In reality, Roe was the left’s Lochner. A pure exercise of judicial law making that could not point to anything in the Constitutional text or history to support a sweeping rule. It’s a precedent that even folks in the left have taken to defending merely by virtue of its existence as such. It’s protection of second trimester abortions is out of step with public opinion, and out of step among the law in other civilized nations.
Not all liberal precedents are like that. In fact most aren’t. There’s a huge difference between Brown and Loving and Obergefell and Roe both legally and in how the relevant issues have played out in domestic and international politics. Nonetheless, it will make political hay to act like overturning Roe will unleash the floodgates of rolling back everything else. Never mind the fact that, even though Roe was so vulnerable from the very beginning, it took conservatives 50 years of single-minded effort to overturn it.
Americans reasonably feel extremely strongly about this. When a perceived right is forcefully taken away by one's state, the legal argument for or against the federal mechanism that was preventing that takes a back seat, to put it mildly.
To be clear, the “right” only came into existence because the Supreme Court in the 1970s conjured it out of thin air. Several other high courts in advanced democracies took up the abortion question around that time. None found a legal right to abortion. Most found it to be an issue for the legislature. Germany found abortion to violate the Basic Law’s Right to Life (and that precedent still stands!)
That legal tidal wave could very well come.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/roe-v-...
It has nothing to do with "benevolence," but Roe being uniquely vulnerable in that its shortcomings as a legal decision made it a target even for the quarter of the GOP that disagrees with the party line on abortion.
> This is not the pattern we are seeing, or else explain the other religion-related decisions.
The explanation is that the Establishment Clause precedent is the next weakest after Roe. The U.S. was founded on religious pluralism, not French-style secularism. The absence of religious belief is, from the Constitutional perspective is not "neutral" but instead just another belief system. Excluding religious organizations and schools from public funding is plainly unconstitutional.
This is neither controversial in the US (a country where 2/3 of people disagree with the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer), or most other countries. Religious schools can get public funding in Sweden. Why not the US?
> More importantly Roe was universally accepted as real.
A real what?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/23/roe-v-...
There’s a spectrum of opinions among legal conservatives on many decisions. Kennedy wrote Obergefell and Gorsuch wrote Bostock. But no legal conservative thinks that Roe was correctly decided and a fair number of legal liberals don’t either. (Alito quotes a liberal legal scholar in this opinion who said of Roe at the time that it wasn’t Constitutional law and didn’t even try to be.)
>Americans' confidence in the court has dropped sharply over the past year and reached a new low in Gallup's nearly 50-year trend. Twenty-five percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court, down from 36% a year ago and five percentage points lower than the previous low recorded in 2014.
The Gallup poll shows pretty much that?
> Americans' confidence in the court has dropped sharply over the past year and reached a new low in Gallup's nearly 50-year trend. Twenty-five percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court, down from 36% a year ago and five percentage points lower than the previous low recorded in 2014.
With modern polarization, "confidence" actually seems to mean "confidence I'll get the result I want from it" (e.g. how ideologically aligned it is to me).
If laws were changed due to new information and were consistent with other laws regulating things like shutting down life support for brain dead adults when compared to abortion, I doubt the SCOTUS would have lost the confidence of the nation.
This Supreme Court is blatantly corrupt.
