Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.

This is really something. 

I've got CNN on. There's a bit of a freak-out happening, although I haven't been over to MSNBC yet, lol.

At the New York Times, "The decision is likely to reshape college admissions at elite schools. Here’s what to know":

Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.

Universities can consider how race has affected a student’s life — a topic they may write about in an application essay, for example — but he warned schools not to use such considerations as a surreptitious means of racial selection. “Universities may not simply establish through the application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” he wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”

“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said.

President Biden assailed the ruling in remarks hours after it was handed down in a televised address, saying the court had walked away from decades of precedent. He also offered guidance to colleges about how to move forward, proposing they take into account the adversity a student has overcome.

“Discrimination still exists in America,” he said, pounding his lectern and repeating his words for emphasis. “Today’s decision does not change that.”

Mr. Biden paused before leaving his remarks as a reporter asked if the court was “rogue.” “This is not a normal court,” he responded...

Via Memeorandum.

Also at the Wall Street Journal, "Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action in College Admissions."

And, "Affirmative Action Timeline: Key Dates."

'We Are Moving Backwards' -- A New 'Underground Railroad' in U.S. Amid Draconian Abortion Laws

 At Der Spiegel, "In the United States, abortion is no longer a basic right. The recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has allowed states to criminalize the act. But the battle for women's right to self-determination continues – on the streets and underground."

Meet the Temporary Republicans Saving U.S. From the Left

From Sasha Stone, on Substack, "Meet the Temporary Republicans ---- Who Will Save the Country from the Left": 

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” ― Theodore Roosevelt.

What did Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill all have in common? They could see the threat and had the courage to confront it.

Tulsi Gabbard is the one Democrat who could not only recognize the threat of the modern-day Democratic Party but also dares to lead a movement to help take them out of power. And they must be taken out of power until they can get a grip and restore some sanity to the party and the country.

You see the “Temporary Republicans” mostly on Twitter anonymously or in comment sections. But don’t be surprised if you see them turn out in November.

They are parents whose children’s lives or businesses were destroyed by crippling lockdowns. Parents whose toddlers were forced to wear masks inexplicably. Even questioning the absurdity of such an illogical command was verboten....

The “Temporary Republicans” like me will return to being liberals once the Democratic Party returns to liberalism. Right now, though, they have become a puritanical cult that separates children from their parents, separates all of us from our biology, common sense, and rights under the Constitution.

For us Temporary Republicans, we have run out of options. There aren’t many alternatives in a two-party system like ours. We're stuck until we can find a way to have more than just two parties. We must throw our weight behind the best bet to take the Democrats out of power.

We’ve almost become numb to how quickly our rights have been infringed with the forced compliance over vaccines, lockdowns, and masks, and the double standards on denying the results of an election or a violent political protest. We just live with “cancel culture” now as though it’s our new normal. Most of us are still afraid to say what we really think online and sometimes in front of our friends. Maybe all of that won’t end in one election, but it’s a start.

A grassroots movement like MAGA is what has always ensured America has a healthy Democracy. Once our government, media, and powerful monopolies set about silencing them, dropping their social media sites like Parler, calling them terrorists and extremists — that tells you just how afraid they are of anyone threatening their power.

The sense of urgency comes because we are at a dangerous crossroads. Already an entire generation has come of age online, the Zoomers. Every generation that comes after them will have their entire lives online. They will have been conditioned and curated from childhood to follow Big Tech's dictates, which will control every aspect of their lives...

RTWT.

 

The Backlash Politics of Dobbs May Come to Haunt Republicans in November

I have to own up to it: At the time of the Court's decision in June inflation and the economy were so bad I thought the Dobbs decision would fade as an important issue for voters in the midterms. Actually, not at all. Inflation's now easing a bit --- and gas prices especially --- and we certainly aren't falling into the much predicted recession amid Federal Reserve rate hikes.

Republicans are still expected to take the House majority, but it's not likley to be a tsumami wave election.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Abortion issue has deflated Republicans’ hopes for November; question now is how badly":

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade and ending the nationwide guarantee of abortion rights achieved a goal the Republican Party had pursued for more than four decades. Now, the bill has come due, at a price much higher than many Republicans expected.

Since the ruling in June, Democrats have done significantly better than expected in special elections, culminating Tuesday with a victory in a race for a vacant congressional seat in upstate New York that strategists on both sides thought the Republican would win.

Combine those results with polls that show Democratic Senate candidates leading in a half dozen swing states plus a surge of women registering to vote this summer in several states, and you have the evidence that has caused nonpartisan analysts to drastically scale back their expectations for GOP victories this fall.

Democrats, despondent over President Biden‘s dismal job approval ratings, had feared a wipeout this fall. Now, they have a strong chance of keeping narrow control of the Senate, perhaps even adding a seat to their majority. The House still seems likely to flip to the GOP, but the prospect of Republicans sweeping to a big majority has dissipated.

The possibility of Democrats saving their current tiny majority is “not out of the question,” David Wasserman, whose forecasts for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report have a wide following in both parties, said Wednesday on Twitter.

None of that means Democrats can start popping Champagne corks — Biden remains unpopular, inflation and the economy still top voters’ list of concerns and the political climate could shift again before November. For now, however, the evidence for a resurgence of Democratic fortunes is strong.

A closer race for the House

For the House, few polls look at specific races this far in advance of the election. Instead, surveys frequently ask people which party’s candidate they would vote for if the election were held now. That question, referred to as the generic ballot, has provided a fairly reliable tool to forecast elections for many years.

Before the Supreme Court decision, Republicans had just over a two-and-a-half point lead on that question, according to the average of polls produced by the FiveThirtyEight web site. The GOP’s standing began to decline shortly after the court’s ruling, and Democrats now lead the average by about a half point. In many recent polls, the Democratic lead has been larger, ranging as high as eight points among registered voters in a recent survey by the Republican firm Echelon Insights.

Caveats: Because of gerrymandering, the overall House map tilts slightly Republican. Because of that, if the two parties were to split the nationwide vote for the House evenly, Republicans would be almost certain to take the majority. In 2020, Democrats won the overall House vote by about three percentage points, which yielded their current four-vote majority.

Moreover, the generic ballot is just that, generic. It can give a rough guide to the vote for the House nationwide, but isn’t designed to say anything about specific congressional districts. Out of the country’s 435 congressional districts, only about 50-60 are competitive. Republicans need only increase their numbers by five seats to take the majority, and Democrats are defending a lot more competitive turf than the GOP this year. The political forecasting site run by Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia lists 27 House races as tossups, including three in California. Of those, Democrats now hold 21.

Special elections this summer have bolstered the polling evidence. Before the Supreme Court decision, Republican candidates in special elections ran well ahead of the mark that former President Trump had set in their districts in 2020 — results that boosted GOP hopes for a big wave.

Since the abortion decision, the picture has flipped. In four contests this summer, Democrats consistently have out-performed what Biden did in their districts two years ago.

Abortion isn’t the only issue helping Democrats: Inflation likely peaked in June, and gas prices have dropped all summer. Biden’s job approval has rebounded a bit. Democrats succeeded this month in passing major legislation on climate change and healthcare, which could help mobilize their voters. Biden’s announcement of debt relief for millions of student-loan borrowers could similarly motivate a large Democratic constituency, although it could also rile up Republican opponents.

But abortion rights were the center of the campaign waged by Pat Ryan, the Democratic candidate in Tuesday’s New York special election, and Democratic candidates nationwide likely will copy what he did. Meantime, some Republican candidates have begun scrubbing their websites to remove previous statements supporting abortion bans.

The issue could have its strongest effect in 22 competitive districts in six states — California and Michigan, where abortion referendums will be on the ballot, and Texas, Wisconsin, Georgia and Ohio, where sweeping bans have been enacted that a majority of the state’s voters oppose, according to Natalie Jackson, director of research at the Public Religion Research Institute, who has closely studied public opinion on abortion.

Democratic advantage in the Senate

Individual candidates matter more in Senate races than in the House because voters tend to know more about them. That’s added to Republican difficulties this year.

“Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome” in Senate contests, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell ruefully noted in recent comments in his home state of Kentucky in which he sought to lower expectations for what his side could accomplish.

In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Republicans have picked Senate candidates backed by Trump who have significant problems.

They’re likely to do the same in New Hampshire when that state holds its primary in mid-September. The leading Republican candidate in the state, retired Gen. Don Bolduc, has defended Confederate emblems as a “symbol of hope,” fanned anti-vaccination theories and repeatedly made false claims about the 2020 election...

 

How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas Vote

At the New York Times, "‘Your Bedroom Is on the Ballot’: How Democrats See Abortion Politics After Kansas":

A decisive vote to defend abortion rights in deeply conservative Kansas reverberated across the midterm campaign landscape on Wednesday, galvanizing Democrats and underscoring for Republicans the risks of overreaching on one of the most emotionally charged matters in American politics.

In a state where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, Kansans delivered a clear message in the first major vote testing the potency of abortion politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: Abortion opponents are going too far.

The overwhelming defeat of a measure that would have removed abortion protections from the state constitution quickly emboldened Democrats to run more assertively on abortion rights and even to reclaim some of the language long deployed by conservatives against government overreach, using it to cast abortion bans as infringing on personal freedoms. (As of Wednesday, the margin was 58.8 percent to 41.2 percent.)

“The court practically dared women in this country to go to the ballot box to restore the right to choose,” President Biden said by video Wednesday, as he signed an executive order aimed at helping Americans cross state lines for abortions. “They don’t have a clue about the power of American women.”

In interviews, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, urged Democrats to be “full-throated” in their support of abortion access, and Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said the Kansas vote offered a “preview of coming attractions” for Republicans. Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a highly competitive district, issued a statement saying that abortion access “hits at the core of preserving personal freedom, and of ensuring that women, and not the government, can decide their own fate.”

Republicans said the midterm campaigns would be defined by Mr. Biden’s disastrous approval ratings and economic concerns.

Both Republicans and Democrats caution against conflating the results of an up-or-down ballot question with how Americans will vote in November, when they will be weighing a long list of issues, personalities and their views of Democratic control of Washington. “Add in candidates and a much more robust conversation about lots of other issues, this single issue isn’t going to drive the full national narrative that the Democrats are hoping for,” said David Kochel, a veteran of Republican politics in nearby Iowa. Still, Mr. Kochel acknowledged the risks of Republicans’ overstepping, as social conservatives push for abortion bans with few exceptions that polls generally show to be unpopular.

“The base of the G.O.P. is definitely ahead of where the voters are in wanting to restrict abortion,” he said. “That’s the main lesson of Kansas.”

Polls have long shown most Americans support at least some abortion rights. But abortion opponents have been far more likely to let the issue determine their vote, leading to a passion gap between the two sides of the issue. Democrats hoped the Supreme Court decision this summer erasing the constitutional right to an abortion would change that, as Republican-led states rushed to enact new restrictions, and outright bans on the procedure took hold.

The Kansas vote was the most concrete evidence yet that a broad swath of voters — including some Republicans who still support their party in November — were ready to push back. Kansans voted down the amendment in Johnson County — home to the populous, moderate suburbs outside Kansas City — rejecting the measure with about 70 percent of the vote, a sign of the power of this issue in suburban battlegrounds nationwide. But the amendment was also defeated in more conservative counties, as abortion rights support outpaced Mr. Biden’s showing in 2020 nearly everywhere.

After months of struggling with their own disengaged if not demoralized base, Democratic strategists and officials hoped the results signaled a sort of awakening. They argued that abortion rights are a powerful part of the effort to cast Republicans as extremists and turn the 2022 elections into a choice between two parties, rather than a referendum just on Democrats...

Still more.

 

Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, Tearing Us Apart

At Amazon, Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.

San Clemente Considers Creating 'Abortion Free Zone'

Beautiful city. Classic California beach town. I was just down there over the weekend shopping at Beach Town Books.

Didn't see any pro-aborts protesting, however. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "This Orange County city to consider banning abortions, becoming ‘sanctuary for life’."

This City Council in Southern California is considering a resolution that would make it an abortion-free zone.https://t.co/dPQJR6ysHI

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 3, 2022

The '#Shes10' Abortion Story the Media Ran With Without Checking Is a Hoax and an Obvious One

At AoSHQ, "Megan Fox has been on the hoax from the beginning, and now Ohio AG Dave Yost completely obliterates the false story."

Supreme Court Ruling on Roe v. Wade Further Polarizes a Divided Nation

You'd think it couldn't get any worse. We've been viciously divided for years, but yeah, the Dobbs decision was like throwing gasoline on the fire.

At the New York Times, "Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis":

On abortion, climate change, guns and much more, two Americas — one liberal, one conservative — are moving in opposite directions.

Pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.

Call these the Disunited States.

The most immediate breaking point is on abortion, as about half the country will soon limit or ban the procedure while the other half expands or reinforces access to reproductive rights. But the ideological fault lines extend far beyond that one topic, to climate change, gun control and L.G.B.T.Q. and voting rights.

On each of those issues, the country’s Northeast and West Coast are moving in the opposite direction from its midsection and Southeast — with a few exceptions, like the islands of liberalism in Illinois and Colorado, and New Hampshire’s streak of conservatism.

Even where public opinion is more mixed, like in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, the Republican grip on state legislatures has ensured that policies in those states conform with those of the reddest states in the union, rather than strike a middle ground.

The tearing at the seams has been accelerated by the six-vote conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which has embraced a muscular states-rights federalism. In the past 10 days the court has erased the constitutional right to an abortion, narrowed the federal government’s ability to regulate climate-warming pollution and blocked liberal states and cities from barring most of their citizens from carrying concealed guns outside of their homes.

“They’ve produced this Balkanized house divided, and we’re only beginning to see how bad that will be,” said David Blight, a Yale historian who specializes in the era of American history that led to the Civil War.

Historians have struggled to find a parallel moment, raising the 19th-century fracturing over slavery; the clashes between the executive branch and the Supreme Court in the New Deal era of the 1930s; the fierce battles over civil rights during Reconstruction and in the 1950s and early 1960s; and the rise of armed, violent groups like the Weather Underground in the late ’60s.

For some people, the divides have grown so deep and so personal that they have felt compelled to pick up and move from one America to the other.

Many conservatives have taken to social media to express thanks over leaving high-tax, highly regulated blue states for red states with smaller government and, now, laws prohibiting abortion.

Others have transited the American rift in the opposite direction.

“I did everything I could to put my mouth where my money was, to bridge the divide with my own actions,” said Howard Garrett, a Black, gay 29-year-old from Franklin, Tenn., who ran for alderman in recent years, organized the town’s first Juneteenth celebration and worked on L.G.B.T.Q. outreach to local schools, only to be greeted with harassment and death threats.

Mr. Garrett moved to Washington, D.C., last year. “People were just sick in their heart,” he said, “and that was something you can’t change.”

On abortion, history seems to be riffing on itself.

Both supporters and opponents of abortion rights see a parallel to the abolition of slavery.

As states like Illinois and Colorado vow to become “safe harbors” for women in surrounding states seeking to end their pregnancies, abortion rights advocates see an echo of past efforts by antislavery states in the North. But abortion opponents see themselves as emancipating the unborn, and often compare the Roe decision’s treatment of the fetus to the Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that denied Black people the rights of American citizenship.

Conservatives are not resting on their victories: The anti-abortion movement, long predicated on returning the issue of reproductive rights to elected representatives in the states, talks now about putting a national abortion ban before Congress.

Roger Severino, a leading social conservative and senior official in the Trump administration, invoked the struggle of Black Americans for equality, saying the 10 years that passed between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ending “separate but equal” segregation and Congress’s passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 mirrored the struggle ahead on abortion.

“I cannot see us living in two Americas where we have two classes of human beings in this country: some protected fully in law, some who are not protected at all,” said Mr. Severino, now the vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank...

 

The Left Killed the Pro-Choice Coalition

It's the great Kat Rosenberg, at UnHerd, "Feminists are increasingly demonising pregnancy":

In 1992, while the ascendant evangelical Right was pushing to roll back abortion rights as part of its “family values” platform, the Democratic party stumbled on a pro-choice message that would not only win the presidency but also define the party’s position for years to come. It consisted of three words, first spoken by then-presidential nominee Bill Clinton, and ultimately heard so often that they started to take on the air of catechism: an incantation whose mere utterance rendered a politician rhetorically bulletproof.

Safe. Legal. Rare.

For those whose interest in the American Left only goes back as far as the Obama administration, it’s hard to explain what a triumph this was. Not only did the phrase create a big tent under which even people who felt morally ambivalent about abortion could comfortably gather, it also forced Republicans into insane, reactionary counter-positions. As well as safe and legal abortions, the Democrats were promoting comprehensive sex education and contraceptive access, which would help prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place — and Republicans, rather than make common cause with their enemies, mostly opted to argue against these things.

And so, for a brief but magical moment, the Democrats could reasonably claim to be the party of fewer abortions and more shagging, while conservatives were left to take the deeply unpopular position that all non-procreative sex was bad, actually.

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic has observed the remarkable staying power of “safe, legal, and rare”, which “translated into language the inchoate sentiments of millions of Americans so exactly that they had to hear it only once for it to become their firmly held position on abortion”. The message was so effective that Hillary Clinton even resurrected it in 2008 during her first (ultimately unsuccessful) play for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two years after that President Barack Obama explicitly identified the phrase as “the right formulation” when it came to discussing abortion.

And yet, in the past 10 years, “safe, legal and rare” has fallen out of favour, as arguments emerged in the more language-obsessed corners of the Left that the “rare” part was unduly stigmatising. “It posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make”, one activist wrote last year, in an essay demanding the phrase be retired.

It’s hard to overstate the utter self-sabotaging lunacy of this argument, which not only undermined one of the most popular lines of party messaging in decades but is also farcically nonsensical: “safe, legal, and rare” are surely a solid and desirable set of criteria for any medical procedure that is both unpleasant and unplanned, as abortions (but not only abortions) invariably are. And yet, the argument prevailed: by the time Hillary ran for president in 2016, the word “rare” had been excised from the Democratic party platform.

In its place arose a variety of messages, none nearly as effective, and some deeply strange, even ghoulish. Among the most notable side effects of the argument that abortion need not be rare is an increasingly prevalent notion that perhaps pregnancy should be. In the days following the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision that ultimately overturned Roe v Wade, the very online Left traded horror stories about what it can do to your body. One much-shared Twitter thread from an obstetrician enumerated the risks of pregnancy like a carnival barker marketing a house of horrors: “Hemorrhage from miscarriage or ectopic, sepsis, blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, hyperemesis and intractable vomiting, increased domestic violence, exacerbations of heart disease, lupus and rheumatologic disease, hypertension, seizures, and mental illness, diabetes” — it’s all right here, folks, and that’s before we even get to the torn anal sphincter and urinary incontinence! Step right up, ladies!

The pro-choice press has only reinforced the horror, by giving us wall-to-wall coverage of the danger of pregnancy and childbirth. Here’s New York Times columnist Pamela Paul with a gut-twisting account of her emergency C-section, which culminated in “being held down by two doctors while my body parts were gathered and reinserted into my torso”. Here’s Kate Manning in the Washington Post talking about urine leakage, blood-covered bedsheets, “cracked nipples and infected breasts”. Here’s Scientific American warning us that “even a seemingly ‘safe’ pregnancy is not without significant risk”. Of course, the intention is only to emphasise that nobody should be forced to go through this — but you would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that not only should abortion be available on demand, but that no woman in her right mind would ever carry a pregnancy to term unless she had some sort of death wish.

Gone are the days when the Left took pains to emphasise that it was not pro-abortion, but against unwanted pregnancy; instead, this moderate stance has metastasised into a demonisation of pregnancy in general. Some have framed this as a look-what-you-made-me-do position forced by the anti-choice Right: “If there was ever anything beautiful about pregnancy, the anti-abortion movement has devoured it, and spat up something hateful in its place. Pregnancy, for many, will now end dreams, alter futures, maybe even kill,” writes New York Magazine‘s Sarah Jones.

In a recent essay for The Bulwark, Mona Charen laments that “young women reading these stories may get the impression that pregnancy is a hellscape of pain, disfigurement, and degradation”. (I disagree with this argument not in substance but in scope: these stories are no less terrifying to women in middle age who, in their waning fertility, might have been on the fence about having kids and are now loathe to do so lest they turn into the Elephant Man.) But even if this type of rhetoric doesn’t ultimately put a dent in the birth rate, it seems to reflect a penchant on the Left for the opposite of coalition-building, for busting up the movement one taboo turn of phrase at a time. Goodbye, “rare”. Goodbye, “women”. Goodbye, “choice” — the beating heart of the movement, now categorised as “harmful language” — and goodbye to the allies who favoured these terms, now severed and drifting away from the movement like Inuit elders who have outlived their usefulness, cast onto an ice floe to die.

Most remarkable is that abortion access is, in fact, an issue with direct bearing on the lives of a vast majority of Americans — not only women, but any man in a heterosexual partnership with one — and yet some of the loudest voices on this issue insist on describing it as anything but. Consider the now-notorious tweet in which the ACLU listed all the groups most impacted by abortion bans. “The LGBTQ community” was second; “women” were not listed at all.

Such rhetoric is inevitably adopted in the name of inclusivity, which is funny, given how it not only sparks internecine infighting but also rules out virtually every position that might have had widespread resonance in the way that “safe, legal, and rare” once did...

Keep reading.

 

Allie Beth Stuckey: Pro-Lifers Have Been Doing Everything

She's very passionate, on Twitter.

To the evangelical leaders telling us we shouldn’t celebrate overturning Roe when we’re not doing enough for moms and children: you’re wrong.

For decades, Pro-lifers have been doing all the work you say needs to be done. You are welcome to get off the couch and join us. pic.twitter.com/8NMKCnLOzy

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) June 30, 2022

Life After Roe Will Be Worse Than Democrats Feared

It's from Katha Pollitt, a well-known extremist on abortion rights.

At the Nation, "We are dealing with religious fanatics, with police chiefs on a mission and prosecutors looking to make their careers in deeply red places":

Let’s not kid ourselves. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, is going to be a catastrophe. There’s a German proverb that translates roughly as “the soup is never eaten as hot as it’s cooked,” meaning things won’t be as bad as you fear. Sometimes that’s true, but it wasn’t for the Germans, and it won’t be for us.

For years pro-choicers have warned that the right to abortion was at risk, only to be called Chicken Littles by pundits and politicos, usually men. Some thought returning abortion to the states would lead to a middle-of-the-road practical solution and, more important, take abortion out of politics. Ha! Others were sure no one wanted bans to happen: Republicans only used “cultural issues” to distract voters from the party’s real agenda, screwing the working class on behalf of corporations. Thomas Frank made himself famous with a book devoted to that thesis, What’s the Matter with Kansas? I hope he apologizes to the women of Kansas, because the fears he dismissed have come to pass.

What can be done? Abortion funds, which raise money for low-income patients’ procedures, are wonderful, and you should give them all your money now, but even before Dobbs, they couldn’t help everyone in need. Their work will be harder now. On Monday, abortion funds in Texas suspended operations because of laws criminalizing helping women seeking to end their pregnancies. If you thought, as many did, that abortion opponents would be satisfied with a return to pre-Roe hypocrisies, when millions of women got abortions while law enforcement mostly looked the other way, think again.

What about traveling to pro-choice states, some of which have recently strengthened protections for abortion rights? That’s not so easy, even for people with money, although it will be much harder for low-income patients. Most women who have abortions are mothers, after all; many have jobs that won’t allow them time off. They can’t just pick up and fly to New York City or Chicago, or drive all day and night to reach the nearest clinic. They’ll need help, and help is expensive. The Brigid Alliance, an abortion travel service which pays all costs—transportation, lodging, food, child care—spends about $1,000 per patient. The influx of patients from states with bans will affect care in the states they travel to. Clinics are already overscheduled. Soon they will be overwhelmed.

Ah, but there are abortion pills, some say, which make it possible to end pregnancies cheaply at home. Pills are crucial, but not a panacea. Yes, they are safe, unlike illegal abortions pre-Roe, but you have to know they exist, how to find them, how to take them, and what to say if you end up going to the ER so you don’t get arrested. You have to know how pregnant you are—they don’t work so well after 12 weeks. You have to avoid copycat anti-abortion websites. And around 5 percent of the time, they won’t work. Who knows how long it will be legal to send them, by mail or in person, to an abortion-ban state? Abortion opponents are already working on ways to criminalize pills and people who make it possible to acquire them. The latest: Facebook and Instagram are taking down information on how to obtain them. Remember when information wanted to be free?

So let’s face it. In half the country, women are fetal vessels now. Their lives, their physical and mental health, their education, their employment, their relationships, their ability to care for their other children, their hopes, ambitions and dreams—none of that matters. What matters is that they incubate a fertilized egg and deliver an infant—which, as Amy Coney Barrett suggested, they can always drop off at the nearest safe-haven baby box. The law may not come after you if you give a pregnant friend money for the procedure or drive her to a free state; anti-abortion activists might not track your pregnancy digitally, as Jia Tolentino warns, but then again, they might (memo to readers: Delete your period tracker now). The capacity exists: to know your online searches, your travel plans, your proximity to a clinic. Does a fetal vessel have rights? I wouldn’t count on it...

Still more at that top link, if you're up to it.

Joe Biden Wants to Deep-Sex the Filibuster to Codify Abortion Rights

He's the biggest asshole.

Gawd.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Biden backs changing Senate filibuster rules as a way to codify abortion rights":

MADRID — President Biden said Thursday that the Supreme Court’s decision ending a constitutional right to abortion is “destabilizing” and that he supports changing Senate rules to codify nationwide abortion protections. He maintained the ruling does not affect U.S. standing on the world stage as he took credit for modernizing the NATO alliance to adapt to new threats from Russia and China.

Biden was speaking to reporters at the conclusion of a five-day foreign trip to huddle with North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in Madrid and the leaders of the Group of 7 advanced democratic economies in the Bavarian Alps, which came as the nation was still grappling with the fallout from Friday’s Supreme Court decision.

“America is better positioned to lead the world than we ever have been,” Biden said. “But one thing that has been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court of United States in overruling not only Roe v. Wade, but essentially challenging the right to privacy.”

He added: “I could understand why the American people are frustrated because of what the Supreme Court did.”

RiseupforAbortionRights rallies throughout downtown opposing the recent Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe v Wade.

Biden said he would support changing the Senate filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to pass most legislation, to allow a bill extending nationwide abortion protections to pass by simple majority, but he said it would likely require voters to send additional Democratic senators to Washington to get done...

Batya Ungar-Sargon Interview With Megyn Kelly (VIDEO)

They're talking about the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. Batya rattling off all the polling data on abortion rights is compelling.

WATCH:

Democrats' Abortion Views Are Far Too Radical to Benefit From the Post-Roe Political Reality

From Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist, "At a time Democrats desperately need to seem normal, they are saddled with one of the least defensible policy positions in American life":

As soon as the Supreme Court issued its ruling finally overturning the Roe v. Wade abortion decision that had so roiled the nation for nearly 50 years, Democrats and their allies who control corporate media began asserting it would be a political boon for their party.

“Democrats see abortion as a big base motivator and a potential winning issue with independents,” claimed Politico.

Democrats could certainly use some help. The party controls all of Washington, D.C. Voters have indicated they’re prepared to deliver large Republican gains in November in response to a series of Democrat policy failures leading to a looming recession, labor problems, supply chain disruptions, high gas prices, rising crime, another foreign war without a strategy for victory, and a completely out of control border.

But there are several problems for Democrats hoping to stem the losses, including that the general Democrat position of abortion on demand until the moment of birth is far too radical to gain politically in most areas of the country. Even CBS polling found that only 17 percent of Americans agree with such an extreme stance.

The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, despite the media disinformation, simply returns abortion law to the states, enabling citizens and their elected representatives to debate and set abortion laws and policies. Roe had falsely decreed that a right to abortion was in the Constitution, and therefore beyond public debate, a view the court flatly and finally rejected last week.

Abortion is a hotly debated topic, and neither those who oppose or support it are likely to be fully happy about public opinion. Most Americans strongly oppose abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy, but most Americans also support some allowances for abortion at earlier stages in pregnancy. In May, a Gallup poll found that 63 percent of Americans support making abortion illegal or legal only in certain circumstances.

Mixed Bag Politically

While the decision may help Democrats hold onto a few suburban seats Republicans had hoped to wrestle back from the party in power, it is unlikely to help them in battleground states and districts where Republicans are experiencing dramatic gains...

Sure, abortion rights supporters are extremely passionate about the issue, but if you check the polls, Ms. Mollie's right: Bread-and-butter kitchen table issues dominate the list of most important problems facing the country. Inflation by itself will drag down Democratic numbers. They've already lost at least a million voters who've recently switched to the GOP, and along the border, Hispanic voters are abandoning Democrats faster than a racehorse under the whip.

We're a little more than 5 months out from the November midterms. Roe or no, the Dems are in big trouble.

Still more.

Mary Ziegler, Abortion and the Law in America

See, at Amazon, Mary Ziegler, Abortion and the Law in America.

Liz Wheeler Discusses Supreme Court Decision in Dobbs v. Jackson (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Liz's emergency stream after the Court overruled Roe on Friday. She's positively giddy and takes the time to read the key quotes from the ruling, relishing every word and ridiculing sourpuss Nancy Pelosi almost a dozen times in the process. 

Good stuff.

WATCH:

The Leak, the Threats, the Violence — Reaction to Roe Is Dark Day for U.S.

From Glenn Reynolds, at the New York Post:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is a victory for the rule of law.

I’m not talking so much about the opinion itself. I’m talking about the Supreme Court majority’s demonstration that it will do what it thinks is right despite unprecedented pressure from the media, from Democrats in Congress, from “activist” groups and even from angry mobs and attempted assassins who show up at their homes.

This is a big deal. When, as reported by Jan Crawford, a coordinated bullying campaign flipped Chief Justice John Roberts’ position in NFIB v. Sebelius, the ObamaCare case from 2012, many observers, especially on the right, lost faith in the court’s independence. And the perception that the court could be bullied, naturally, was a guarantee that people would try bullying it again.

And they did, in spades. Activist groups sent mobs to protest at the homes of justices expected to vote to overturn Roe, even though that sort of pressure on federal judges is a crime. (Unsurprisingly, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice appears to have done nothing.) In an unprecedented breach of confidentiality, an insider at the court — we still don’t know who, for some reason — leaked a draft opinion that became a rallying point for Democrats and the left.

Extremist rhetoric — of the sort that’s called “hate” when it comes from the right and “passion for justice” when it comes from the left — raised the temperature to the point where a would-be assassin actually showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a Glock, two magazines and pepper spray. He’s now awaiting trial. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) even threatened Kavanaugh and other conservative justices that they would “pay the price” for overturning Roe.

This deadly threat to a sitting Supreme Court justice drew an extremely muted reaction from pundits and Democratic politicians, though an politically motivated assassination to change a judicial opinion would be enormously destabilizing and destructive. On social media, people were openly wishing for the deaths of conservative justices. But the same people who decried the Jan, 6 protests — where only an unarmed protester was the victim of deadly violence — seemed unfazed by this.

Now leftists are promising a “Night of Rage” in response to Roe being overturned...

 

President Trump's Lasting Legacy After the Supreme Court's Ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson

Something I noted last Friday on Twitter. If this is the most consequential Supreme Court ruling in 100 years, then doesn't that mean Donald Trump's the most consequential president as well?

At the Los Angeles Times, "News Analysis: Trump’s lasting legacy grows as Supreme Court overturns Roe":

WASHINGTON — President Biden rarely mentions his predecessor by name. But as he spoke to a nation processing a seismic shift in the rights of women, he couldn’t ignore Donald Trump’s legacy. “It was three justices named by one president — Donald Trump — who were the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country,” Biden said Friday after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark ruling from 1973 that provided constitutional protections for women seeking abortions.

The abortion decision marked the apex in a week that reinforced the former president’s ongoing impact in Washington more than a year and a half after he exited the White House.

A court that includes three Trump-appointed conservatives also decided to weaken restrictions on gun ownership. And across the street at the Capitol, which was ravaged by a mob of Trump supporters in the final days of his presidency in 2021, new details surfaced of his gross violations of democratic norms. The House’s Jan. 6 committee used a public hearing last week to spotlight the intense pressure that Trump put on top Justice Department officials to overturn the 2020 election, along with discussions of blanket pardons for cooperative members of Congress.

The developments were a reminder of the awkward political bargain social conservatives embraced to achieve their grandest ambitions. In refusing to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee during the final year of his presidency, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ensured that the next president would be able to make his mark on the court. As Trump pledged to transform the Supreme Court’s ideological leanings — even providing a list of the judges he would choose from — reluctant conservative Republicans and evangelical Christians rallied behind Trump, a thrice-married man who had previously described himself as “very pro-choice.”

“When he ran in 2016, he promised that he would appoint conservative and pro-life judges to the federal courts starting with the U.S. Supreme Court. And he kept his word,” said Ralph Reed, an evangelical leader and chair of the the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who was criticized in some corners for his embrace of Trump. “Those in the faith community that felt it was worth taking a chance on Donald Trump in 2016 have been vindicated.”

The GOP is now at something of a turning point in its relationship with a man who has fundamentally transformed the party with his populist, “Make America Great Again” agenda and his fight against the establishment Republicans who used to control the party. There’s a growing debate within the party about whether Trump’s resonance is beginning to fade as lays the groundwork for a third presidential run in 2024.

Other leading Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump’s former secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, are taking increasingly bold steps toward White House bids of their own. And many of Trump’s own supporters are eagerly embracing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as Trump’s natural successor as they look to the future.

Pence, Pompeo and DeSantis are among those who have made clear that a Trump candidacy would not influence their own decisions about whether to run. If they do run, they will all be competing for support from the same conservatives who fueled Trump’s rise.

Trump himself seems somewhat uncertain about how to navigate the political fallout from the past week, particularly the abortion ruling. He has privately expressed concern to aides that the decision could energize Democrats going into the November elections, the New York Times first reported.

Indeed, in a Fox News interview after the abortion opinion was released, Trump said that, “in the end, this is something that will work out for everybody.”

Asked about his own role in the eventual decision, Trump responded that, “God made the decision.”

Trump grew more emboldened as Friday unfolded, raising money off the court ruling and issuing a statement in which he took full credit for what he called “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation.”

He said that it and “other decisions that have been announced recently, were only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. It was my great honor to do so!”

At a Saturday night rally, Trump took another victory lap to cheers from the crowd...

The Conservative Legal Push to Overturn Roe v. Wade Was 50 Years in the Making

 At the Wall Street Journal, "An increasingly influential movement questioned the view of constitutional rights underpinning the decision":

WASHINGTON—The overruling of Roe v. Wade was 50 years in the making—the culmination of a conservative judicial movement that rejected the interpretation of constitutional rights underpinning that 1973 Supreme Court decision.

It took far longer than many conservatives expected.

The majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, first disclosed in draft version by an extraordinary leak in May, declared that Roe and later abortion-rights precedents have no basis in the Constitution. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Even as a young lawyer, Justice Alito had looked for ways to push back on the reasoning behind Roe going back to the 1980s, when he worked in the Reagan Justice Department. In a May 1985 memo, he sketched out opportunities “to advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade.”

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III championed the conservative jurisprudence during the Reagan years and promoted the young lawyers—Justice Alito among them—who would rise to influence through successive Republican administrations.

“It really has been a matter of pretty clear record for a long time that [Roe] was wrong,” he said.

Because the Constitution doesn’t expressly grant women a right to end a pregnancy, many conservatives, like Mr. Meese, have said the court erred by construing a right to privacy that allows for abortion at least in the earlier stages of gestation. That originalist legal view overlapped with the convictions of a broader set of people who opposed abortion on what they considered moral grounds as the taking of a life.

Friday’s liberal dissenters pointed to a different constitutional tradition, one that has seen rights expand since the country’s beginnings. The framers “understood that the world changes. So they did not define rights by reference to the specific practices” of their time but “defined rights in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning,” Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in a joint opinion.

For the antiabortion movement that has helped power Republican political success—including the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who as president appointed three justices who were in the Dobbs majority—the end of Roe was long a key goal. With states now free to regulate the procedure, most abortions likely will be outlawed or at least curbed in about half the states.

But for the conservative legal movement, “this was not a matter of deciding whether abortion is a good idea or a bad idea,” said Mr. Meese, now 90 years old. “It’s a matter of the Constitution.”

Counterrevolution

That Roe would stoke a legal counterrevolution leading to its own undoing was far from evident in January 1973, when by a 7-2 vote the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability, or the capacity to live outside the womb. The decision invalidated dozens of state laws banning or restricting abortion, many dating from the 19th century.

The decision followed a line of cases that had steadily removed the government from regulation of family life and sexual practices. In the Roe opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun cited a series of earlier decisions. It began in the 19th century, he wrote, when the court rejected Union Pacific’s demand that a female passenger, who was suing the railroad for negligence after an upper berth fell on her, submit to a surgical examination.

“No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person,” the court said in 1891, a year after Louis Brandeis, a future justice, co-wrote a seminal article in the Harvard Law Review, “The Right to Privacy.”

Justice William O. Douglas had invoked that legal tradition in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision striking down an 1879 state law banning contraception. The “marriage relation” involves “a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights, older than our political parties, older than our school system,” he wrote.

Justice Hugo Black was among those who disagreed. “I like my privacy as well as the next one,” he wrote in his Griswold dissent, “but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.” The lack of such a named provision has been underlying judicial opposition to Roe v. Wade ever since.

In a passage that Justice Antonin Scalia later called “garbage,” Justice Douglas wrote that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”

In that context Justice Blackmun wrote in his 1973 Roe decision that the right of privacy was not only grounded in the Constitution, but also “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”

That right wasn’t absolute, he added, and “at some point in pregnancy” government may “assert important interests” that include “protecting potential life.” Following a 1972 lower court decision invalidating Connecticut’s abortion ban, Roe drew the line at viability, generally seen as between 22 and 24 weeks.

While even some conservative commentators praised the decision, the legal substance of the ruling came under some criticism—including from some liberal-leaning scholars who supported a woman’s right to an abortion. Like Justice William Rehnquist, who dissented from Roe, Yale professor John Hart Ely likened the decision to the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, which struck down a state law limiting working hours for bakers with the argument that it violated a different unenumerated right the court found implicit in the Constitution: the “liberty of contract.”

That precedent, which jeopardized a swath of state laws over workers’ safety and fair treatment, had been effectively abandoned by a series of decisions over the ensuing half-century. “Roe may turn out to be the more dangerous precedent,” Ely wrote, adding: “I suppose there is nothing to prevent one from using the word ‘privacy’ to mean the freedom to live one’s life without governmental interference. But the Court obviously does not so use the term. Nor could it, for such a right is at stake in every case.”

In response to Roe, abortion opponents initially focused on amending the Constitution. Rep. Larry Hogan Sr. (R., Md.), the father of Maryland’s current governor, proposed within days of the Supreme Court’s opinion an amendment extending due-process and equal-protection rights to “any human being, from the moment of conception”—effectively equating abortion with murder. When such proposals died in Congress, activists turned to the states. By 1981, more than a dozen legislatures, including Massachusetts and Mississippi, had passed resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to consider a human-life amendment. The movement stalled short of the 38 necessary states.

Remaking the judiciary became a central strategy for reversing Roe when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, amid a broader effort to move federal courts against what Mr. Meese called the “radical egalitarianism and expansive civil libertarianism” the justices had embraced in the 1950s and ’60s. In that era, the court under Chief Justice Earl Warren took steps to abolish racial segregation, end government censorship, extend voting rights and increase protections for criminal defendants, as well as rulings like Griswold that defined a broader concept of privacy and individual rights.

Conservatives argued that in those decisions the justices sometimes overstepped their authority to remake society as they pleased...