The Supreme Court Will Pay for Overturning Roe
A few short weeks ago, speaking at a Federalist Society event, Justice Clarence Thomas warned ominously that “you cannot have a free society” without stable institutions. He contended that “we should be careful destroying our institutions because they don’t give us what we want when we want.” In hindsight his prediction that public regard for institutions— his worry that he didn’t know how much longer we would have and keep those institutions—reads more like a ransom note that a lament.
What Justice Thomas was telling us was that institutional respect is owed, blindly and without conditions. It chimed in the same key as then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s promise that unless Americans stopped disrespecting the police, the police might stop showing up to protect them. That isn’t how respect, or public trust, works. Those things are earned, over time. They can also be squandered, we are now learning, in the span of a few careless months.
Today, for the first time in constitutional history, the United States Supreme Court, by a 6-3 margin, took a fundamental constitutionally protected right away from half the population; a right around which generations of women and families have ordered their lives. Make no mistake, the same court that just 24 hours earlier had determined that the decision to carry a gun on the streets is such an essential aspect of personal liberty that states may not be permitted to regulate it, has now declared that decisions about abortion, miscarriage, contraception, economic survival, child-rearing, and intimate family choices are worthy of zero solicitude. None. In their view of liberty, women were worthy of zero solicitude at the founding, and remain unworthy of it today. As Mark Joseph Stern notes women will suffer, some will be refused treatment for miscarriages, and some will be turned away from emergency rooms. Some will be hunted down, spied on, and prosecuted for seeking health care, medication, and autonomy. The majority glibly tells us that because the harms to these people are unknowable, they are not urgent—or at the very least, less urgent than the harms faced by people who would like to see more guns in public spaces.
But ordinary Americans do not think these harms are trivial. On Thursday, Gallop polling showed the public approval for the Supreme Court to be at an historic low—25 percent. It’s a precipitous drop from the prior historic low the court received in September, which sat at about 38 percent. The six Justices in the majority of Dobbs will comfort themselves that this doesn’t matter. They will tell themselves that they corrected an historic injustice and that they saved unborn babies. They will say that they have lifetime tenure in order to protect against the whims of the majorities. They will blame protesters and they will continue to blame the press. Even the much vaunted centrism and pragmatism of Chief Justice John Roberts seems to have left the building. The fact of his seemingly moderate concurrence notwithstanding, in joining with a majority that could not wait to do in three years what they could do in one, it is clear that he has lost his court, and also that he is surely less worried about the public regard for the institution than we had believed.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-supreme-court-will-pay-for-overturning-roe/ar-AAYQnAX
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