Senate Republicans don’t have the votes to take down Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, but they’ve used her confirmation process to broadcast their intention to roll back decades of civil rights progress.
It’s funny, (actually not funny) how we were all sort of deluding ourselves that the GOP going after Roe was like a dog chasing a car, in that they needed it for ginning up their base and fund raising, and that they wouldn’t know what to do with it if they caught it… this should be a reminder that we decent human beings need to fight tooth and nail for every single one of these fights over rights, and hang them around the neck of the GOP and right wing like a toilet seat and bash them over the head loudly until every last one of these psychos are defeated at the polls. It’s a minority of people who want these rights rolled back… we shouldn’t forget that.
If a lawsuit undercutting Loving makes its way to the Supreme Court, will Clarence Thomas finally need to recuse due to conflict of interest?
Sure , Republicans, go ahead and overturn Griswold. That will be fun. I can then spend my sunset years enjoying an entrenched Democratic majority.
The US Constitution is very old, so privacy rights have had to be interpreted into the document over time. The EU is a much more recent creation, so they simply list out the rights in the 2012 Charter of Fundamental Rights. Congress has had over two centuries to fix the situation, e.g. protection of rights of the elderly and children, the environment, and science and the arts. A specific privacy right is the right to protection of personal data. Anyway, the US is almost to the same outcome, but through a contorted judicial path.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12012P/TXT
And here in lies the problem. Too many people - especially Republicans - are all about “rights for me but none for thee”. The only thing that’s saved the US has been the willingness of the judiciary to interpret the Constitution as broadly as possible in its enumeration of rights. That era seems to have come to an end with staunch right wingers on the SCOTUS who are loyal to an ideology rather than the citizenry. Up until now, the SCOTUS has been the only thing that’s saved the US from becoming a confederacy of separate mini-nations, each with their own interpretation of fundamental rights. For whatever reason - politics, hate, etc - it seems there are Justices right now who don’t think a person in New York should have the same rights when in Alabama.
We learn in school that this country was founded on the basis of “religious freedom” and mistake that phrase to mean “religious tolerance”. The original meaning “religious freedom” for the Pilgrims and other “religious refugees” meant “I have to freedom to believe what I want to believe and the freedom to impose my will on anyone who disagrees with me.”
This has been the basis of the conservative side of this country for pretty much four hundred years and it’s showing no signs of going anywhere.
The Founding Fathers failed to include fundamental rights in the Constitution (e.g. the 1st Amendment rights to free exercise of religious beliefs and freedom from a state religion), which incorporated cut-outs for slave-owners. That was sort of corrected quickly with the Bill of Rights, but to this day not all of them even apply to the states. You have to think that the US was pretty advanced in its thinking in the late 1700s, but we’ve kind of lagged in recent decades because of this reliance on SCOTUS to interpret privacy rights and other fundamental rights into existence. A good example is pay equality for women. Progress is extremely uneven across US states. Finland, for example, has acknowledged its own problems in reaching the very high nordic standards for pay equality, proposing to let everybody at work see everybody else’s wages.
They are small-r repugnants.
When I lived in Belgium (1980s), there was a government guideline for salaries for various job positions for companies to use. It was divided into salaries for men and salaries for women. The (American) jerk I worked for part of the time I was there had put a woman nominally at the head of the company because he could get away with paying her noticeably less than if he’d designated a man.
Pretty sure that is gone now…. But it was a shocker for me.
(TBF, not sure it was even still legal then, but he had started the company a number of years before and still had the book with the guidelines. And, of course, he was corrupt AF anyway. So was the woman he’d nominally put in the job. They both grifted like crazy.)
I sincerely hope that this is correct …but I am also disgusted that it is even a question.
Disgusted that so much of the opposition to her is plainly rooted in her gender and her ethnicity.
Her credentials are robust and impeccable… absolutely impeccable… no objective points to critique regarding knowledge, integrity, process.
And yet it may end up being a razor thin vote …
One of those was Griswold v. Connecticut , the case that established a right to privacy related to the use of contraceptives. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the 1965 decision “constitutionally unsound” precedent.
She should know, too. She has her Bachelor’s Degree in Home Economics! Contraceptives just ruffles her feathers!
So, do you suppose Marsha Blackburn’s Congressional salary is less than Gym Jordan’s? Personally, i’m pissed off that we’re paying anything to either one of them.
It is a failure of constitutional law that the 9th amendment—written exactly to prevent this sort of thing—has been long defanged and kicked aside. So now we have American policymakers honestly arguing that somehow, in the Most Free Nation on Earth, the citizens don’t have a right to privacy. I mean, what? And these are the same people who won’t shuttup about the virtue of small government.
They’re fascist. And if we just quit on fighting for Congress this fall, this is what we’re conceding to.
Democracy takes work. This is why you vote. We need to take a lesson from the rightwing. For forty years they kept voting GOP despite the supposed disappointments (what others would call progress). Now they are going to reap the benefit of that loyalty.
The only thing that will counter this madness is winning elections.
The most repulsive combination verb I have ever seen in Democratic Party politics is “come out”.
YOU FUCKING VOTE. You participate in your own representation
Hillary (a candidate who was disliked by enough Democrats to make it a social artifact) should have won by 400+ Electoral Votes in the face of running against a common thief…
At least
But see, this is a very privileged and casual thing you can say when your rights aren’t up for debate. Too many establishment democrats are far too complacent.
Note: Fascism on the March!
It exists on this site: people who link Trump’s election to Hillary’s faults.
With a straight face. Trump was an obviously incompetent, lazy, criminal liar. That’s like declining to work on averting a meteor strike because you like Chevys and your boss loves Fords.
For SCOTUS alone, that woman should have mopped the Floor on 2016.
Sadly, I am afraid we are paying them the same unearned salary…. Pisses me off too.