I am reading this out of order. I LOVED this: "Let’s get out there and rejoin the battle. The brave band of 100 protestors in Oklahoma is waiting for us." Thank you!
Robert, with all due respect, be careful….your newsletter dripped with finger-pointing at us liberals and progressives, when the blame for ALL of this lies at the feet of the far-right cabal made up of the faux-Christian right, the power-hungry, amoral Republican members of Congress, White supremacists, bigots of all types, and old-style conservatives (aided and abetted by the corporate media), and the real cancer: center-right Democrats.
This progressive is indeed pissed off enough to step back and say, “You wanted it? Well, now you own it.”
Republicans will not win this one. There are way too many of us in our society and across the planet who have woken up to knowledge of the importance and desire to express and create a more inclusive relationship with each other, no matter of race, color, religion or what ever diversity of life’s expressions we are experiencing is being dishonored and disrespected by their conniving right now. We are the majority and even if Roe v. Wade is reversed, only more uprising will happen for voters to become engaged and fix this crazy fantasy. I am with Mr. Hubbell. Let’s stay engaged anyway we are able. Our army of voters shell overcome. This is not over until our Democratic vows are manifested. We the people...
Robert, can’t justices Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett be charged with perjury when they were being questioned in the Senate about Roe v Wade? Their answers were all framed as Roe is an existing law already challenged before the Supreme Court and upheld? They were practicing deception knowingly. They should be impeached and removed from the court as should Thomas. He voted against the January 6 Committee being allowed access to Trump’s papers which included evidence that his wife was taking part in overthrowing the election and keeping Trump in office.
I am sick of partisan justices. They should be chosen for their excellent knowlege of the law and for their excellence as judges in lower courts!
Here's a "Right' not explicit in the Constitution: the right to carry a gun for personal protection. But then, that applies mainly to the "manly." Anyone regretting not holding their nose, and voting for Clinton? The battle for November and the war for the future begins Now.
I'm having a dissociative reaction. I can't take it all in. I feel like I'm already doing all I can do campaigning for a fairer economy Massachusetts and making calls to voters in New Hampshire and my native state of Wisconsin. I hope not to fall into despair, which you so rightly point out is the whole objective of the Right.
The delegitimization of the Supreme Court as an effective bulwark against the terrible instincts of the majority or, as in this case, the minority has taken another painful and possibly fatal blow. In Bush v. Gore the Court engaged in a dance of Twister to install a delegitimate candidate as President (and stated that the case had no precedential value in the future) to start a dance to cases like Heller where Justice Scalia, who was brilliant (although I disagreed with most of his judicial philosophy) engaged in one of the worst-written cases I have ever read, with "logic" that was convoluted and only crafted to achieve an end-result. The Dobbs decision will now begin the rapid reversal of all the Due Process incorporation cases that have brought this country towards a more just and equitable society. Brown v. Board of Education forward are all at risk. When the Court starts this march to destroy personal freedoms will Justice Thomas write the option overturning Loving v. Virginia? I'd like to be a fly-on-the-wall at that conference to see how he wiggles out of the logic created in Dobbs. To use your on-going emphasis, Robert, all we can do is double-down on our personal and collective efforts to get-out-the-vote, from the local school board elections to the mid-terms to the 2024 Presidential race. Onward all!
When they say there is no right of privacy included in the Constitution, then all kinds of accepted rights are at risk now. They say Democrats are socialists aiming to destroy our liberties. What hypocrisy. The Second Amendment is all they care about. Five religious extremists telling the rest of us to revere their personal view of the world. I feel as though they are running America according to strict Evangelical religious views and I am deeply offended.
I wanted to make another comment after sharing my experiences before R v W. I saw a knowledgeable person explain that this time it will be different. Abortion pills are available and will be used legally or illegally. She expects the impacts to be criminalizing it. Putting people in jail. So, while some women with unwanted pregnancies will deliver a baby, many won’t. But they’ll be criminals and could be charged. The Texas law does not criminalize but the majority of states laws against abortion do.
As an unaffiliated voter who at times had voted a split ticket until 2016, and considering the behavior of the GOP writ large since then, my outlook since - and for the future - is that a vote for any member of the Republican party for any office, at any level of local, state or Federal government, in any election, at any time is a vote against liberty and freedom in this country. Period. Full stop.
I write as a 75 year old English woman who had an abortion when I was twenty - before Roe and wade. Not proud of it but there were abusive connotations. I cannot believe that people in your country are invoking the constitution! Thank you for that article Robert. I hope everyone comes to their senses before you have an epidemic of botched abortions with all those memories of the 1950s.
Please offer/encourage other means to counter this terrible shift than expanding the Supreme Court. That effort seems to me to be a non-starter. Our energy should be focused on elections at every level.
I am shaking. In 2017 I wrote an article for a local newspaper and it went viral. It was on women's struggles over the decades to get us where we are today. So many young women are not aware of the rights they have that they can lose and how women struggled to get them. I received 4,000 comments from around the world from young, old, men, women, positive and negative. After sitting on them for over a year, I decided that I had learned so much from these comments that I had to share. I put 500 in a book called What Young Women May Not Know published in 2021. At the time I thought that the change in administrations made this less relevant. Little did I know. News today reminds me of The Handmaids Tale. There were young women who were shocked that in the not too distant past, a woman was not able to get a library card without a signature from a husband, father or brother. Women fought, marched, were beaten, imprisoned, force fed and died here and abroad. We really need to be paying attention. As I said in my article, "Lest we lose it all!"
Settled law. Unless it is settled law the reactionary judges don't like. The vitriole Alito uses in his language against the thinking of the previous (Republican and Democrat appointees) justices is just a new form of the destructive way we have lined up. My mother had a friend who had an abortion in a hotel in San Francisco. In college my generation saw the law changed, and my grandaughter will see it changed backwards. I love babies and am in pediatrics. But this is not about babies. It is about controlling women. One pregnancy one time in one testicle and this discussion is done. If only.......
I respectfully disagree that the Dobbs draft opinion, if adopted, would mean the end of the other protections you list. I think Alito makes a sound and clear distinction between Roe and Casey, on the one hand, and cases like Loving, Griswold, Pierce, Lawrence, and Obergefell, on the other. There are no "handsprings" in the draft opinion. It states clearly that none of the other cases involves "potential life" [Roe and Casey] or "the life of an unborn human being" [the Mississippi statute at issue]. The draft opinion says those other cases "are inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion and by the same token our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way." Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, draft opinion at page 32.
I am reading this out of order. I LOVED this: "Let’s get out there and rejoin the battle. The brave band of 100 protestors in Oklahoma is waiting for us." Thank you!
Robert, with all due respect, be careful….your newsletter dripped with finger-pointing at us liberals and progressives, when the blame for ALL of this lies at the feet of the far-right cabal made up of the faux-Christian right, the power-hungry, amoral Republican members of Congress, White supremacists, bigots of all types, and old-style conservatives (aided and abetted by the corporate media), and the real cancer: center-right Democrats.
This progressive is indeed pissed off enough to step back and say, “You wanted it? Well, now you own it.”
Republicans will not win this one. There are way too many of us in our society and across the planet who have woken up to knowledge of the importance and desire to express and create a more inclusive relationship with each other, no matter of race, color, religion or what ever diversity of life’s expressions we are experiencing is being dishonored and disrespected by their conniving right now. We are the majority and even if Roe v. Wade is reversed, only more uprising will happen for voters to become engaged and fix this crazy fantasy. I am with Mr. Hubbell. Let’s stay engaged anyway we are able. Our army of voters shell overcome. This is not over until our Democratic vows are manifested. We the people...
Robert, can’t justices Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett be charged with perjury when they were being questioned in the Senate about Roe v Wade? Their answers were all framed as Roe is an existing law already challenged before the Supreme Court and upheld? They were practicing deception knowingly. They should be impeached and removed from the court as should Thomas. He voted against the January 6 Committee being allowed access to Trump’s papers which included evidence that his wife was taking part in overthrowing the election and keeping Trump in office.
I am sick of partisan justices. They should be chosen for their excellent knowlege of the law and for their excellence as judges in lower courts!
Here's a "Right' not explicit in the Constitution: the right to carry a gun for personal protection. But then, that applies mainly to the "manly." Anyone regretting not holding their nose, and voting for Clinton? The battle for November and the war for the future begins Now.
I'm having a dissociative reaction. I can't take it all in. I feel like I'm already doing all I can do campaigning for a fairer economy Massachusetts and making calls to voters in New Hampshire and my native state of Wisconsin. I hope not to fall into despair, which you so rightly point out is the whole objective of the Right.
The delegitimization of the Supreme Court as an effective bulwark against the terrible instincts of the majority or, as in this case, the minority has taken another painful and possibly fatal blow. In Bush v. Gore the Court engaged in a dance of Twister to install a delegitimate candidate as President (and stated that the case had no precedential value in the future) to start a dance to cases like Heller where Justice Scalia, who was brilliant (although I disagreed with most of his judicial philosophy) engaged in one of the worst-written cases I have ever read, with "logic" that was convoluted and only crafted to achieve an end-result. The Dobbs decision will now begin the rapid reversal of all the Due Process incorporation cases that have brought this country towards a more just and equitable society. Brown v. Board of Education forward are all at risk. When the Court starts this march to destroy personal freedoms will Justice Thomas write the option overturning Loving v. Virginia? I'd like to be a fly-on-the-wall at that conference to see how he wiggles out of the logic created in Dobbs. To use your on-going emphasis, Robert, all we can do is double-down on our personal and collective efforts to get-out-the-vote, from the local school board elections to the mid-terms to the 2024 Presidential race. Onward all!
When they say there is no right of privacy included in the Constitution, then all kinds of accepted rights are at risk now. They say Democrats are socialists aiming to destroy our liberties. What hypocrisy. The Second Amendment is all they care about. Five religious extremists telling the rest of us to revere their personal view of the world. I feel as though they are running America according to strict Evangelical religious views and I am deeply offended.
I wanted to make another comment after sharing my experiences before R v W. I saw a knowledgeable person explain that this time it will be different. Abortion pills are available and will be used legally or illegally. She expects the impacts to be criminalizing it. Putting people in jail. So, while some women with unwanted pregnancies will deliver a baby, many won’t. But they’ll be criminals and could be charged. The Texas law does not criminalize but the majority of states laws against abortion do.
As an unaffiliated voter who at times had voted a split ticket until 2016, and considering the behavior of the GOP writ large since then, my outlook since - and for the future - is that a vote for any member of the Republican party for any office, at any level of local, state or Federal government, in any election, at any time is a vote against liberty and freedom in this country. Period. Full stop.
Does anyone need any more proof than this?
I write as a 75 year old English woman who had an abortion when I was twenty - before Roe and wade. Not proud of it but there were abusive connotations. I cannot believe that people in your country are invoking the constitution! Thank you for that article Robert. I hope everyone comes to their senses before you have an epidemic of botched abortions with all those memories of the 1950s.
Please offer/encourage other means to counter this terrible shift than expanding the Supreme Court. That effort seems to me to be a non-starter. Our energy should be focused on elections at every level.
I am shaking. In 2017 I wrote an article for a local newspaper and it went viral. It was on women's struggles over the decades to get us where we are today. So many young women are not aware of the rights they have that they can lose and how women struggled to get them. I received 4,000 comments from around the world from young, old, men, women, positive and negative. After sitting on them for over a year, I decided that I had learned so much from these comments that I had to share. I put 500 in a book called What Young Women May Not Know published in 2021. At the time I thought that the change in administrations made this less relevant. Little did I know. News today reminds me of The Handmaids Tale. There were young women who were shocked that in the not too distant past, a woman was not able to get a library card without a signature from a husband, father or brother. Women fought, marched, were beaten, imprisoned, force fed and died here and abroad. We really need to be paying attention. As I said in my article, "Lest we lose it all!"
Settled law. Unless it is settled law the reactionary judges don't like. The vitriole Alito uses in his language against the thinking of the previous (Republican and Democrat appointees) justices is just a new form of the destructive way we have lined up. My mother had a friend who had an abortion in a hotel in San Francisco. In college my generation saw the law changed, and my grandaughter will see it changed backwards. I love babies and am in pediatrics. But this is not about babies. It is about controlling women. One pregnancy one time in one testicle and this discussion is done. If only.......
I respectfully disagree that the Dobbs draft opinion, if adopted, would mean the end of the other protections you list. I think Alito makes a sound and clear distinction between Roe and Casey, on the one hand, and cases like Loving, Griswold, Pierce, Lawrence, and Obergefell, on the other. There are no "handsprings" in the draft opinion. It states clearly that none of the other cases involves "potential life" [Roe and Casey] or "the life of an unborn human being" [the Mississippi statute at issue]. The draft opinion says those other cases "are inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion and by the same token our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way." Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, draft opinion at page 32.