“When asked about Mace’s resolution to force McBride to use the men’s bathroom, one unnamed moderate Republican perhaps hyperbolically responded to “I mean — a presidential election may have been decided on this issue.””
I don’t think there was anything hyperbolic about his response. Trump’s campaign didn’t spend $200 million it they didn’t think it was working. It didn’t change the outcome in Florida, Texas or California, but a few thousand votes in swing states make all the difference in our weird system.
If that is the case please enlighten us with your superior lawyerly knowledge and wisdom how Clarence Thomas’s concurrence fits into the entirety of your point. The bottom line as I see it is that you are expressing a theoretical standard, an ideal toward which the judiciary should strive, where I am describing the actual practice by some on this court.
“Tucked inside the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that overturned the long-held constitutional protection for abortion was a concurring opinion from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. In it, he pushed the court to revisit cases that have already been decided related to contraception and same-sex marriage.”
Substantive Due Process was an issue in Dobbs. As in, did it protect any right to an abortion, which the majority answered “No.” Thomas just took the occasion to say that he thought SDP was bullshit, period. The issue was still right there for the taking.
Could you please enlighten us about how U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk fits into your Platonic ideal view? It sure looks like gaming the system to me, as a way to use the judiciary to make new law, which I thought was supposed to be the turf of the legislative branch. Include in your answer his penchant for making nation wide rulings on what seem to me to be better treated as local to state level legal issues.
“When anti-abortion groups wanted to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of an abortion-inducing drug, they didn’t file the lawsuit in Maryland, where the FDA is headquartered, or in any state where the pill is still legally prescribed.
They filed it in Amarillo, a Texas city that didn’t have an abortion clinic even before the state all but banned the procedure.
But Amarillo does have a federal courthouse with, importantly, just one federal judge presiding. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk hears 95% of the cases filed in Amarillo.
Before Kacsmaryk was appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2019, he was deputy counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a deeply conservative religious liberty law firm based in Plano.
Under his leadership, First Liberty was involved in several legal fights over reproductive health care, including trying to block the “contraception mandate” which required health insurers to pay for birth control. Kacsmaryk himself has been outspoken in his opposition to LGBTQ rights.”
Certainly. The mifepristone case presented the legal issue of whether the FDA’s approvals of mifepristone complied with federal law on the approval of pharmaceuticals. Kaczmaryk ruled that they were not in compliance.
Shitty judges make indefensibly shitty decisions all the fucking time. That’s not the issue here. The issue is simply whether the case presents a question to which the court can give a shitty answer, a good answer, or just boot the whole damn thing for lack of standing to present it.
I’m a biologist and remember well when American Protestants, mostly from the land of cotton (and tobacco), the Old South were openly waging war against the teaching of evolution in the public schools. That, too, like the wildfire of anti-trans hysteria (misogynistic pun embedded if not intended*) burning up the right (GOP, MAGA, Trumpians, etc) has a strong religious undertow.
A key legal case was “ The 1981–82 federal court case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education constituted a challenge to the state’s Act 590, which mandated the equal treatment of creation science in classrooms where evolution was taught. On January 5, 1982, U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton ruled Act 590 unconstitutional in light of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. His determination that creationism constituted a religious doctrine rather than a scientific theory had a profound impact on the nation, the ramifications of which are still being felt today.”
The trial has been called Scopes II, after the famous 1925 Monkey trial, which featured an all star array of witnesses including leading scientists and philosophers of science, and pitted two legal lions of the time William Jennings Bryant against Clarence Darrow.
Judge Overton’s masterful ruling is well worth a read, and features an excellent broad historical overview, which has disturbing parallels to the anti-trans hysteria. One bitter aftertaste is that intentionally interpreting the Bible as a source of literal facts dates to the latter half of the 19th century, and is a direct reaction to Darwin’s ideas on the evolution of life, including human beings, as the product of descent with modification, as opposed to Divine special creation of humans ex nihilo, or out of nothing.
Origin
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late 19th century: from Greek hustera‘womb’ + -ectomy.
I agree with you in the narrow sense, but not in the broad sense of my question regarding the largely right wing penchant to impose by judicial fiat what they had not been able enact through legislation. The recent election may have opened up that path. Care to reflect on that possibility, or is it a high probability?
The broader question I was trying to articulate is how some judges and even justices are constructing their opinions in a way that invite additional cases for the purpose of them, e.g. Kacsmaryk and Thomas, making law through their judicial rulings on issues that could not be made legislatively.
To say they were merely deciding the cases before them reminds me of Willy Sutton’s answer to why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is”. It seems like some right wing judges and justices are leaving bread crumb trails for some right wing legislators to follow directing them to issues on which they want to rule, often apparently for the purpose of overturning decades of multiply reaffirmed precedents, e.g. Dobbs overturning Roe v Wade.
The state also argues that transgender people are not a protected class, which would mean that laws targeting them are not subject to a higher standard to pass muster.
Cool, so as long as it’s not already a protected federal class, we can fuck with whoever and start passing laws cutting anyone off at the knees… perhaps Randy was right, and short people really have no feelings, so how about banning them from sports outside of being a jockey, or marriage so we don’t have more folks under, say 5’5" in the world? I’m also thinking that anyone with hereditary balding or alopecia should get up against the wall? Maybe anyone who doesn’t have naturally hairy chests or can’t grow full beards aren’t really deserving of the vote?
Wow, I never knew how far I could go in life by simply planting my boot-heel on other’s necks.
