Interesting as far as it goes, but one question that isn’t considered is how the liberal justices would deal with a national abortion ban. If memory serves, the court’s liberals are surefire votes for finding that a given law is an appropriate exercise of CC power. That last dig at Thomas notwithstanding, he is by far the justice with the most cabined view of Congress’s power. See, eg Raich and Lopez. I’d wager that, if there are votes to strike down a ban, Thomas would be among them
Interesting thought. I guess it depends whether you think hypocrisy is confined to the conservative justices. I imagine the liberals would perform judicial contortions to find any other way to rein in the Commerce Clause power in that case. Not sure what that might be, though.
I certainly don’t think it’s confined to the liberals; but I’d also guess that I see less hypocrisy among the justices overall than most. I tend to think the meme that the justices are only doing fancy politics is vastly overrated. I worry that if the issue comes up on a codification of Roe, people will *only* see it as the justices voting their political preferences, even though there’s a ton of pre-commitment on the Justices’ parts to philosophies that would tend to push the liberals toward finding an abortion law (either ban or Roe codification) a valid exercise of commerce clause power, and the conservatives inclined the other way.
Maybe the way the SC reconciles a federal ban with its previous “send it to the states” position is by saying it went to the states who decided the best course of action was for the US Congress to act, through officials elected by the states, collaboratively to ban? Why can’t the laboratory’s best idea be collective federal action?
Interesting as far as it goes, but one question that isn’t considered is how the liberal justices would deal with a national abortion ban. If memory serves, the court’s liberals are surefire votes for finding that a given law is an appropriate exercise of CC power. That last dig at Thomas notwithstanding, he is by far the justice with the most cabined view of Congress’s power. See, eg Raich and Lopez. I’d wager that, if there are votes to strike down a ban, Thomas would be among them
Interesting thought. I guess it depends whether you think hypocrisy is confined to the conservative justices. I imagine the liberals would perform judicial contortions to find any other way to rein in the Commerce Clause power in that case. Not sure what that might be, though.
I certainly don’t think it’s confined to the liberals; but I’d also guess that I see less hypocrisy among the justices overall than most. I tend to think the meme that the justices are only doing fancy politics is vastly overrated. I worry that if the issue comes up on a codification of Roe, people will *only* see it as the justices voting their political preferences, even though there’s a ton of pre-commitment on the Justices’ parts to philosophies that would tend to push the liberals toward finding an abortion law (either ban or Roe codification) a valid exercise of commerce clause power, and the conservatives inclined the other way.
Maybe the way the SC reconciles a federal ban with its previous “send it to the states” position is by saying it went to the states who decided the best course of action was for the US Congress to act, through officials elected by the states, collaboratively to ban? Why can’t the laboratory’s best idea be collective federal action?
What a sham this court is. Total hypocrisy and bad faith jurisprudence
Matthew: any thoughts about the fact that Alex Holder, for his "insider" video of the family of TFG, has appropriated your blog-title?