One of the saddest days of the past 5 years has fallen today, June 24th, 2022. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court of the United States removed the power of precedent. The court in a 6-3 decision struck down a woman’s right to safely access an abortion before 15 weeks, overturning the landmark Roe vs Wade (1973). The decision, which will set Americans back decades comes at the end of a week of where the conservative justices sent a wrecking ball to our constitutional right as human beings. The law, which prohibits any exclusions such as incest and rape.
Sen. Susan Collins on SCOTUS/Roe: “This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”
Susan Collins — who voted for Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — on the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade: “It is a sudden and radical jolt to the country that will lead to political chaos, anger, and a further loss of confidence in our government.”
Originally tweeted by Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) on June 24, 2022.
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Dobbs is courageous and correct. This is an historic victory for the Constitution and for the most vulnerable in our society. My full statement:
Originally tweeted by Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) on June 24, 2022.
“With sorrow ― for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection ― we dissent,” wrote Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.
The decision reads in everyday terms like this: The historical heaviness used in the decision making is based on the 1800s, “American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy. This consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.” Based on this conservative interpretation of the 1800s, Jim Crow should also be called into question. They went on to include, “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.”
“Today, the Court discards that balance,” the dissenting justices wrote. “It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”
The consenting opinion goes on to include other stare decisis cases better known as precedent, two of which included Black Americans and their constitutional rights as freed people. “Some of our most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents. We mention three. In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), the Court repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine, which had allowed States to maintain racially segregated schools and other facilities. Id., at 488 (internal quotation marks omitted). In so doing, the Court overruled the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), along with six other Supreme Court precedents that had applied the separate-but-equal rule.” Plessy v Ferguson is the gateway to Jim Crow. In the 1800s, President Lincoln was assassinated. In the 1800s, the civil war was fought. In the 1800s, Juneteenth was created. The current 2022 version of America is starting to react to outdated Christian ideologies. January 6th was meant to be 1776. Today we’re back in 1973 and the 1800s at the same time. But its actually 2022. If we keep going back to question the historical decisions of white males in political power throughout American history, how could this land be both our land and yours?
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