SCOTUS Will Gaslight Us Until the End

[marmar]

(Slate) Perhaps it would be refreshing if the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court no longer felt the need to lie to us. The lying, after all, is becoming nearly untenable—especially for an institution that relies on public confidence. After confirmation hearings in which they promised that stare decisis was a deeply felt value and that Roe v. Wade was a clear “precedent of the court” and “the law of the land.” there’s something sort of soothing about knowing the lying to our faces will soon be over. They were all six of them installed on the Supreme Court to put an end to Roe v. Wade after all, and that is exactly what they intend to do. There will be no more fake solicitude for women making difficult choices, no more pretense that pregnant people really just need better medical advice, and no more phony concerns about “abortion mills” that threaten maternal health. There is truly something to be said for putting an end to decades of false consciousness around the real endgame here, which was to take away a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy—rape, incest, abuse, maternal health no longer being a material factor. At least now we might soon be able to call it what it is.

But somehow, even still, only some of the six conservatives seem brave enough to admit to the real project. That became clear as oral arguments progressed this morning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Evaluating the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that prohibits virtually all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a pre-viability ban on its own terms that quite deliberately violates Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, some of the justices continued to pretend that what was being proposed—the overturning or hollowing out of a precedent on which generations of pregnant people had relied—was a teensy little tweak, a long-overdue tug of the constitutional sheets in the right direction.

Chief Justice John Roberts, sounding eminently Newsmax-y, referenced the private papers of Justice Harry Blackmun several times to argue that the author of Roe secretly believed the viability line established in that case is arbitrary. He then compared America’s abortion permissiveness to that of China and North Korea. (Reminder that the court’s conservatives do not like it when you compare U.S. capital punishment with foreign countries.) Justice Brett Kavanaugh, trying desperately to justify overturning Roe and Casey while sounding like the reasonable centrist he wants to be in the world, fatuously suggested, several times, that if only there were some way to balance a woman’s rights and interests against that of a fetus. The problem with Kavanaugh’s rhetorical question is that there is: It’s called Roe v. Wade, and if that wasn’t enough for him, he’d love to hear about Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which preserved the right to choose even while narrowing it. Indeed, the text of these opinions have struck that balance for 50 years. But rather than look to actual precedent, Kavanaugh instead posited that the middle place between a Constitution that outlaws all abortion and one that permits it is surely a Constitution that “leaves it to the states.” No matter that the outlawing of all abortion isn’t even on the table in this case. Say it enough times and it becomes a goalpost. ............(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/12/scotus-will-gaslight-us-until-the-end.html

[2naSalit]

1. Good piece by Dahlia Lithwicke.