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Then, Sam Brownback should be crafting a law in the US Congress to make abortion illegal. The Supreme Court is there is interpret the laws. If a law is seen to be wrong, then it is up to Congress to change the laws to be more appropriate or fair.
Now, how is it reasonable for the Supreme Court to make a ruling you agree with; yet, it is unreasonable for them to make a ruling you disagree with? If the mechanism is wrong when you disagree, then the mechanism should still be wrong when you agree.
One would hope that a Senator running for President would understand how government should work. I suppose it is too much to ask. *sigh*
I wonder if Sam will sponsor a nationwide effort to get dry-cleaners to donate their wire hangers to back-alley abortion doctors if they overturn Roe? Or if they'll check ID's and give sonograms at the border to make sure women aren't going to canada to have abortions. I wonder when Sam Brownback becomes president, if condoms are going to be sold by drug dealers at 8 times the market value. Or maybe, when you get pregnant, the doctors will have to report you to the "Department for the Safety of Potential Life" and you'll be sent to a "Life Preservation Camp" where you'll be cared for until you bring your offspring into this world, when you'll promptly be tossed onto the street.
What a wonderful Utopia Sam Brownback envisions for the United States. A country where women who aren't prepared to have a family they can care for are treated like suspected terrorists. A country where sex for no other reason than procreation is criminal. Thanks Sam. Keep fighting the good fight.
Then women in illegal states will have to travel to legal states for the procedure. These are the type of moral victories the right wing spends all their time on.
The American public really doesn't want that kind of an outcome.
But people like Brownback can't see more than a few feet in front of themselves.
He might want to consult with other member of his party, like the ones in Congress, before making a statement like that. Many of them know it would be the death of their party. They really just prefer to use it as a wedge issue.
There are enormous problems with having a one-issue litmus test for Supreme Court Justices, or an attitude that justice selections should be made with one goal in mind. Those justices will have authority to make decisions on other issues not related to that one issue. Those justices that are most likely to make it clear before hand that they will overturn Roe are those who also take a dim view of citizen's access to the courts, environmental regulation, restraint of the executive, civil rights in general, and all matter of other important areas of the law. A focus on Roe alone will get the anti-abortion crowd, were they to get their way, and indeed all of us, a far nastier, less compassionate, less free country ruled by a reactionary attitude to the law that seeks to turn back the clock to the late 19th century by eliminating much of the progress that has been made in the past century. Reliably anti-Roe justicial candidates have also a reliably dark vision of what America should be. The frightening thing is that, were the the anit-abortion people to realize this, I don't think they would care.
Overturning Roe is not the real goal. Once that happens, if it happens, and some states retain the current status of federal abortion rights, then they will try for some constitutional interpretation or court challenge and vote that criminalizes abortion nationally.
But states rights is the strict constructionism the right wing always preaches.
Oh well what's new. More hypocrisy, more talking out of both sides of their mouths.
We'd have those touch-healing revivals inside the Supreme Court.
Reid and Pelosi are publicly excoriated as traitors by the rank and file for not pushing time lines to get us out of Iraq in the first four months they are in the lead. This throws congressional approval ratings in the dumper.
Bush has all 3 branches of government locked up for 6 years and neither gets RvW overturned nor an anti-gay marriage ammendment passed and the religious right is merely disappointed that the struggle must go on. And the 30% base approval crowd grimly hangs on. I brought up the concept with one of my evangelical friends that they were being played and he was genuinely insulted that I would suggest good christians would play like this.
This statement is about as politically fortuitous as it gets, on the admittedly unlikely assumption the Democrats have the balls to exploit it. Specifically, the time is now -- right goddamn now -- for every Democratic campaign to vigorously point out that Nosferatu Guiliani plans to appoint precisely the same judges as Brownback, notwithstanding his disgusting, mealy-mouthed claims that he regards the decision as a matter of individual conscience.
I wish the supreme court would revist roe v wade before a fundie justice gets in there. The whole trimester argument that made sense over 30 years ago is invalidated by advances in medical technology.
The issue isn't if roe v wade will be over turned or modified. The issue is what kind of supreme court will hear the case.
Why not let the states decide the issue? A monolithic Supreme Court ruling is clearly not tenable as a long-term solution, given how extraordinarily divisive the abortion issue is. Let the people vote on the issue at the local level.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/6/17/11124/1577
A reenactment?
Is if Roe was overturned the following will happen in the backrooms of some state legislatures----"Look, we all know there will be thousands of women from our state that will be wanting abortions for various reasons. They can go to some other state on our border or in the general vicinity that retains abortion rights. And we can criminalize it here, taking the moral high ground to impress our Christian base."