Precedents Day: Justice Roberts Pins Ruling on Past
The other side calls her the “perfect messaging unicorn.” But that’s the tragic thing about Monday’s Supreme Court decision.
The other side calls her the “perfect messaging unicorn.” But that’s the tragic thing about Monday’s Supreme Court decision. As a black, female, Democratic, pro-lifer, Louisiana State Senator Katrina Jackson isn’t an outlier. If anything, the woman who wrote the law that five justices just struck down is a symbol of the consensus this court won’t recognize. “There’s nothing unusual about my views,” Katrina insists. Americans can disagree about a lot of things, but no matter how this country feels about abortion, women’s safety was never negotiable. Until now.
Maybe it was a lack of courage. Or a misguided judicial philosophy. Whatever it was, Chief Justice John Roberts decision to flip on a law he’d have upheld four years ago was a stunner. “I spent a lot of time defending Justice Roberts over the past year,” a frustrated Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry told me. “And what he confirmed for me today is he’s joining the rest of those elitists, and that basically he’s hoodwinked the American people. It is completely disappointing. It’s what undermines democracy and the credibility of our Constitution.”
Roberts’s explanation was that his hands were tied. After the court struck down Texas’s abortion regulations in 2016, the Bush appointee shrugged and said he was bound by precedent. It would be one thing, Jeff explained, if he’d done that throughout this whole term. But, he pointed out, “what’s hypocritical about that statement is that he [hasn’t been] consistent in upholding [precedent].” If he had, even throughout this term, “then maybe there would be some credibility to what the justice said. But he struck down or overruled stare decisis in past decisions just this year alone. So he’s basically treating [precedent] like a buffet. When it suits him, he picks it, and when it doesn’t, he discards it.” Remember, Landry pointed out, this law wasn’t about abortion. It was about guaranteeing a woman’s health and safety. And this court, led by Roberts, just gave the abortion industry a pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who returned to the side of common sense after his wild departure on Bostock, didn’t spare Roberts in his dissent. He called the majority’s opinion “the judicial version of a hunter’s stew: Throw in anything that looks interesting, stir, and season to taste.” In reality, he argued, nothing about the admitting privileges should have been remotely controversial. It “tracks longstanding state laws governing physicians who perform relatively low-risk procedures like colonoscopies, Lasik eye surgeries, and steroid injections at ambulatory surgical centers.” And by blaming his vote on precedent, Justice Clarence Thomas argues about Roberts, he misses the whole point. “When our prior decisions clearly conflict with the text of the Constitution, we are required to privilege the text over our own precedents.”
Obviously, our judicial system needs stability and continuity. But if the Supreme Court followed Roberts’s logic, America would still be living under segregation! Ironically, Ed Whelan writes, the justices agreed to take this case because the circumstances had changed since Texas’s 2016 case — which means Roberts’s precedent argument (the stare decisis excuse) doesn’t necessarily apply. And yet, experts say, that seems to be his m.o. on thorny cultural debates. “When contentious social issues are at play, Roberts is now treating stare decisis as almost sacrosanct. For him, it’s a one-way ratchet: Prior court rulings of a purely economic or regulatory nature are fair game for overturning, but once the court has moved ‘leftward’ on an issue such as abortion or transgender issues, Roberts claims his hands are tied even if he thinks the court’s initial interpretation was wrong.”
At the end of the day, Justice Thomas insists, “The fact that no five justices can agree on the proper interpretation of our precedents today evinces that our abortion jurisprudence remains in a state of utter entropy. Since the Court decided Roe, Members of this Court have decried the unworkability of our abortion case law and repeatedly called for course corrections of varying degrees. Because we can reconcile neither Roe nor its progeny with the text of our Constitution, those decisions should be overruled.”
For now, even Thomas’s clarity is a cold comfort to the people of Louisiana, who are tired of settling for lower standards for women. And who did something about it, only to see five justices’ political agenda get in the way. And yet, the NRO editors urged, “The pro-life movement has persisted all these decades, no matter how long the odds, no matter how beleaguered the cause, no matter how insistently it was told that the question of the human rights of unborn children had been settled… It knows that what the Supreme Court has kept saying about our nation’s fundamental law is a slander. This latest sad and unconvincing decision should not cause pro-lifers to slacken for a moment.”
There is a path forward. It’s called the November elections. The way to right this wrong is not to throw in the towel and go home. It’s to persist, engage, vote, and pray that the president whose two appointments sided with women gets at least one nomination more.
Originally published here.
New Jersey Ballots Hit Fraud-side
Thanks to New Jersey, we don’t have to wonder if the mail-in balloting is a horrible idea. We have proof! In what is already a PR nightmare for the Democratic Party, at least one in five ballots have been disqualified in a local election for fraud. But wait, you say. Liberals swore that never happens! Well, it’s happening all right. And just in time to rethink the ridiculous idea ending in-person voting.
“We should be sounding a [siren],” RealClearPolitics’ Mark Hemmingway told me on “Washington Watch.” “I mean, it wasn’t just that we had one in five ballots in the third largest city of New Jersey suspected of fraud. The New Jersey attorney general, who is a Democrat, brought fraud charges against four different people in the city — which included candidates for the city council and the current vice president of the city council in Paterson.” And, as Mark explained, it involved all kinds of things: “stealing ballots out of people’s mailboxes, mishandling ballots, ballot harvesting.” If there was an avenue of corruption, they found it.
But it wasn’t just Paterson. “There were 31 municipal elections across New Jersey last month. And in those elections — which were all mail-in elections because of the pandemic — 9.6 percent, about one in 10 ballots, were all rejected… which suggests that something is going on there. Clearly, I don’t know if that’s all fraud or just partially fraud or whatever. But we have not ironed out the problem.” And that’s especially concerning now, as the Democrats ramp up this push for November — with tens of millions more Americans voting by mail voting that way for the first time.
And, as we’ve seen in tight races all across the country, it only took a handful of ballots to make the difference in the final outcome. Just imagine what would happen if that same faulty system were applied across the board. As Mark pointed out, we don’t have to. Donald Trump would lose. “The last presidential election was decided by less than 80,000 votes across the handful of states. That’s what determined the Electoral College winner. So when you [consider that] 129 million total ballots were cast in that election… even a tiny fraction of the ballots being fraudulent [would] completely throw things into doubt.”
Even now, as states debate the idea, there are dozens of lawsuits being filed across the country, mostly by Democratic Party-affiliated groups that are rushing to expand access to mail-in ballots. And as part of those lawsuits, Mark explains, they’re trying to squash a lot of the security measures we have in place for mail-in ballots. “So, for instance, there were a few thousand ballots in Patterson, New Jersey [that] were thrown out because [of] signature match issues, which is… one of the ways that they verify it’s an authentic ballot. They compare the signature on the ballot to a voter registration card or something they have on file at the board of elections. And it’s not a great way to do election security, but in a lot of ways that’s the only security measure in place for mail-in ballots. And yet there are lawsuits across the country right now to do away with signature matching.”
Even the barest attempts at election integrity are being chipped away, thanks in part to the media’s steady insistence that voter fraud doesn’t exist. “And if you believe that, then why really worry about any sense of security measure? …Any extra step to ensure the integrity of the ballot is really just some form of voter suppression, [their attitude seems to be]. And it’s really sort of troubling.” Especially since the evidence on fraud is clear about just how misguided the press’s coverage has been. Ten years ago, Mark explains, Cal Tech and M.I.T. put out a joint report on voting that warned fraud is concentrated in the mail-in ballot system. “And not only do we need to look into that, we need to probably scale back on the amount of mail-in and voting that we’re doing.”
There are other ways, after all, to make sure everyone has a chance to exercise their civic duty — like expanding the hours and days that in-person voting is open, because it’s much more secure. Now, obviously, communities need to do what’s best for them. But there are trends, like legalizing ballot harvesting, that almost guarantee tampering. When someone else is allowed to pick up your ballot and deliver it, there’s absolutely no way to guarantee that vote’s integrity.
“Bad things happen with mail-ins,” the president insisted. And I don’t know many Americans willing to risk their vote to find out how bad.
Originally published here.
Sick of Watching People Ruin Monuments? So Is Allen West.
Does anyone remember George Floyd? Allen West wonders, because his death is being lost in all of the noise of the protests, Antifa, mob riots, and this new war against American history. No one is having the conversation this country should be having. Hear what the former congressman and military vet has to say in my interview with Lt. Col. West on “Washington Watch.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
