ConfirmThem

I think we're just one vote away from sending this heinous practice back to the legislatures and to have this policy face the political reckoning it so richly deserves.

I continue to pray that all of the liberal activist justices on the court will be divinely forced off, to be replaced by strict constructionists like R. Ted Cruz, Edith Jones, Michael McConnell, Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown, Paul Clement, William Pryor, Viet Dinh, John Yoo, Edith Brown Clement, Frank Easterbrook, Priscilla Owen, Peter Keisler, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Jerome Holmes, etc.

I can see how a Republican or conservative could be pro-choice, but I don't see how either could support Roe. Anyone who says the Constitution states abortion must be legal should ask who wrote that amendment and what year it was passed.

No less than Larry Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, Ruth B. Ginsburg, and Sandy D. O'Connor have said at various times that Roe is, at a minimum, a poorly written & reasoned opinion.

This is why you hear all the gibberish about precedent & privacy; nobody aside from Justice Stevens thinks it's a brilliant piece of jurisprudence.

People just like the result, and state & national politicians of both parties are desperate not to be forced to vote on the basic issues, *when their vote will really matter*.

Just throwing this out there; I wonder if Sandy & Flipper could've been swayed back in '92 by a Brennanesque opinion that simply stated that abortions are allowed to save the life of the mother, & in cases of rape, incest, or a severe PHYSICAL health crisis. Everything else will be decided on a state-by-state basis. (FWIW I believe at least 70% of the nation would go for this)

I can understand completely Nino's desire to just plain overturn it, but the cat was long out of the bag by '92, and sometimes you have to take what you can get. Additionally, such a compromise would've put huge pressure from the far left
on Dems to pass a federal law allowing 3rd trimester PBA's if it's discovered the baby's eyes aren't blue, 14 y.o.s to taken by people across state lines w/o parental notification, etc. Could've been a big political win, too.

I agreew/Saletan & others who say just overturning it puts the pressure on Repubs, as unfortunately many people believe that overturning it will instantly outlaw it nationwide, and I do wonder if SDO was worried about all the 'trigger' laws out there, at least initially (by the end of her career she was all abortion, all the time, of course).

It's not originalism or consistent, but it sure may have worked. Could still actually.

Let history decide who was the more effective & influential Justice, Brennan or Scalia.

(note: I do believe that without Scalia as inspiration & educator, the Judiciary would be a complete lost cause, and SCOTUS would soon be nine Babbitts & Cuomos, w/the occasional Ikuta or Callahan mixed in for diversity's sake.)

The current push from the right is to have the SC push it down to the states so the elected legislatures there can decide. I realize this could generate an endless heated discussion, but I'm kind of curious when trying to look at this from afar in as open-minded a manner as possible. Where would it leave us if that were to happen?

Most anti-Roe folks could be categorized into a couple of different groups I'd think:
A) Those who believe abortion is murder and should be banned.
B) Those who wouldn't have a problem if one state opened it up entirely and one state banned it entirely.

Do people in group A really feel it's a states' rights issue, or are they just hoping to turn everything around? IOW if Roe gets overturned, would the people in group A start pushing for federal laws restricting abortions, such as PBAs for starters?

I suspect that would happen, and if so would it then be fair game to call these people hypocrits? "Oh, so it was a states' rights issue when you didn't like the federal law; now you're trying to take it away from the states and give it back to the feds if you can get it your way there."

To be fair, almost all Democrats are total hypocrits too. They say they want to make abortions rare, but vote against virtually any restrictions. To me, that's like saying you want to make drunk driving deaths rare, but you're against minimum drinking age and blood alcohol content laws and so on.

Because of the passions involved from people are the far left and right ends, isn't this going to be a heated fight forever? If the day comes where states can decide, I can see it becoming almost as crazy as it is today. If the feds are out of the picture, what happens for example to any attempts to pass state laws that involve other states, e.g. women or even just minors going to another state to get an abortion or buy a morning-after pill that they can't get at home? Would it be easier or harder to pass/enforce such laws?

I also believe that a majority of people are somewhere in the middle and wish there could be a happy medium and that be the end of the discussion. For example, I bet most people would be against PBA except to save the mother's life, and that most would also want to be able to use RU-486 or whatever if their 12yo daughter was raped. But the two extreme ends will never be satisfied with anything in the middle.

So sending it to the states will create 50 never-ending battles instead of one IMHO.

If you read the Blackmun papers and other inside accounts, Kennedy was with the conservatives in conference and switched at the last minute. The reports even have Scalia making a late night visit to Kennedy's DC home to make a last dicth appeal.

Kennedy was also very critical of it during the Webster confrence and was apparently willing to join Rehnquist's opinion overruling it until O'Connor balked.

Part of the problem is I don't thik Kennedy wants to be the 5th vote, to be the guy who overruled it. If there were already 6 or 7 votes, I could see him joining.

At this point, it's probably too late. If a dem wins in 2008, I'd say it's curtains. If Bush gets a 3rd appointment or a Republican wins, there's still a chance

I wonder if these judges have any idea what they've done. Putting aside the carnage, there's the incredible drain on the emotional energies of the country, the political divisiveness caused by Roe, the reluctance even to defend a country that has such a barbaric policy. When children used to ask their mothers where babies come from, they used to be told how the babies lived in the womb, but now the children so often get stony silence. Husbands are now forbidden to defend their unborn children, and wives are guaranteed the right to never tell their husbands what their love-making is continuing to cause. And, then there's all that carnage.

The rule of law has been made into a joke, as if anything in the Constitution required what the Court did in 1973. What a horrible horrible shame. What a tragic subversion of everything the civil rights movement and the sixties were about. And, that's my rant for the day.

BK,

I suggest the "hypocrisy" you found is exactly where you found it: in your strawman fabrication room.

The real point it that we live in a democracy, not an oligarchy. Questions of public policy are properly decided by the legislative branches, be they state, local or federal. The Court's role is to enforce the Constitution. Properly read, the Constitution is absolutely silent on the issue of abortion.

The question of "state's rights" would only present itself if the federal legislature tried to pass some law either sanctioning [criminalizing] or sanctioning [legitimizing] abortion.

If the result of the courts renouncing Roe is fifty state legislative battles, so be it. We have fifty legislative battles over schools, taxes, the minimum wage, etc.

The real problem in renouncing Roe is that pro-choice Republicans are going to be placed in a position of actual obstruction of the will of their pro-life primary electorates.

BSB

The country was has a continuous leftward drift precisely because both the liberal and conservative movements have leaders that are far to the left of their respective memberships. The country will only turn to the right when rank-and-file conservatives demand actual conservatives as their leaders.

I want more nominees NOW! Forget the State of the Union address: I want NOMINEES!!!

Any guesses as to when nominees may be named? Also, what are the odds Harriet Meirs gets the nod on the Fifth Circuit?

Maybe Dubya will use the State of the Union to say, "A weakness in the state of our union is a depopulated bench. So, I would like the American people to meet my nominees to fill every current vacancy on the federal appellate bench."

And then, among the nominees, is R. Ted Cruz to the 5th Circuit and Paul Clement to the 4th Circuit. :-)

has a President ever used a SOTU speech to pimp for specific judges (or nominees to any position)? certainly he has and should remind the people and congress about the importance of nominees having a fair hearing and an up or down vote (for all it will fall on the deaf ears of evil senators), but to call them out like America's Mother In Law trots The Children up to the Speaker's chair (if only verbally) would be cringe-worthy. simply not the place.

Not a single Democrat stood up and clapped when the President delivered his line about nominating qualified judges and giving them an up or down vote. Here goes a long two years.