Eeyore’s Cabinet:The Paradoxes of Woke RacismPart One By: Victor Davis HansonVictor Davis Hanson // Private PapersJune 29, 2021 Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania: ● Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves? The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils? Does not a Don Lemon or LeBron James privately believe that many so-called “whites” are similar to the CNN crowd they hang with, or the basketball corporate apparat? Do the elite non-white who fuel the war against “whiteness” mostly dislike, envy, fear, or compete with their own white mirror images? I think a Van Jones has far more in common with Brian Selter than do half the white people in the country. In terms of class, do middle-class blacks especially identify with the multi-homed BLM head Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac or 1619 promulgator Hannah Nikole-Jones? Do working-class whites seek solidarity with Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, or Steven Colbert? ● We still have not received any systematic exegesis of why the non-white are pouring into a country whose racism, they are warned by our current cultural and political elites, defines America. Why would the Squad or the Biden clique want two million foreign citizens in the current twelve-month period to cross the border and thus suffer the terrible wages of racism? Either one of three things surely must be true: 1) either the Left doesn’t really believe the country is racist, and so assumes illegal aliens don’t either; 2) or, if they do believe it, and if illegal aliens believe it, then they feel legions of angry new recruits are being prepped for the holistic cultural, race, ethnic, and gender take-over to come; 3) or the more they claim America is racist, the more their opponents will compromise and let in more illegal immigrants to prove they are not racist. ● Since the writs against “whiteness” are detailed and nearly endless, and since the prosecutorial case is conducted in starkly racial terms, will there be a defense in kind? I mean, if a sometimes New York Times contributor Mr. Damon Young lists all the reasons whites have destroyed life on this planet (and thus deserve what exactly?) or a Dr. Aruna Khilanani damns all white people as sick and pathological liars and fantasizes of shooting them (as opposed to the Bernard professor who dreams of gassing them), will the people they despise and wish eliminated offer a defense in similar stereotypical and generalized terms? That is, would America unwind in the manner common throughout history, when tribes go full tribal? Would the white counter-defense appear something like calibrating the white percentage of the population and then scanning data tables to see whether such a mythical group is under- or over-represented in various good and bad categories: combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq? Violent crimes? Homicides? Victims or victimizers in interracial crimes? Nobel Prize winners? DUIs? Do we really wish to go down this road, where each tribe tries its case before other tribes? One can see where this racism is going. For if there is such a thing as whiteness that characterizes all 230,000 million Americans, as seems to have been alleged nonstop since June of last year, then there is a commensurate “brownness” or “blackness” that is to be on similar grounds defined by the sum total of its purported demerits? Is that the logic of tribalism on the horizon? In sum, why do nonwhite racists think they are not racists, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement? Why do they think it is in their interest to establish the principle that it is perfectly fine to categorize, systematize, stereotype, and generalize about tens of millions on the basis of their skin color, and why do they think that in a multiracial democracy their own protocols and tropes won’t boomerang on them?
Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania: ● Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves? The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils? Does not a Don Lemon or LeBron James privately believe that many so-called “whites” are similar to the CNN crowd they hang with, or the basketball corporate apparat? Do the elite non-white who fuel the war against “whiteness” mostly dislike, envy, fear, or compete with their own white mirror images? I think a Van Jones has far more in common with Brian Selter than do half the white people in the country. In terms of class, do middle-class blacks especially identify with the multi-homed BLM head Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac or 1619 promulgator Hannah Nikole-Jones? Do working-class whites seek solidarity with Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, or Steven Colbert? ● We still have not received any systematic exegesis of why the non-white are pouring into a country whose racism, they are warned by our current cultural and political elites, defines America. Why would the Squad or the Biden clique want two million foreign citizens in the current twelve-month period to cross the border and thus suffer the terrible wages of racism? Either one of three things surely must be true: 1) either the Left doesn’t really believe the country is racist, and so assumes illegal aliens don’t either; 2) or, if they do believe it, and if illegal aliens believe it, then they feel legions of angry new recruits are being prepped for the holistic cultural, race, ethnic, and gender take-over to come; 3) or the more they claim America is racist, the more their opponents will compromise and let in more illegal immigrants to prove they are not racist. ● Since the writs against “whiteness” are detailed and nearly endless, and since the prosecutorial case is conducted in starkly racial terms, will there be a defense in kind? I mean, if a sometimes New York Times contributor Mr. Damon Young lists all the reasons whites have destroyed life on this planet (and thus deserve what exactly?) or a Dr. Aruna Khilanani damns all white people as sick and pathological liars and fantasizes of shooting them (as opposed to the Bernard professor who dreams of gassing them), will the people they despise and wish eliminated offer a defense in similar stereotypical and generalized terms? That is, would America unwind in the manner common throughout history, when tribes go full tribal? Would the white counter-defense appear something like calibrating the white percentage of the population and then scanning data tables to see whether such a mythical group is under- or over-represented in various good and bad categories: combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq? Violent crimes? Homicides? Victims or victimizers in interracial crimes? Nobel Prize winners? DUIs? Do we really wish to go down this road, where each tribe tries its case before other tribes? One can see where this racism is going. For if there is such a thing as whiteness that characterizes all 230,000 million Americans, as seems to have been alleged nonstop since June of last year, then there is a commensurate “brownness” or “blackness” that is to be on similar grounds defined by the sum total of its purported demerits? Is that the logic of tribalism on the horizon? In sum, why do nonwhite racists think they are not racists, 60 years after the Civil Rights movement? Why do they think it is in their interest to establish the principle that it is perfectly fine to categorize, systematize, stereotype, and generalize about tens of millions on the basis of their skin color, and why do they think that in a multiracial democracy their own protocols and tropes won’t boomerang on them?
On Public Discourse, law professor (and occasional Bench Memos contributor) Michael Stokes Paulsen has published the first part in a two-part series on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Dobbs, you will recall, is the big abortion case on the Supreme Court’s docket for next Term—the case that ought to bring a decisive end to the illegitimate Roe/Casey regime that the Court has inflicted on the American people for nearly fifty years now.
Some excerpts from Paulsen’s piece:
Dobbs poses the enormously important question whether Roe and Casey, two of the worst constitutional decisions of all time, were wrongly decided and should now, finally, be overruled. On the merits, I submit, the answer must be yes….
In simplest terms, Roe created a constitutional right to abortion of the life of a living human fetus. That result, and Roe’s reasoning in support of it, are indefensible from a legal standpoint. No plausible argument from the constitutional text, no rule or principle fairly derived from its structure or internal logic or deducible from other propositions contained therein, and no credible argument from historical understanding or intention remotely supports the abortion right created in Roe. Roe v. Wade is simply a lawless decision. I know of no serious constitutional scholar who defends Roe’s result as a faithful interpretation of the Constitution’s language, understood according to its natural and original meaning, as understood at the time of its adoption, or as consistent with the original intent of its adopters in 1868….
In Casey, the Court, while nominally reaffirming Roe’s substantive due process holding, could not bring itself actually to embrace Roe’s reasoning as correct. Indeed, a majority of justices seemed to indicate they believed that the case was wrongly decided. Casey left Roe in place almost purely on the basis of the doctrine of stare decisis. In other words, the justices concluded the Court should stick to Roe “whether or not mistaken,” simply because it was a precedent on which the Court had staked its authority, and it might look bad if it were to reverse itself. In tomorrow’s essay, I will attack this craven, unprincipled reasoning. For now, my point is simpler: Roe is a relic of abandoned reasoning that almost no one—including the Court itself—any longer thinks correct on its own terms. If Roe retains any legitimacy at all, it is only because it is a precedent and for no reason moored to the text of the Constitution….
It is worth pausing briefly to reflect on just how radical the Roe–Casey abortion-rights legal construct is. It is no cautious “balance” of interests. It is almost unreservedly pro-abortion. It adopts one of the most extremely lenient pro-abortion legal regimes anywhere in the world. It fails to recognize any legal rights of the unborn human fetal children, in any respect, at any stage of pregnancy. It does not recognize them as legal persons in their own right, entitled to the equal protection of the laws from private violence (a debatable but infinitely more plausible legal understanding of the common law and of the Constitution’s guarantees than is Roe’s creation of a constitutional right to abortion). Nor, short of that, does it recognize the unborn as members of the human species meriting protection by the state, whether or not they possess a constitutionally recognized legal “right to life” of their own. The living human fetus is treated, absurdly, as “potential life.”
Read the whole essay, and tomorrow’s installment on stare decisis as well.
Today’s unanimous Ninth Circuit panel ruling in Jones v. Ryan has plenty of ingredients that make me suspicious: (1) an opinion by Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, joined by two of his liberal colleagues; (2) granting habeas relief in a death penalty case on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel; (3) overturning a denial of habeas relief by the district judge (Susan R. Bolton), a Clinton appointee; (4) finding that the prejudice prong of the habeas inquiry was met, based on counsel’s failure to obtain a defense mental-health expert for the penalty phase; (5) involving murders nearly three decades ago (in 1992); and (6) in a case in which the Supreme Court a decade ago vacated a previous ruling by Thomas granting habeas relief on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel.
On the fourth point: The panel opines that if defense counsel had secured a mental-health expert, that expert “could have provided substantial evidence … that [Danny Lee] Jones suffered from mental illness,” including “(1) cognitive dysfunction …; (2) poly-substance abuse; (3) post-traumatic stress disorder; (4) attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder; (5) mood disorder; (6) bipolar depressive disorder; and (7) a learning disorder.” But, by the panel’s own account, the sentencing judge in fact found as mitigating factors that Jones “suffered from long-term substance abuse”; that he “was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time of the offense”; that he “had a chaotic and abusive childhood”; and that “his longstanding substance abuse problem may have been caused by genetic factors and aggravated by head trauma.”
Is there really a “reasonable probability” that the additional mental-health testing that the panel thinks trial counsel should have done in order to meet the threshold of competent representation would have changed the judge’s sentencing?
1972—In Furman v. Georgia, five justices vote to overturn a death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment but can’t agree on a rationale. Each of the five justices instead issues his own opinion. Despite the fact that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments expressly assume the existence of the death penalty, Justices Brennan and Marshall each assert that the death penalty is in every instance an Eighth Amendment violation. The Court’s per curiam declaration creates massive confusion and requires states to rewrite their capital-sentencing laws.
1992—By a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court bungles an opportunity to dismantle the regime of Roe v. Wade and to restore abortion policy to the democratic processes. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter combine to produce a joint opinion so breathtaking in its grandiose misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s role that it makes one long for the modest incoherence of Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade.
The joint opinion is perhaps most infamous for declaring, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” What this gauzy New Age rhetoric obscures is that the justices are claiming the unconstrained power to define for all Americans which particular interests they think should be beyond the bounds of citizens to address through legislation.
But it gets far worse. Consider, for example, these passages on stare decisis considerations:
“Where, in the performance of its judicial duties, the Court decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe and those rare, comparable cases, its decision has a dimension that the resolution of the normal case does not carry. It is the dimension present whenever the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution calls the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.”
“To all those who will be so tested by following [the Court], the Court implicitly undertakes to remain steadfast, lest in the end a price be paid for nothing. The promise of constancy, once given, binds its maker for as long as the power to stand by the decision survives and the understanding of the issue has not changed so fundamentally as to render the commitment obsolete.”
“Like the character of an individual, the legitimacy of the Court must be earned over time. So, indeed, must be the character of a Nation of people who aspire to live according to the rule of law. Their belief in themselves as such a people is not readily separable from their understanding of the Court invested with the authority to decide their constitutional cases and speak before all others for their constitutional ideals. If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined, then, so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals. The Court’s concern with legitimacy is not for the sake of the Court but for the sake of the Nation to which it is responsible.”
Subject yourself to parts I, II, and III of the atrocity, and then read Justice Scalia’s devastating response. Some excerpts from Justice Scalia:
“The Court’s description of the place of Roe in the social history of the United States is unrecognizable. Not only did Roe not, as the Court suggests, resolve the deeply divisive issue of abortion; it did more than anything else to nourish it, by elevating it to the national level where it is infinitely more difficult to resolve. National politics were not plagued by abortion protests, national abortion lobbying, or abortion marches on Congress, before Roe v.Wade was decided. Profound disagreement existed among our citizens over the issue—as it does over other issues, such as the death penalty—but that disagreement was being worked out at the state level.”
“Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has obscured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court in particular, ever since. And by keeping us in the abortion umpiring business, it is the perpetuation of that disruption, rather than of any pax Roeana, that the Court’s new majority decrees.”
“The Imperial Judiciary lives. It is instructive to compare this Nietzschean vision of us unelected, life tenured judges—leading a Volk who will be ‘tested by following,’ and whose very ‘belief in themselves’ is mystically bound up in their ‘understanding’ of a Court that ‘speak[s] before all others for their constitutional ideals’—with the somewhat more modest role envisioned for these lawyers by the Founders: ‘The judiciary . . . has . . . no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither Force nor Will but merely judgment.’ The Federalist No. 78.”
2018—By a 5-2 vote, the Iowa supreme court rules (in Planned Parenthood v. Reynolds) that the state constitution requires that regulations of abortion be subject to strict judicial scrutiny and, applying such scrutiny, bars a state law that requires a 72-hour waiting period between the time a woman seeking abortion provides informed consent to the abortion and the time the abortion takes place.
2020—Presented an opportunity to begin making headway against the Supreme Court’s illegitimate Roe/Casey abortion regime, Chief Justice Roberts instead adopts a wooden view of stare decisis in June Medical Services v. Russo. While reiterating his belief that the Court’s 2016 ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was “wrongly decided,” Roberts casts the decisive fifth vote against Louisiana’s admitting-privileges law for doctors.
From this and other recent votes by Roberts, the Left draws the lesson that bullying him pays big dividends.
M. Edward Whelan III Distinguished Senior Fellow and
Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies Ethics and Public Policy Center 1730 M Street N.W., Suite 910 Washington, D.C. 20036 202-682-1200 www.EPPC.org
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Repudiating Roe (Part I): The Most Important Abortion Case in Thirty Years
JUNE 28, 2021BY MICHAEL STOKES PAULSENThis is a signal moment in America’s constitutional history. One of the most notorious decisions in the Court’s history is likely either to be repudiated and overruled—discarded, finally and definitively—or else reaffirmed and entrenched, perhaps permanently. The stakes could not possibly be higher.
For the first time in a generation and a half—nearly thirty years—there is a realistic chance that the Supreme Court might overrule Roe v. Wade, the Court’s 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. The Court has agreed to hear a case next fall that presents a direct challenge to the foundations and validity of Roe.
This is a signal moment in America’s constitutional history. One of the most notorious decisions in the Court’s history is likely either to be repudiated and overruled—discarded, finally and definitively—or else reaffirmed and entrenched, perhaps permanently. The case is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And the stakes could not possibly be higher.
My discussion of Dobbs proceeds in two parts. Today, I explain why Dobbs is the most important abortion case to reach the Court in nearly thirty years—since Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the case in which a splintered Court, by the narrowest of 5-4 margins, reaffirmed Roe, not because a majority of the justices thought Roe was right, but on the basis of the judicial doctrine of “stare decisis.” Dobbs is important because it frames a direct challenge to Roe and Casey, forcing the Court to confront the legal indefensibility and radicalism of the Court’s pro-abortion jurisprudence. Dobbs poses the enormously important question whether Roe and Casey, two of the worst constitutional decisions of all time, were wrongly decided and should now, finally, be overruled. On the merits, I submit, the answer must be yes.
Tomorrow, I take up the somewhat peculiar-sounding question whether the judicial doctrine of “stare decisis”—the (inconsistent) judicial practice of generally adhering to precedents—can properly require the Court deliberately to reaffirm precedents that it is persuaded are egregiously and atrociously wrong. That, I maintain today, is the only true question remaining at issue in Dobbs. And the answer is emphatically no.
Roe’s Wrongness
Start with Roe v. Wade. Roe is regarded, rightly, as one of the most consequential and controversial—and one of the very worst—constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court in its history.
In simplest terms, Roe created a constitutional right to abortion of the life of a living human fetus. That result, and Roe’s reasoning in support of it, are indefensible from a legal standpoint. No plausible argument from the constitutional text, no rule or principle fairly derived from its structure or internal logic or deducible from other propositions contained therein, and no credible argument from historical understanding or intention remotely supports the abortion right created in Roe. Roe v. Wade is simply a lawless decision. I know of no serious constitutional scholar who defends Roe’s result as a faithful interpretation of the Constitution’s language, understood according to its natural and original meaning, as understood at the time of its adoption, or as consistent with the original intent of its adopters in 1868.
To be sure, a small cottage industry of legal academics has grown up around the enterprise of attempting to concoct “alternative” legal theories to support the result in Roe. These theories range from the merely strained and historically insupportable—the claim that abortion restrictions constitute sex discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is the most common—to the comically absurd and outlandish. The latter include wild assertions that abortion laws violate the Constitution’s prohibition of slavery or interfere with the guarantee to women of the right to vote. (I address and refute these theories in a book chapter of a volume collecting many of the most “creative” such contrivances, and also in an academic article.)
The Court has never adopted any of these alternative theories for abortion as a constitutional right. Nor has it come anywhere close to doing so. Instead, it has left the right to abortion where Roe purported to find it, in the guarantee that government not deprive persons of life, liberty, or property “without due process of law.” That’s the same bogus legal reasoning on which the Supreme Court had rested its infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857, holding unconstitutional Congress’s law prohibiting the introduction of slavery into federal territories. This reasoning, if one can call it that, goes by the oxymoronic label “substantive due process.” It is gibberish, as most sensible people recognize.
In Casey, the Court, while nominally reaffirming Roe’s substantive due process holding, could not bring itself actually to embrace Roe’s reasoning as correct. Indeed, a majority of justices seemed to indicate they believed that the case was wrongly decided. Casey left Roe in place almost purely on the basis of the doctrine of stare decisis. In other words, the justices concluded the Court should stick to Roe “whether or not mistaken,” simply because it was a precedent on which the Court had staked its authority, and it might look bad if it were to reverse itself. In tomorrow’s essay, I will attack this craven, unprincipled reasoning. For now, my point is simpler: Roe is a relic of abandoned reasoning that almost no one—including the Court itself—any longer thinks correct on its own terms. If Roe retains any legitimacy at all, it is only because it is a precedent and for no reason moored to the text of the Constitution.
It is important to grasp this. Roe v. Wade’s rule no longer rests on any provision of the Constitution. It rests on Roe’s rule being Roe’s rule. The constitutional right to abortion has been cut loose from any tether to the Constitution’s text. It now depends, essentially entirely, on the force of Roe’s status as a precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis.
Roe’s indefensibility as a matter of faithful constitutional interpretation is, frankly, almost no longer a matter of serious dispute. The incorrectness of Roe as a matter of first principles is practically a point of common ground, certainly so for the principled constitutional conservatives that now compose the majority of the justices on the Court. Bluntly put: Roe is as wrong as wrong can be, and everybody knows it.
Roe’s Extremism and its Human Consequences
Roe’s formulation of the abortion right is also quite extreme. In a nutshell, Roe established a constitutional right to abortion of a living human fetus for essentially any reason that a pregnant woman chooses. Under the Court’s decisions, the right to abort exists throughout all nine months of pregnancy, albeit in slightly varying forms depending on the stage of pregnancy. Prior to fetal “viability”—that is, the point when the child could live outside his or her mother’s womb, now around twenty-four weeks—the right to abort is explicitly plenary. There is no ground on which states may prohibit an abortion from being obtained. This includes, as I have recently written, eugenic reasons—aborting an unborn child because of his or her race or sex, or on account of disability.
After viability, an abortion may be had for any “health” reason, but “health” is defined broadly (and misleadingly) to embrace emotional, psychological, age, or “familial” considerations. This loophole is big enough to make the right to abortion functionally absolute, even when the child could live outside the womb. The Court’s opinions concerning “partial-birth” abortion, in 2000 and 2007, bear this out. They uphold a right to kill a fetus capable of living independently of the mother, under the rubric of the need to permit late abortions on “health” grounds. Thus, partial-birth abortion—the gruesome technique of inducing labor, delivering all of the body except the head, puncturing the skull and vacuuming out the child’s brain, collapsing the head, and then completing removal of the dead child—can be prohibited as an abortion method, even after viability, only if there is available some equally safe (to the pregnant woman) alternative method for killing the fetus.
The right to abortion is thus essentially absolute. This is especially clear for pre-viability abortions. State governments may adopt certain informed consent and waiting-period requirements, and they may enforce some (but not many) regulations of abortion clinics. But they may not prohibit abortion itself, for any reason, prior to viability. Planned Parenthood v. Casey tinkered slightly with Roe’s framework but did not alter its essentials. It retained the absolute right to pre-viability abortion and it retained the “health” right to abortion of even viable unborn babies.
It is worth pausing briefly to reflect on just how radical the Roe–Casey abortion-rights legal construct is. It is no cautious “balance” of interests. It is almost unreservedly pro-abortion. It adopts one of the most extremely lenient pro-abortion legal regimes anywhere in the world. It fails to recognize any legal rights of the unborn human fetal children, in any respect, at any stage of pregnancy. It does not recognize them as legal persons in their own right, entitled to the equal protection of the laws from private violence (a debatable but infinitely more plausible legal understanding of the common law and of the Constitution’s guarantees than is Roe’s creation of a constitutional right to abortion). Nor, short of that, does it recognize the unborn as members of the human species meriting protection by the state, whether or not they possess a constitutionally recognized legal “right to life” of their own. The living human fetus is treated, absurdly, as “potential life.”
In short, if Roe were an act of legislation, a bill passed by a legislature, it would be extremist pro-abortion legislation. And, not to put too fine a point on it, Roeis an act of legislation. (As is Casey—a modest, friendly amendment to Roe.) That Roe and Casey are acts of extremist legislation, adopted by a runaway judiciary, only makes matters worse.
The most important point about Roe’s extremism is, of course, its human toll. Roe’s practical and moral consequences have been truly stunning. Roe sanctioned, and Casey perpetuated, in the name of our fundamental law, the killing of over sixty million human beings.
This is not rhetorical overstatement but simple description. That abortion kills should not be a controversial proposition. There is no doubt that abortion results in the death of a distinct living being—an organism that was alive before is now dead. And there is no doubt that the living being killed by abortion is a human living being, distinct from the mother. Abortion thus ends a human life. To be sure, it is a human life at an early and vulnerable stage in its development. But it is the same human life it will be at all stages of its life cycle, as an embryo, fetus, infant, child, and adult.
Roe created a right of some human beings to kill other human beings. It is important to be clear about that. Since Roe, the running human death toll from abortion in America has exceeded that of the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, and the Rwandan genocide combined. Our familiarity with Roe has led to a strange acceptance of, or numbness to, its shocking, murderous radicalism and the scale of its havoc.
Roe is both a constitutional monstrosity and a moral atrocity. As I wrote in these pages nearly a decade ago, Roe is simply unbearably wrong. It is time—long past time—to overrule Roe v. Wade.
The Dobbs Case
That brings us to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Dobbs case poses a direct, head-on challenge to Roe’s framework and, by necessary implication, its legitimacy. Here’s how: As noted, Roe and Casey hold that abortion cannot be banned for any reason before the point of fetal viability, when the child would be capable of living outside his or her mother’s womb, currently at about twenty-four weeks of pregnancy. Dobbs involves a legal challenge to a Mississippi law forbidding abortions after fifteenweeks of pregnancy. This is more than two months before the point of viability. Simply put, if Roe is right, Mississippi’s law is “unconstitutional” (to accede, for purposes of argument, to an inaccurate characterization). And conversely, for Mississippi’s law to be upheld, Roe and Casey must be rejected.
The Dobbs case thus squarely presents the issue of whether Roe v. Wade is wrong and should be overruled. Given what Roe and subsequent abortion decisions hold, and what the Mississippi law in question provides, the issue is practically unavoidable. And the Court’s order granting review shows no desire to avoid it. The legal question on which the justices granted review was stated as follows: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” That’s another way of asking whether Roe v. Wade is rightly or wrongly decided and should remain the operative legal rule.
What will the Court do? A solid majority of justices now on the Supreme Court clearly believes that Roe is unequivocally wrongly decided, as flagrant a departure from constitutional text, structure, and history as any precedent in the Court’s history. There is no doubt in my mind that six of the nine sitting justices firmly believe Roe is wrong. They are, in rough order of certainty: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts. In truth, I believe Justice Elena Kagan in her heart of hearts is unpersuaded of Roe’s legal correctness, too. But she and fellow liberals Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor can be counted on to vote for unrestricted abortion rights no matter what.
The Stakes and Snare of “Stare Decisis”
Everything—everything—thus depends on the Court’s treatment of the legal doctrine of “stare decisis.” “Stare decisis” is a fragment of the Latin phrase taken to stand for the general rule of practice and judicial policy, drawn from the common law, that courts tend to follow their own precedents unless they have a good and sufficient legal justification for departing from them.
Significantly, the doctrine has never been thought to be constitutionally required. It is a rule of judicial policy and usual practice only. Nor has the doctrine ever been thought absolute. There are literally hundreds of examples of cases that have been overruled. Even at common law, courts could overrule prior decisions demonstrated to be unsound. Moreover, the doctrine’s roots in common-law adjudication—where the law actually consists of general principles discerned from the overall course of judicial decisions—mean that it does not transpose neatly (if at all) to constitutional interpretation, where the relevant law consists of an authoritative, written legal text. Simply put, if the text is the touchstone, judicial precedents contrary to the text are simply not faithful understandings of the relevant law. The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in constitutional cases has consistently affirmed that core principle, leading the Court repeatedly to emphasize that adherence to precedent is “not an inexorable command.”
Nonetheless, the doctrine retains some intuitive appeal, especially for “conservatives,” as it purports to advance conservative-sounding values of stability, predictability, consistency, humility, and restraint. And it does advance these values, at least to some extent. But the doctrine is slippery, deceptive, and readily manipulated. In practice, the doctrine often disserves the very policies it claims to serve, undermining predictability and stability and disguising judicial discretion. There is a strong claim that it is not “conservative” at all—that faithful adherence to the Constitution requires just that: faithful adherence to the Constitution, not to faithless departures from its text, structure, history, and original meaning.
Ironically, the staunchest defenders of stare decisis today are liberal, activist judges, who invoke it selectively and perhaps a bit cynically, as a tool for entrenching liberal decisions that are not defensible under the Constitution. That is, they invoke stare decisis precisely to preserve such faithless departures from the text itself.
Like the apple in the Garden, then, the doctrine of stare decisis can be deceptively enticing. Dangled by the devil for evil purposes, the doctrine has an enormous capacity to mislead and deceive. Some nominally “conservative” members of the Court have succumbed to its appeal in the past, including in abortion cases, substituting a corrupted version of the doctrine for constitutional principle. That is what happened in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision in which a 5-4 majority of the Court voted to reaffirm Roe v. Wade on the supposed basis of the doctrine of stare decisis—even while changing Roe’s standards and framework and overruling two cases.
Is there a risk that something like this could happen again in Dobbs? Is there a risk of another Casey? Might the Court hold, in the name of stare decisis, that Roe and Casey should be upheld, no matter how wrong they were, how extreme they are, and how atrocious their consequences, simply because they were decided before?
I take up that question tomorrow: Does the doctrine of stare decisis require adherence to an egregiously wrong, legally indefensible precedent, in conflict with a proper understanding of the Constitution, simply because it is a precedent?
Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis. He is co-author, with Luke Paulsen, of The Constitution: An Introduction, published by Basic Books.
The Democrats are right, there are two Americas. The America that works, and the America that doesn’t. The America that contributes, and the America that doesn’t. It’s not the haves and the have nots — it’s the dos and the don’ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, obey the law, support themselves, contribute to society, and others don’t. That’s the divide in America. It’s not about income inequality, it’s about civic irresponsibility. It’s about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It’s about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country. That’s not invective, that’s truth, and it’s about time someone said it. The politics of envy was on proud display a couple weeks ago when President Biden pledged the rest of his term to fighting “income inequality.” He noted that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that’s not just. That is the rationale of thievery. The other guy has it, you want it, Biden will take it for you. Vote Democrat. That is the philosophy that produced Detroit. It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America. It conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense because it ends up not benefiting the people who support it, but a betrayal. The Democrats have not empowered their followers; they have enslaved them in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victimhood and anger instead of ability and hope. The president’s premise – that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful – seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices. Because, by and large, income variations in society is a result of different choices leading to different consequences. Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure. Success and failure usually manifest themselves in personal and family income. You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college, and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education and/or employment. You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course; you have them within a marriage and life is apt to take another course. Most often in life our destination is determined by the course we take. My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome, but, our lives also have had an inequality of effort. While my doctor went to college and then devoted his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I chose another avenue. He made a choice, I made a choice, and our choices led us to different outcomes. His outcome pays a lot better than mine. Does that mean he cheated and Joe Biden needs to take away his wealth? No, it means we are both free men in a free society where free choices lead to different outcomes. It is not inequality Joe Biden intends to take away, it is freedom. The freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail.There is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure. The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy. Even if the other guy sat on his ass and did nothing. Even if the other guy made a lifetime’s worth of asinine and shortsighted decisions. President Biden and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort. The simple Law of the Harvest – as ye sow, so shall ye reap – is sometimes applied as, “The harder you work, the more you get.” Biden would turn that upside down. Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society. Entitlement will replace effort as the key to upward mobility in American society if President Biden Barack gets his way. He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive to foster equality through mediocrity. He and his party speak of two Americas, and their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other. America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts. It is a false philosophy to say one man’s success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man’s victimization.What Biden offered was not a solution, but a separatism. He fomented division and strife, pitted one set of Americans against another for his own political benefit. That’s what socialists offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow. Two Americas, coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln’s maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
In 1971 Saul Alinsky while he was a professor at the University of Chicago wrote his book Rules for Radicals. Among his devotees were Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dorn, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Alinsky also penned another work called Reveille for Radicals and his works represent the basic foundation for the creation and expansion of community organizers spearheaded by former President Barack Hussein Obama. Analyzing the works of Saul Alinsky was the basis of Hillary Clinton’s graduate thesis including the principles of how to create a social state. I have always found this list of steps to take, suggested by Alinsky, in the quest to create a social state extremely interesting, especially when compared to the policies and practices of our first half-black, half-white, and full-bodied dimwit President. All of them zero in on the principles of control, not governance. According to Alinsky and his devotees, there are eight levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a social state. They are as follows: 1)Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people. 2) Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible; poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live. 3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes and this will produce more poverty. 4) Gun control – Remove people’s ability to defend themselves from the government. That way you are able to create a police state. 5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of people’s lives (food, housing, and income). 6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to; take control of what children learn in school. 7) Religion – Remove the belief in God from the government and schools. 8) Class warfare& Racial Division– Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor; black against White; Hispanics against Whites. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take from (tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor. Does any of this sound remotely familiar? Does any of it remind you of what has happened and continues to be happening in the United States? Isn’t this precisely what Barack Obama and Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry attempted to do when they were in power and, in some respects succeeded in doing? Didn’t Obama proudly announce on the day of his inauguration in 2009 that he was going to offer to the American people Change You Can Believe In? What he really meant was he would “Change What You Believe In!” History is often a great teacher, so let’s recall a bit of factual not revisionist history: ● Didn’t Obama force Obamacare down the throats of all Americans without a single vote from the Republican party? ● Wasn’t Obama a staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood and abortions as well as Gay marriage? ● Didn’t Obama and Eric Holder launch a campaign to control guns even suggesting that Americans should surrender their weapons to “avoid violence”? ● Didn’t Obama add roughly $10 trillion to the National Debt, exceeding the level of debt incurred by all of the other President’s in our history combined? ● Isn’t Joe Biden now following in his footsteps with his American Rescue Plan and the American Family Plan so that our National Debt is now almost $30 Trillion? Under Obama and Biden poverty in our nation reached a level when 43% of the nation was on food stamps and 93 million Americans were not working and therefore considered “out of the workforce”? ● Wasn’t Obama the person who said emphatically that “America is no longer a Christian Nation” ignoring the very foundation and reason as to how America came into being? ● Isn’t our education system failing our children and now filling their heads with racial tension, pitting black against white? ● At the end of his eight-year term as President, didn’t Obama weaken our nation’s military to the point that the size of our Navy was at pre-World War II levels and planes were kept flying only by cannibalizing other aircraft parts? ● Do you really believe that climate change is an existential threat to the world? Joe Biden has stated that the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him that climate change was the biggest threat to America to which I say….Bullshit! Show me the evidence of this and let me listen to the debate between those who suggest climate change poses this threat and those who vehemently deny it. Have you heard such debates before? The left is basing all of their demands for a Green New Deal on this so shouldn’t we see and hear the evidence? If you wish to make up your own mind about Climate Change, you might read the no-nonsense book Unsettled by Steven Koonin a leading scientific expert on the subject. President Trump thankfully reversed all of the failures of the Obama-Biden Administration. But since January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden took the oath of office, we find ourselves right back in the soup again as policies and regulations enacted by Biden stifle progress and weaken us economically and militarily. While China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea strengthen their militaries, we seem to be focusing on things like debating whether transgender males should be allowed to compete against females in athletic events, and why it is important that every soldier, sailor, Marine, and airman needs to become familiar with Critical Race Theory. Today, we find ourselves struggling with the concept that if you defund the police, you can expect to have more crime! And, if you refuse to prosecute criminals, you can expect more crime. And, crime has been escalating by historic proportions all over America, particularly in major cities. Well, Obama and his Administration are gone (theoretically) but has been replaced with Joe Biden and retreads from Obama, so we are once again between a rock and a hard place. And, the politicians in Washington still cannot get along and, worse, still do not work on behalf of the people. When will we learn? Of course, I am just “spiffballing” on a Tuesday morning.
Shocking New Allegations in Lawsuit against Cardinal Dolan and North American College
Over 30 U.S. and Vatican Bishops Implicated
NEW YORK, June 28, 2021 New bombshell allegations have emerged in a lawsuit naming New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan; the Archdiocese of New York; the Pontifical North American College (NAC) in Rome; the NAC rector, Illinois-priest Father Peter Harman; the NAC vice-rector, Washington D.C.-priest Father Adam Park; and others.
In New York State Supreme Court, the February 2021 legal Complaint by former seminarian Anthony Gorgia describes accounts from numerous credible witnesses who allege a history of sexual harassment and misconduct by Park toward vulnerable seminarians; graphic sexual acts by Harman and the former bishop of Springfield in Illinois at an orgy in the presence of seminarians; and a massive cover-up by Dolan and a network of complicit Church officials. In a stunning development, recently-filed affidavits now identify the former Springfield bishop as the current Archbishop of Omaha, George Lucas. The lawsuit also alleges that NAC officials retaliated against Gorgia as a result of his refusal to be complicit with misconduct.
In a June 2021 affidavit, one of multiple subjects of Park’s sexual harassment recounted his own experiences and the cover-up that ensued when NAC rector Harman ignored his report. The subject’s affidavit plunges into scandal the NAC and U.S. Bishops who comprise its Board of Governors for their refusal to investigate sexual misconduct by NAC leadership and threats to the safety of their vulnerable seminarians.
In a separate new affidavit, a highly-credentialed former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) explained his analysis of incriminating evidence, including video footage, which led him to find “entirelycredible” an eyewitness account of Harman and Lucas’ graphic sexual acts at an orgy involving subordinate seminarians. The former SAC cites “the alleged dimensions and specific descriptions of Harman’s and other participants’ intimate body parts” and “the graphic sexual acts attributed to Harman and Lucas, among others.”
New affidavits filed in Court also reveal compelling long-standing ties between Dolan and Lucas dating back to their rise to power in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. According to these affidavits, their relationship indicates Dolan’s personal interest in concealing predation which had the potential to out Harman and Lucas. The former SAC likewise reveals the factors that have caused hundreds of vulnerable seminarians over the years to be exploited by nonconsensual sexual acts and cover-ups.
The former SAC not only implicates over 30 U.S. and Vatican bishops who received and ignored numerous incriminating reports against Harman, Park, and the NAC; but also Bishop Kevin Vann of Orange, California as a first-hand witness to the graphic misconduct alleged against Harman and Lucas. According to the former SAC, a number of these bishops who retain Harman and Park in their positions of power over the NAC’s vulnerable adults have themselves been accused of covering up sexual misconduct in the past.
Gorgia is only one of hundreds of seminarians impacted by sexual misconduct ravaging seminaries. While many of these seminarians left quietly without ever revealing what they suffered, Gorgia becomes among the first to hold accountable Church leaders who have victimized seminarians through a landmark case-in-the-making. It is expected that scores of victimized seminarians and priests will continue to come forward with overwhelming accounts that will shatter the “culture of silence” in the Church.
FDA COVER-UP!! THEY KNEW ABOUT DEADLY VAX SIDE EFFECTS
BookItCJPublished June 8, 2021 9,155 ViewsSUBSCRIBESHARE21 rumblesEMBED
Rumble — Dr. Bryan Ardis joined Brannon Howse on Lindell TV / FrankSpeech.com to discuss the infamous “Slide 16.”
THE FDA KNEW. THEY JUST DIDNT TELL YOU!
THIS IS A MUST WATCH INTERVIEW
Dr. Bryan Ardis has been studying the adverse effects of these vaccines worldwide and has been following all of the studies and VAERS data weekly. In October 22, 2020 Dr. Ardis found FDA documents that listed 4 different blood clot disorders that they expected would come from these Covid vaccines.
Dr. Ardis has copies of this report and the infamous “Slide 16” that listed all expected serious adverse effects / side effects to people that the FDA predicted would be reported. In December, the FDA produced “Fact Sheets” for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and NONE of the serious side effects from their own October report were listed. Zero.
Those facts sheets were given to hospitals, doctors, vaccine administrators, the media, and the public.. (Fact Sheets = Emergency Use Authorization Documents ) The “Fact Sheets” are supposed to be the one document that informs the public receiving the vaccine of any side effects or problems, so they can make an informed decision, and have true and informed consent. This clearly is not happening.
Dr. Ardis is the CEO of Ardis Labs and his 2 practices have helped thousands of patients from all over the world including from as far away as the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, Barbados, Italy, Scotland & many more.
He was the first doctor in America to blow the whistle on Remdesivir – the Non-FDA Approved drug that Dr. Fauci made a protocol in all hospitals in the United States. China used Vitamin C and showed around 4K deaths since January of 2020. America followed Fauci with Remdesivir and Ventilators and we had, according to the CDC, over 500,000 deaths… though that number is highly suspicious.
In early 2020 Dr. Ardis lost his Father-In-Law because of ill-advised hospital protocols. Since that time Dr Ardis has been on a mission to help educate the public about the dangers to Americans in many of our “institutes of health.” He is a devout follower of Dr. Sherry Tenpenny and believes vaccines are making people sick and that Big Pharma is creating their future consumer base.
His podcast “The Dr Ardis Show” can be found on our Dr Ardis Show YouTube page and Vokal Media platform.
FDA COVER-UP!! THEY KNEW ABOUT DEADLY VAX SIDE EFFECTS
BookItCJPublished June 8, 2021 9,155 ViewsSUBSCRIBESHARE21 rumblesEMBED
Rumble — Dr. Bryan Ardis joined Brannon Howse on Lindell TV / FrankSpeech.com to discuss the infamous “Slide 16.”
THE FDA KNEW. THEY JUST DIDNT TELL YOU!
THIS IS A MUST WATCH INTERVIEW
Dr. Bryan Ardis has been studying the adverse effects of these vaccines worldwide and has been following all of the studies and VAERS data weekly. In October 22, 2020 Dr. Ardis found FDA documents that listed 4 different blood clot disorders that they expected would come from these Covid vaccines.
Dr. Ardis has copies of this report and the infamous “Slide 16” that listed all expected serious adverse effects / side effects to people that the FDA predicted would be reported. In December, the FDA produced “Fact Sheets” for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and NONE of the serious side effects from their own October report were listed. Zero.
Those facts sheets were given to hospitals, doctors, vaccine administrators, the media, and the public.. (Fact Sheets = Emergency Use Authorization Documents ) The “Fact Sheets” are supposed to be the one document that informs the public receiving the vaccine of any side effects or problems, so they can make an informed decision, and have true and informed consent. This clearly is not happening.
Dr. Ardis is the CEO of Ardis Labs and his 2 practices have helped thousands of patients from all over the world including from as far away as the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, Barbados, Italy, Scotland & many more.
He was the first doctor in America to blow the whistle on Remdesivir – the Non-FDA Approved drug that Dr. Fauci made a protocol in all hospitals in the United States. China used Vitamin C and showed around 4K deaths since January of 2020. America followed Fauci with Remdesivir and Ventilators and we had, according to the CDC, over 500,000 deaths… though that number is highly suspicious.
In early 2020 Dr. Ardis lost his Father-In-Law because of ill-advised hospital protocols. Since that time Dr Ardis has been on a mission to help educate the public about the dangers to Americans in many of our “institutes of health.” He is a devout follower of Dr. Sherry Tenpenny and believes vaccines are making people sick and that Big Pharma is creating their future consumer base.
His podcast “The Dr Ardis Show” can be found on our Dr Ardis Show YouTube page and Vokal Media platform.
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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