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Help Max Blaska and Karla S. Bryant adapt Stephen King’s “Last Rung On the Ladder” into a video feature. Crowd fund it here and pick the perk and the amount you wish to donate from the column on the right.
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‘Roe v. Wade was on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided.’
Excerpts from Justice Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent.
It relied on an erroneous historical narrative; it devoted great attention to and presumably relied on matters that have no bearing on the ‘meaning of the Constitution; it disregarded the fundamental difference between the precedents on which it relied and the question before the Court; it concocted an elaborate set of rules, with different restrictions for each trimester of pregnancy, but it did not explain how this veritable code could be teased out of anything in the Constitution, the history of abortion laws, prior precedent, or any other cited source; and its most important rule (that States cannot protect fetal life prior to “viability”) was never raised by any party and has never been plausibly explained.
Overuling precedent
Some of our most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents. … In Brown. v. Board of Education, the Court repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine, which had allowed States to maintain racially segregated schools and other facilities. 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.
Roe legislated from the bench
[Roe’s] elaborate [trimester] scheme was the Court’s own brainchild. Neither party advocated the trimester framework; nor did either party or any amicus argue that “viability” should ‘mark the point at which the scope of the abortion right and a State’s regulatory authority should be substantially transformed. … This scheme resemble[d] the work of a legislature. …
Roe certainly did not succeed in ending division on the issue of abortion. On the contrary, Roe “inflamed” a national issue that has remained bitterly divisive for the past half-century. … Indeed, in this case, 26 states expressly ask us to overrule Roe and Casey and return the issue of abortion to the people and their elected representatives.
Tag Archives: Madison
Cops in Madison schools, Part #1
Expel the disrupters, not the police Only in the Emerald City would the school district even consider evicting police from its high schools. Truly, Madison is that island surrounded by the reality of mass school shootings, most recently this month … Continue reading
‘A dark and buried chapter’ of history revived at Confederates Rest
The great American tragedy is that half of what Grant gained at Appomattox was lost when he left office in 1877. Perhaps not even Lincoln could have reconciled Southern whites with their former slaves In the midst of Gorbachev’s glasnost, Russians … Continue reading
Mother thanks cop after son’s arrest
The little lights, they are flickering again at the Stately Manor You would never know it from the headlines, the news footage, or the raucous parade of social justice warriors mau-mauing Madison police at the city council and county board. But … Continue reading
Madison spends $400,000 to study police, gets ‘few answers’ — while bullets fly
‘Few answers in report on police’ Good on Chris Rickert. I’m sure he misses his opinion column on Page 2 of the Wisconsin State Journal but, given the contracting news business, at least he is doing honest labor as the … Continue reading
Can’t we all just bridge the digital divide?
After studying the warranty and some augury involving small animals, the Policy Werkes concludes that your humble bloggeur will never be as virtuous as the average Madison alderoid. For the Madison Common Council and its mayor for life, every day … Continue reading
Arrest the social justice brownshirts
“This is what democracy looks like,” the Derail the Jail mob chanted Monday night as they disrupted a scheduled meeting of the Dane County Board of Supervisors. No, this is what the Bolshevik putsch 100 years ago looked like. This … Continue reading