Podcast: I Feel Snitty
Episode 187: SCROTUS
Premiere Date: 5/5/2022
Length: 13:42 (2,112 words)
Link: https://ifeelsnitty.podbean.com/e/scrotus/
Transcript:
Welcome to I Feel Snitty, episode 187, entitled, “SCROTUS.” I’m your host, Craig Rozniecki.
Supreme Court Justice and man least likely to support a law banning vasectomies – Samuel Alito – has unintentionally let it be known that the Supreme Court of the United States plans on reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade and 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey rulings. Alito’s opinion draft was leaked to the press in recent days, and in it he declares that a majority of Supreme Court Justices will vote to uphold the Mississippi law which bans abortions after 15 weeks via the 2018 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, and both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey will be overturned as a result.
So, yesterday, I spent a good chunk of my day reading all 98 pages of this draft; taking notes; and conducting further research. If I had to sum it all up in one word, it’d be “bullshit,” but I should probably elaborate. For as much as I love the term, I didn’t read 98 pages; take notes; and conduct further research to just utter the word “bullshit.”
I should probably start by saying I’m not a fanboy of abortion, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t know anyone who is. Labeling myself as “pro-choice” does not mean that I love abortion. People who go to pro-choice rallies aren’t chanting things like, “Abortion! So much fun! Let’s get it done!” No, they’re shouting, “My body, my choice!” I’ve never gone on a dating site, and under hobbies, read, “Swimming, playing with my dogs, cooking, long walks on the beach, and having abortions.” We’re not pro-abortion; we’re pro-choice. There is a difference.
Secondly, I’m just going to come out and say it: the Constitution is a great document – especially for its time, but it often reads like fortune cookies written by white men in the 1700s. There’s a good reason why it’s been amended 27 times – it ain’t perfect, and things change.
I bring this latter point up, because the bulk of the argument from the five conservative Supreme Court Justices set on overturning Roe v. Wade is the aforementioned collection of fortune cookies written by white men in the 1700s, or even earlier.
Here are just a few such snippets from the opinion piece:
- “Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. Zero. None.”
- “Abortion had long been a crime in every single state.”
- “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.”
- “By 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, three-quarters of the states, 28 out of 37, had enacted statutes making abortion a crime even if it was performed before quickening. Of the nine states that had not yet criminalized abortion at all stages, all but one did so by 1910. The trend in the territories that would become the last 13 states was similar: all of them criminalized abortion at all stages of pregnancy between 1850 (the Kingdom of Hawaii) and 1919 (New Mexico). By the end of the 1950s, according to the Roe Court’s own count, statutes in all but four states and the District of Columbia prohibited abortion however and whenever performed, unless done to save or preserve the life of the mother. This overwhelming consensus endured until the day Roe was decided. At that time, also by the Roe Court’s own count, a substantial majority-30 states-still prohibited abortion at all stages except to save the life of the mother.”
The 13th century, 1850, 1868, 1919, 1950… I’m noticing a trend here. It’s 2022. Even 1950 is nearly three-quarters of a century ago. When you’re relying on documentation from 1222 to justify an argument nearly a thousand years later, you might want to look in the mirror and say one of two things: 1) “My views may be a little outdated” or 2) “I’m a fucking ghost!”
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the former contended that previous Supreme Court rulings, such as “the right to marry a person of a different race” (1967), “the right to marry while in prison” (1987), and “the right to obtain contraception” (1972), proved it was reasonable to conclude women had the right to decide what to do with their bodies once impregnated.
Justice Alito didn’t agree, as he responded:
“These attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s ‘concept of existence’ prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.”
…and there it is, the phrase of the hour – “None of these rights has any claim to being deeply rooted in history.” I can’t tell you how many times I read that very phrase throughout the 98 pages. My guess is 23, but I digress.
Okay, first off, did Justice Alito just compare interracial marriage to prostitution? Secondly, what the hell kind of argument is “Abortion rights don’t have any claim to being deeply rooted in history”? You know what else doesn’t? Women’s right to vote. Desegregation. Marriage equality. Slavery. Oh, wait, that last one is deeply rooted in our history, so I guess Justice Alito would say it’s Constitutional.
This is a major reason why conservatives piss me off – they’re stuck in the Paleolithic Era and refuse to speak in complete sentences, because at that point, only grunting was deeply rooted in their history. Discoveries are made daily. Just because we weren’t aware of a recent discovery in 1642, doesn’t make it any less true today. So, so what if abortion was deemed a crime during all stages of a pregnancy in 1801; this isn’t 1801.
Alito also criticized the allegedly vague, ambiguous terminology used in the Roe v. Wade case – especially the word “liberty.” According to him, since there are numerous definitions, how can we know with any degree of certainty what the accurate interpretation of it is, unless it’s explicitly laid out to us? Yeah, you know what else is often vague? The Constitution.
Case-in-point? The First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Well, I’ll be damned. I don’t see any mention of Twitter, and since social-media isn’t deeply rooted in our history, I guess it doesn’t constitute as free speech. Suck it, Elon. I have to admit; it’s quite incredible Justice Alito can be such a mastermind at correctly interpreting the vagueness of the Constitution, yet be completely clueless on such language used in Roe v. Wade.
Near the end of the “piece,” Alito claimed that there were five main factors in the Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade:
1) “The nature of the Court’s error”
2) “The quality of reasoning”
3) “Workability”
4) “Effect on other areas of law”
5) “Reliance interests”
Here are some of my favorite arguments from those five, sure, I’ll call them points:
- “Casey described itself as calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily declared a winning side. Those on the losing side-those who sought to advance the state’s interest in fetal life-could no longer seek to persuade their elected representatives to adopt policies consistent with their views.”
So what? Was it wrong to end slavery, because some on the losing side felt they could no longer seek to persuade their elected officials to adopt their racist policies? Boo-fricking-hoo. The rights of a woman over her own body shouldn’t be made on a state-by-state basis. How can one of these anti-choice conservatives utter with a straight face that it should be legal for a woman to be treated as a person in one state, a second-class citizen in another, and yet declare this the land of the free? Next…
- “Roe’s failure even to note the overwhelming consensus of state laws in effect in 1868 is striking…”
No, the 2022 Supreme Court thinking that abortion laws from 154 years ago is relevant to today is what’s striking.
- “The first rule of fight club…” Oh, sorry, let me start that again. “The first rule is that ‘a provision of law is invalid, if its purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability. But whether a particular obstacle qualifies as ‘substantial’ is often open to reasonable debate. In the sense relevant here, ‘substantial’ means ‘of ample or considerable amount, quantity, or size.’ Huge burdens are plainly ‘substantial,’ and trivial ones are not, but in between these extremes, there is a wide gray area. In addition to these problems, one more applies to all three rules. They all call on courts to examine a law’s effect on women, but a regulation may have a very different impact on different women for a variety of reasons, including their places of residence, financial resources, family situations, work and personal obligations, knowledge about fetal development and abortion, psychological and emotional disposition and conditions, and the firmness of their desire to obtain abortions. In order to determine whether a regulation presents a substantial obstacle to women, a court needs to know which set of women it should have in mind and how many of the women in this set must find that an obstacle is ‘substantial.’”
It's pretty rich for a group of old, white men to debate on just how substantial an obstacle pregnancy can be and is for women. I wonder what their thought-process would be if they overheard a female-dominated high court debating on just how substantial the following obstacles were: premature ejaculation, limp-dick, or OMPS, which stands for Overcompensating for Microscopic Penis Syndrome. Moving on…
- “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women are not without electoral or political power. It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”
That’s right, ladies! Not only must you be forced to carry a baby for 9 months and take care of it after birth, but in order to have any choice once you get pregnant again, you have to influence public opinion, lobby legislators, vote, and run for office – all while breastfeeding. Piece of cake! Ooh, speaking of cake, make us some! Yes, while breastfeeding!
I’m also hearing arguments that the Supreme Court’s seemingly inevitable reversal of Roe v. Wade is proof democracy works. This is ridiculous to the point of asinine. Four of the five Supreme Court Justices who will apparently vote to overturn Roe v. Wade were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.
Samuel Alito was appointed by George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote to Al Gore in the 2000 election.
Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett were appointed by Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In other words, in true democracies, 80% of these five Supreme Court Justices wouldn’t have been nominated, let alone appointed, so their decision to overturn a 1973 ruling, where 7 of the 9 Justices – including 5 of the 6 who were appointed by Republican presidents – voted to provide women with reproductive rights over their own bodies, is anything but democratic.
Each and every election cycle, Republicans lay claim, void of any evidence, that Democrats are going to come after your guns. While seemingly miraculously, gun sales increase, Republicans come after people’s votes, reproductive rights, marriage rights, rights to protest, etc. As my dissection of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion draft should showcase, the modern-day Republican Party lives in yesteryear – for it’s the only way they can maintain the straight, white, Christian patriarchy they’ve enjoyed for so long. The only way we can make them and their exponentially outdated policy ideas history is by protesting, fighting, and voting today to make for a better tomorrow.
That’s it for today’s episode. Until next time, you can find me on Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Podbean, and Blogger. This has been I Feel Snitty, with Craig Rozniecki. Take care.
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