Your Womb's New Supreme Court Overlords

Meadow Vista CA

Description

GETTING EVEN Thomas was and is a backbencher. His notoriety in recent cases, notably his lone dissent in the Court’s 8-1 decision that denied Trump’s bid to block the release of presidential records and his Dobbs concurrence, are exceptions. In the first case, Thomas neglected to recuse himself in a case in which his wife’s communications with White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, were front and center. Dobbs, on the other hand, appears to be a case in which Thomas attempts to exorcise his old nemesis of the past. Part of Thomas’ political DNA has always been to side with the most conservative theories of governance—even those that supported equality and social justice for blacks. He has always been a critic of affirmative action, for instance, calling it a program for whites, despite being admitted to Yale Law School under its racial preference plan: “Under the program, which was adopted in 1971, the year Judge Thomas applied, blacks and some Hispanic applicants were evaluated differently from whites, the officials said. Nonetheless, they were not admitted unless they met standards devised to predict they could succeed at the highly competitive school.” ---NYTimes, by Neil Lewis, July 14, 1991 Thomas seems to be a man who is embittered by his shortcomings, trying to articulate an argument that would redefine his recalcitrance to democratic norms won by others of his race at great cost. He is the Black Contrarian espousing reactionary positions— perhaps to expel his inner demons. Anita Hill has been renting space within his head since that day when her testimony revealed his tawdry perversions. The Dobbs opinion was written in spite. It is as if it was his revenge against the one woman who stood her ground against great opposition in 1991. His extrapolation into other decisions of more recent Courts, Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell (except Loving v. VA), were simply Thomas asserting what Hill had accused him of all those many years ago— male dominance and white supremacy. His opinions over the years have been focused on the most radical readings of originalist thought—a reading that supported enslavement and denial of rights to women, people of color, immigrants, and the gay community. He is a bigot whose views on race, religion, guns, gender equality, and political power are less original in thought than antediluvian: Respondents’ argument that this history does not matter flies in the face of the standard the Court has applied in determining whether an asserted right that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution is nevertheless protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Solicitor General repeats Roe’s claim that it is “doubtful... abortion was ever firmly established as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus,” 410 U. S., at 136, but the great common-law authorities—Bracton, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone—all wrote that a post-quickening abortion was a crime. Moreover, many authorities asserted that even a pre-quickening abortion was “unlawful” and that, as a result, an abortionist was guilty of murder if the woman died from the attempt. The Solicitor General suggests that history supports an abortion right because of the common law’s failure to criminalize abortion before quickening, but the insistence on quickening was not universal… ---Thomas’ concurrence in Dobbs Via dailykos.com