The draft opinion that shows the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade should surprise no one.
Yes, it's a historic and staggering reversal of women's rights but it's also a first line, a Trojan horse ruling that has 70 years of progressive change in its crosshairs.
It has long been clear to feminists and to the LGBT community where the GOP's decades long effort to appoint ultra-conservative Justices was headed.
Unable to win the popular vote and at odds with mainstream public opinion, American conservatives have worked tirelessly to capture and then impose their minority views (and thereby shape American life) through the highest Court in the land.
September 26, 2020: President Donald J. Trump walks with Judge Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. (Public Domain / Flickr / Shealah Craighead)
The scale of their theft is as self-evident as its extremism. This lamentable decision willfully ignores precedent or any concept of justice to simply be what it actually is, a flagrant abuse of power.
Soon, millions of American women will have a fundamental right, which many have known all of their lives, taken away from them by the Roberts Court.
The ruling will also cleave America in two. After it, abortion will be quickly banned by state legislatures in Republican-run states, but it will still remain legal in Democratic-run states.
A Constitutional Right has never been taken away in U.S. history.
— Heather Thomas (@HeatherThomasAF) May 3, 2022
In the ruling, Justice Samuel Alito superciliously claims that overturning Roe won't impact other decisions about personal autonomy (to wit gay rights, gay marriage rights, even the right to contraception).
But then recall that all three of Trump's Court appointees claimed under oath that Roe was established law and that they weren't seeking to overturn it.
July 9, 2018: President Donald Trump introduces U.S. Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, (R), as his nominee to the United States Supreme Court. (Getty Images)
The more you read the draft, the more it becomes clear that the Court is just a half step away from letting states re-criminalize same-sex sexual intimacy.
The shared relation between women, LGBT folk, and BIPOC folks could not be starker. Here is what will finally unite us - and what is so clearly on the menu: bodily autonomy.
Instead of accepting this extremist ruling, we must make a once-in-a-generation pact now to overturn it. If that means general strikes, Capitol protests, civil disobedience, well bring it on.
I’d like to see men mobilize this week as if the Supreme Court is coming for their testicles.
— Esther C, MD (@choo_ek) May 3, 2022
Alternating between marinading in their own resentment - that the American mainstream has passed them by - and ruthlessly plotting to use the Courts to impose their will regardless, conservatives have miscalculated and overreached. The pushback will be national and tidal because the ruling is so out of step with the views of nearly 70 percent of the nation's voters.
Gutting Roe v. Wade right before a midterm election is also politically suicidal. The GOP has just rocket launched Democratic efforts to end the filibuster and pass national abortion rights legislation.
The GOP and the conservative Roberts Court – whose legitimacy was already controversial thanks to its two “stolen” seats - now aim to have the last word. So they will be startled by the chorus of outraged voices already being raised against them if this lamentable draft ever becomes the law.
I'm telling you now how this is going to go down:
About a week after the decision to overturn Roe is released, AG Paxton in TX will release an opinion that TX is not bound by Obergefell. 1/n
— Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) May 3, 2022
Either way you look at it, the Court loses. They can lead us toward a new authoritarian society (that 70 percent of us already resist) where a small minority can remove the rights of over half the population (because if this pillar falls, then clearly they all can) or instead they simply lose what is left of their fading legitimacy and create a constitutional crisis, destroying the country in the process.
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