail in such a suit because it’s hard to do if you’ve been criminally charged and tried, even if exonerated. That’s one of powers prosecutors have over our lives.

[*NOTE: That’s a famous quote from Ray Donovan:

In a highly publicized case, Donovan and six other defendants were indicted by a Bronx County, New York, grand jury for larceny and fraud in connection with a project to construct a new line extension for the New York City Subway, through a scheme involving a Genovese crime family associate and a minority-owned subcontractor. Schiavone Construction was required by its contract with the NYCTA to subcontract part of the work to a minority-owned enterprise. The essence of the charge was that the minority-owned firm (Jo-Pel Contracting and Trucking Corp) leased equipment from Schiavone and therefore was not truly independent of Schiavone. On May 25, 1987, Donovan (and all of the other defendants) were acquitted with a number of jurors openly applauding the verdict, after which Donovan was famously quoted as asking, “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” Reagan supported Donovan throughout the trial, and upon the latter’s acquittal, affirmed how he had “always known Ray Donovan as a man of integrity” and “never lost confidence in him.”

A second criminal investigation saw Donovan investigated by a federal special prosecutor. This was over allegations that he had ties to individuals in organized crime and claims that he was present when a union leader received an illegal payoff. No charges were pressed and the investigation was brought to an end.

Note the contrast between Reagan and Biden, who as candidate falsely and maliciously labeled the 17-year-old Rittenhouse a white supremacist, a charge the Arizona leftist students are employing.

Donovan’s Wiki entry states that in his later years he “participated in a local program that assisted in exonerating individuals who had been wrongfully convicted.” The word “local” there probably means in the Bronx. The organization isn’t named, and a link goes to the WaPo article which I assume is under a paywall. But my guess is that this organization either doesn’t exist anymore or is something like The Innocence Project, which deals with people who are already convicted but for whom DNA evidence ends up proving they didn’t do it. That doesn’t apply to either Donovan or Rittenhouse, neither of whom were convicted but who suffered nevertheless.]

You may have noticed that there’s been an overactive spam filter here lately

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of you may have experienced comments disappearing for no reason. Well, I usually don’t know the reason, either. I just check the moderation folder and the trash and spam folders now and then and I find them, and then I almost always liberate them to see the public light of day. But I probably miss a few.

So if you’re having repeated trouble that way, please let me know.

Also, here’s a question about blog business from commenter “JimNorCall”:

For any thread there is a usual set of regulars commenting. But, in addition, there is a fairly enormous set of “new names”.

The unfamiliar (to me) names will comment on just one or a couple posts but pretty much every post will have a few of them.

What is the source for all the people who visit TheNewNeo?

Generally there are a lot more people who just read here and don’t comment then there are people who comment here regularly. The commenters are the tip of a fairly small iceberg. But sometimes those lurkers comment, and they are perceived as new names even though they’ve been around a while.

Also, though, when there is a link at a big blog like Instapundit or elsewhere, there sometimes are quite a few commenters who arrive and then comment just once at that link but don’t stay. Some do stick around, though and become regulars.

There are also people who have some sort of alert that tells them when certain topics are written about. Some are trolls and some are just people interested in that topic.

For example, it used to be that, whenever I wrote something about Israel, anti-Israel trolls would come like ants at a picnic. Readers here don’t necessarily see the worst ones because I tend to ban them rather quickly. But many who come that way are also friendly.

For example, I once wrote a post about a certain poet, and his son came and commented. He must have had some sort of alert or perhaps he performed regular searches for his father’s name. Google has since changed its algorithm, however, so that blogs don’t come up in searches in the way they used to.

Apparently there’s also some glitch on my blog – something I have to get some professional to fix – that makes this blog even more invisible to Google than it would otherwise be. I’ve had trouble getting someone willing and able to help me, and I don’t think it’s mostly for political reasons, I think the job is just too minuscule for them to bother with in terms of the amount of money they’d receive.