The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today in the case that could decide the fate of abortion rights in the United States. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, centers on a 15-week abortion ban out of Mississippi. The state and a chorus of conservative groups have urged the justices to overturn precedent guaranteeing abortion as a constitutionally protected right.
I think it’s a safe bet that SCOTUS will side with Mississippi on this one. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what six of the Justices have wanted all along, isn’t it?
Based on the snippets I’m reading on Twitter, it feels like the conservatives are leaning towards siding with the State of MS and overturning Roe. However, the liberals on the SCOTUS are doing a great job of making clear to everyone that this case is about overturning Roe and not some stealth, back door approach where Roe somehow co-exists with a standard that erodes or chips away at it. No middle ground. Sotomayor is plainly stating that such a decision would be political and effectively lawless. The conservatives may take that as a challenge to write a decision that somehow makes an anti-Roe ruling consistent with Casey, but they’ll lose the political battle, and that matters most.
Breyer and Sotomayor are making it pretty clear that if the conservative majority does overturn Roe, the GOP will pay the max political price. If there’s one person that argument can persuade, it’s Kavanaugh. That said, I’m not too optimistic about Roe remaining as law.
6-3 to affirm the 15-week ban. That’s a no-brainer. Roberts writes for the majority, because he gets to assign the opinion to himself. Guaranteed that it will include legal fuckery that enables basically any and all restrictions, but it won’t outright overrule Roe, just the viability threshhold.
Thomas and Alito will concur with the majority on affirming the 15-week ban, but will write separately to performative display how much they hate hate hate abortion. Gorsuch might join them, but I think he’ll probably keep his powder dry for the next fight. Rapey McBeerface and Handmaid’s Tale both probably go along with the Chief.
Breyer assigns the dissenting opinion to Justice Kagan, who will shit all over the forced-childbirth majority.
I will not be surprised to see the six radicals on the court kill Roe. This is what the Radical Christians have demanded ever since the Moron Majority was formed.
Sounds like somebody’s cousin trying to get a job down the lodge, and most of the board just has to OK it.
Nothing from the justices on the tax-free status of the entities bringing these cases, and how they are funded.
Of course, this is the same court that said with a straight face that employee unions would be able to balance the political money spent by companies that have spent the last 50 years shutting the unions down while packing this very court.
They will still win plenty of elections. It will, at best, make it just barely slightly more difficult for some of them to win. I would love to believe there is some constituency within the MAGA coalition who thinks that banning abortion is a bridge too far, or that there are oodles of untapped voters who are going to get riled up about the womb police taking over their bodies, but I would also love to believe that Middle Earth is a real place and that unicorns fart rainbows.