‘Don’t You Dare Touch Roe!’ — Judicial Confirmation Silly Season Begins

Roe probably won’t be overturned because it probably won’t come up; Casey is the center of abortion law nowadays.

.. the cesspool that judicial-confirmation politics has become since his name became a synonym for slander in 1987 — a debacle that changed history for the worse in more ways than the woodenly whimsical Anthony Kennedy’s assumption of what should have been the Bork seat.

.. Thanks to Justice Kennedy, we’ve actually been living in a Casey world — as in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — for the past quarter century. For good and for ill.

..  It is a sign of our wayward times that a “conservative” judge is one committed to construing the law as it is written, in accordance with what it was commonly understood to mean when adopted. You might think that’s simply what a judge is. But progressives rely on robed legislators to block the elected officials who beat them at the polls, and to impose on the nation what they cannot enact democratically. These are known as judges with “empathy.”

Collins wants you to know: She’s not one of those staid old Republicans looking for a staid old by-the-book jurist. She wants empathy!

.. Rhetorically at least, this 1973 ruling’s fabrication of a constitutional right to abort unborn children retains for progressives its sacral status. But in point of fact, the Supreme Court itself has dismantled much of Roe’s framework. What survives is its narrowing core.

.. Democrats eliciting verbal acrobatics from solid nominees who are well aware both that Roe is atrociously reasoned and that saying so will imperil their confirmation chances.

.. If abortion ever gets rolled back in this country, it will be because a cultural shift forces legal change, not the other way around.

.. Casey was a triple gut punch for conservatives.

  1. First, in a bitterly divided 5–4 ruling, the Court upheld the constitutional abortion right it purported to discover in Roe.
  2. Second, the main opinion, among the most farcical in the Court’s history, was jointly crafted by Reagan appointees Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor, along with Bush 41 pick David Souter.
  3. Third, while paring Roe back in significant ways, the trio reaffirmed a potentially limitless “substantive due process” right to “liberty” in any matter as to which five unelected lawyers decide dignity and privacy warrant it.
.. the ruling’s demolition of Roe’s capricious trimester construct
.. Casey’s reaffirmation of Roe is highly qualified. It made clear that the state is free to adhere to a strongly pro-life policy even before “fetal viability.”
.. And viability is a dynamic concept, so as evolving technology made it possible to preserve and protect unborn life at earlier stages, states would have commensurate power to restrict or even outlaw abortion throughout more of pregnancy.
..  the national abortion debate should never have been moved to the federal courthouse for resolution, and pro-lifers cannot win it there in any event. It has to be won in the culture, from the ground up.
.. It has since moved on to gay rights (including same-sex marriage, endorsed in Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell opinion in 2015), and now we are on to LGBTQ rights, three-partner marriage (and why stop at three?), and who knows what other transgressive erosions of bourgeois culture.
.. What we need from judges is to remember that our law is a reflection of who we are, not a tool to shape us into something else. What we need from confirmation hearings is to ensure that we get judges of that kind.