(Dobbs) We’re At More Than A Crossroads. We’re At A Point Of No Return
Only the next elections can begin to undo the damage. Or at least prevent more.
There are good reasons why some women make the choice to end a pregnancy. Now, in the blink of an eye in much of America, that choice is gone.
There are good reasons why some citizens, angry in the heat of an argument or obsessed with the weight of a passion, should not be carrying a gun. But now, government has lost the right to decide who can pack a firearm in public places and who can’t.
There are good reasons why taxpayer money should not be used to subsidize religious schools when some have a history of discrimination against students who don’t conform to their benchmarks of what’s sinful and what’s not. But now, that’s where government funds will freely flow.
In the space of three days, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has turned a long era of social progress on its tail.
The irony is, when they abolished Roe v. Wade, they all but declared that abortion is murder— the word “murder" actually appears in the majority’s opinion twelve times. But not 24 hours earlier, when they abolished a gun licensing law in New York State, they abetted murder, declaring that the archaic gun-centric world in which the Founding Fathers lived, when the most lethal weapon in any man’s hands was a musket, is the world we must now inhabit in the age of AR-15s.
As late night television host Trevor Noah perceptively put it, “I don’t know about you guys, whenever I’ve been sitting in rush-hour traffic in New York with drivers screaming at each other and bikers cussing out the drivers and pedestrians wailing at the bikers and the drivers, the one thing I always think is, ‘Man, one thing that would calm this down is if everyone had a gun right now. Just a Glock or two would really chill the situation out’.”
Statistics, recent massacres, and that kind of common sense all tell us, the Court’s myopia means more murders on the horizon, not less.
This is the United States Supreme Court of 2022. It is America as of this moment, and for the foreseeable future.
The bad news on guns is, the lifting of restrictions doesn’t stop in New York. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas cited a guns rights case called Heller and wrote, “Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them.” That’s called “originalism,” as if the Founding Fathers could ever dream of the weapons almost anybody can easily buy today. As the chief counsel at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said after the ruling was announced, this reasoning will apply to “every sort of gun law going forward.”
Be on the lookout for an AR-15, strapped over a shoulder near you.
But there is qualified good news on abortion. A growing list of blue-chip American companies, like Apple, Tesla, and Disney, Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase, and Levi Strauss, are offering employees reimbursement for travel if they have to leave their home states to terminate a pregnancy.
What’s more, invalidating Roe will hurt women who don’t want to bring unwanted children into the world, especially poor women who don’t have the resources to go beyond their own states where in many cases even rape and incest won’t be grounds to end a pregnancy. But, political leaders in states where legal abortion has been codified have vowed to open their doors to those whose own doors have just been slammed shut.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul today declared her state a “safe harbor” for women seeking abortions and even moved last month— after Justice Alito’s draft opinion was leaked showing the Court’s intent— to spend tens of millions of dollars for reproductive health clinics to deal with the expected surge of women from out-of-state. California Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted, “SCOTUS has stripped away liberties & let other states replace them with mandated birth.” He promised women needing an abortion, “We’ve got your back.” In Colorado, in anticipation that Roe might be struck down, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill back in April called the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which says embryos, fertilized eggs, and fetuses have no standing under state law, and proactively permits abortions not just for women from Colorado but for any who can get there.
But many can’t. So hold onto your wire hangers. From what the American Medical Association saw in the dark years before Roe v. Wade was enacted, they’re about to be in demand once again.
And here’s even worse news. In his concurring opinion to the decision to abolish Roe v. Wade, Justice Thomas yesterday wrote this: “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Griswold is the case that established a couple’s right to use contraceptives. Lawrence was a ruling that decriminalized anal and oral sex. Obergefell legalized same-sex marriage.
They’re all on the table now. The right-wing Court is on a roll. This is America now, and for the foreseeable future.
I wrote just the other day that we wouldn’t have this Republican-appointed majority of six justices if not for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who cheated President Obama out of one appointment to the Court and unscrupulously fast-tracked another in the waning days of Trump.
For the record, it is worth deconstructing McConnell’s deceit, with a reminder that although he was the architect, his whole party bought into it. When he refused to hold hearings through the course of 2016 on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, McConnell said, “I believe the overwhelming view of the Republican Conference in the Senate is that this nomination should not be filled, this vacancy should not be filled by this lame duck president.” He said it on February 23, 2016. Obama, the “lame duck president,” still had 331 days— almost a full year— to serve in the Oval Office.
But on September 26, 2020, when Donald Trump was just 116 days from the door, he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. McConnell muscled the nomination through at Mach speed and she was sworn in one month later, less than two weeks before Trump lost the 2020 election.
That’s the definition of a lame-duck president. And of a two-faced politician whose low ethics know no bottom, a man who hopes to win a Republican majority, which he would lead, in November.
Unless we, the voters, stop him.
We’re at more than a crossroads. We’re at a point of no return. As President Biden said today, “Roe is on the ballot.” So are guns, so are election rights, so are civil rights, so are human rights. If Republicans take the midterm elections coming up in just over four months, there will be no turning back. Already the right-wing is talking about federal laws that would nullify state laws and outlaw abortion, and create a field day for guns, in every state in the union.
For now, an America that has moved to expand civil rights and human rights for 60 years has been put in reverse. Even if the Democrats hold onto Congress, which they must, the Court’s decisions, this week and in the future, won’t soon be reversed.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Regarding Abortion, Guns, Pot etc., James Madison covered it all when he wrote in the Federalist :
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."
Madison and the "Founders" realized that if the Federal Government had the power to regulate all behavior, our nation would become totalitarian in nature. They wisely left law-making regarding torts, elections, etc. to the states. If, for instance, our Government were to control all elections, then those in power would determine who would be in power and the USA would truly become another "banana republic". Fixing bad law, vis a vis our Constitution, is not the end of the world, or the end of our Republic.
I am sick to my stomach and wonder what kind of world lays ahead for my about to be born great grandchild. Libby B