Alito’s dream come true
The Times on Alito’s long patient campaign to make women prisoners of their own bodies again:
Mr. Alito became interested in constitutional law during college largely because he disagreed with the Supreme Court at the time on criminal procedure, the establishment clause and reapportionment, he has written. The court in the 1960s issued rulings on those topics that conservatives disliked, including protecting the rights of suspects in police custody, limiting prayer in public schools, and requiring electoral districts to have roughly equal populations.
More prayer and fewer rights for other people, that’s what he wanted, along with less ability for the fewer-rights people to fight back via the ballot box. I guess that’s “conservatism”? More power and privilege for rich [white] men and much less for everyone else?
But in 2016 and 2020, just as in 1985, a new frontal attack on abortion rights would have failed. With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg still on the bench, there were not five votes to overturn Roe. This year, there was no longer need for a restrained, slower-burning approach.
Over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — who agreed that a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks should be upheld, but said that the majority’s “dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us” and violated the principle of judicial restraint — the long-envisioned time for a direct assault on Roe had come.
“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Justice Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”
Well, that is, the people carefully gerrymandered and voter-intimidationed to exercise their authority according to Alito’s lifelong wishes.
I was arguing that point with my husband the other day. I said conservatism is the attempt to conserve certain privileges for yourself and those who are like you. He disagreed, saying conservatism is about trying to maintain the ideas expounded by Edmund Burke.
He may be right on a technicality, but I doubt many of today’s hide-bound religious right and their allies have ever heard of Edmund Burke. They certainly don’t know what ideas he expounded. They know they want to pay lower or no taxes, give no assistance to people who are the ‘wrong’ sort of people, prohibit women from controlling their own reproduction, and be allowed to have enough fire power to blow up everyone they want to blow up. They want a social view that resembles the 1950s, and an economic view that resembles the 1880s (not the 1950s as most people think because there were strong unions then).
So maybe it isn’t classical conservatism. I agree that they aren’t conservative at all; conservatism isn’t about destroying everything around you, it’s about conserving what is valuable to you. But this is what they have made it, and it is the dominant form of conservatism in America.
Yes, it does. But Alito got the question wrong. The proper question is “Are women people, and do they have the right to determine the permitted use of their own body?” Actually, he may have gotten the question right, he just has a different answer than I do.
Huh, Alito openly admits he studied law with a political goal to achieve right at the outset. We all knew judges are political creatures as much as anyone else, but this guy can’t even pretend to be non-partisan.
Modern “conservatism” just demonstrates further the flaw with self-ID…
Progs at least avoid the term “liberal”.