originalist intent

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1019 belated? dismabig?</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">primary 2 23 on clarence 2nd amend
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</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KBJ flips 10 22 on voting rights</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">abortion?</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/how-the-federalist-society-won">https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/how-the-federalist-society-won</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">a few minutes before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Sherif Girgis sat in his office at Notre Dame Law School, desperately clicking refresh on the Supreme Court’s Web site. Girgis had been looking forward to this precise moment for months. He’d been gaming out the arguments for years, really.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Conservatives of an older generation, who suffered a Supreme Court betrayal in 1992—when a trifecta of Republican-appointed judges upheld the constitutional right to an abortion, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey—couldn’t believe that Roe would ever truly fall. But Girgis, who is thirty-six, came up in a different era. “I was in kindergarten when Casey was decided,” he said. Unlike his jaded elders, he believed that the Court would one day follow through on the simple, powerful idea that animates the conservative legal movement: that a judge’s job is not to make value judgments or to speculate about the potential consequences of his or her decisions but, rather, to decide cases by looking solely at how the Constitution was understood at the time it was written. This method of interpretation, called originalism, would inevitably lead to the end of Roe.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">girgis, a professor who specializes in philosophy and the law, embodies a young, energized, traditionalist wing of the conservative legal movement that will likely be galvanized by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Early in his career, Girgis clerked for Samuel Alito, the Justice who wrote the majority decision in Dobbs. He’s a rising star in the Federalist Society, a powerful network of conservatives and libertarians that has a chapter at many major law schools, as well as dozens of professional chapters across the country. The organization prides itself on being a forum for ideas, even those which some conservatives hate, which is part of what drew Girgis to become a member when he was a student at Yale Law School, in 2011. “The Federalist Society is not a ghetto within each law school,” he said. “At its best, it is—or ought to be—a cheerful and willing debating partner.” Girgis is a frequent speaker at chapter events. A longtime member described him to me as a “brilliant, beautiful soul.” One of his mentors, Princeton’s Robert George—a heavyweight in the relatively small world of élite conservative academics—frequently hypes him on Twitter, like a coach cheering on Rocky in the ring.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In 1982, when the Federalist Society was founded, the conservative legal movement was still finding its footing. Law-school campuses were predominantly liberal, and there was a prevailing sense among students and professors that the conclusions in Roe and other major Supreme Court decisions of the prior thirty years—on issues such as birth control, racial integration, and voting rights—were both morally good and legally correc</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">t. But an ideological counter-revolution was beginning. Lee Liberman Otis—one of the Federalist Society’s founders, who was then a law student at the</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;University of Chicago</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">—recalled thinking, It’s funny that there are these ideas about law which Reagan seemed to have run on, in part, and nobody’s talking about them.&nbsp;</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">She helped organize the first Federalist Society conference; its speakers included Antonin Scalia</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, then a law professor, and</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Theodore Olson, then an Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan Administration</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Otis could tell that the conference was the start of something. Four years later, Scalia would ascend to a seat on the Supreme Court, and Olson would eventually become one of the country’s most accomplished Supreme Court litigators.</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“I don’t recall Roe being an issue in any such conversations I had concerning [the] creation of Fed Soc,”&nbsp;<b>Olson&nbsp;</b>wrote to me, in an e-mail. “It was all about creating a forum/venue for debate. Not taking sides on any particular issue.” And yet Roe symbolized something to the Federalist Society’s founding members. “For someone like me, a lawyer, Roe was really not about abortion,” John McGinnis, a conservative law professor at Northwestern University, said. (McGinnis was an early member of Harvard’s Federalist Society chapter, back when it could fit in a “broom closet,” he said.)&nbsp;</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Roe, he told me, “was the&nbsp;<b>culmination of the Court diverging from the text of the Constitution&nbsp;</b>and essentially—this is not too strong of a word—fabricating the law.” One of the core holdings of the decision, that abortion had to remain legal before the point of fetal viability, seemed to conservatives to be summoned out of thin air. Some prominent left-leaning legal scholars, despite being pleased with the outcome of the decision, said the same: John Hart Ely commented that Roe was “not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” (The current conservative majority on the Court happily cited this line when overturning Roe.)</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">During the next four decades, the conservative legal movement set about radically changing the way that the law was talked about. They promoted a mode of legal interpretation that was purportedly value-neutral, based on their understanding of what the Founders wrote. The movement’s most powerful tool was its people: the Federalist Society started functioning as a kind of Rolodex for legal jobs around the country, especially clerkships and judgeships.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;And yet the process was slow going. In 1987, the U.S. Senate rejected the nomination of Robert Bork, an early Federalist Society figure, to the Supreme Court, based in part on his strong opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.&nbsp;</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Anthony Kennedy and David Souter—Republican appointees without strong Federalist Society ties—drifted to the left during their time on the bench, siding with their liberal peers in Casey, along with Sandra Day O’Connor</b>, Reagan’s first nominee to the Court. Slowly, though, originalist Justices started taking their seats.<b>&nbsp;Today, all six members of the conservative majority run in Federalist Society circles. All voted to effectively end the federal abortion rights that have been in place for the past fifty years.</b></span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Dobbs case also illustrates the Federalist Society’s broader influence beyond judicial appointments. The conservative movement now has a legal intelligentsia of academics, writers, and national advocacy groups who fundamentally shaped how Roe was overturned. The Alliance Defending Freedom (A.D.F.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">), a conservative Christian legal firm, helped Mississippi legislators draft the fifteen-week abortion ban that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which the Justices upheld in Dobbs, and then later served alongside Mississippi’s legal team as it presented its arguments to the Court.<b>&nbsp;A.D.F.’s general counsel, Kristen Waggoner, a Federalist Society member</b>, told me that the firm closely monitored the scholarship on abortion while shaping&nbsp;<b>Mississippi’s litigation strategy—which was led by another Federalist Society regular, Mississippi’s solicitor general, Scott Stewart.</b>&nbsp;</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The Court depends on this scholarship, too; the Dobbs decision is heavy with footnotes debating the minutiae of how abortion was historically viewed</b>. To Girgis, whose own scholarship has touched on subjects such as the nature of marriage, religious liberty, and constitutional principles, this is what’s compelling about his job: “The legal academy is not like other academic disciplines, because it is tied to the real world in a very concrete way,” he said. “It’s at least supposed to be serving the bench and bar.”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Dobbs is exciting, he added, in part because it shows that “a theory of interpretation can actually lead to real-world results.”</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>While originalism may sound intuitive and straightforward, many in the legal world feel cynical about its true aims.</b>&nbsp;Critics of the conservative legal movement view the approach as a theoretical fig leaf used to justify decisions that line up with conservatives’ policy preferences. When I asked Girgis about this, he said that originalism is supposed to achieve the opposite: it’s a way to make sure the law doesn’t just reflect the preferences of the ruling party. (Or, as Girgis put it, to guarantee that judges “don’t cheat.”) Dobbs was satisfying, in his view, precisely because it was argued according to a set legal theory that has clear rules and little room for personal opinion. To Girgis, it’s not a sign of bad faith that originalist decisions often reach conservative outcomes, because both are philosophical approaches anchored in the past.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">still, other critics believe that originalism, even when applied in good faith, often has unacceptably harmful consequences.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The three liberal Justices’ dissent in Dobbs is in part a scathing critique of the originalist approach: the Founders, they wrote, “did not recognize women’s rights. When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification . . . it consigns women to second-class citizenship.”</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Conservatives don’t always agree on how originalism should be applied. For example, Neil Gorsuch, the originalist all-star who replaced Scalia, wrote the 2020 decision that extended workplace protections to L.G.B.T.Q. employees. In the opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s liberal Justices, Gorsuch made his argument on strictly textualist grounds, but the outcome rankled many conservatives who believed that nineteen-sixties-era anti-discrimination laws were never intended or understood to protect gay and trans people.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;During the same term, Roberts put the brakes on overturning Roe out of a desire for the Court to practice restraint, despite eagerness from the movement to see that decision in the ash heap of history; he continued to make his uneasiness clear in his concurrence in Dobbs, even as the majority overruled him.</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Common wisdom has it that the Federalist Society is roughly divided between libertarians and more traditionalist types—religious conservatives like Girgis, who converted to Catholicism in high school</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;Some on the traditionalist side have claimed that the occasionally unexpected outcomes of originalism demonstrate the movement’s failures—that the theory doesn’t necessarily lead to moral results in the hardest cases.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Girgis’s loose impression is that among law students and Federalist Society members there’s more of an appetite for a style of legal interpretation which would promote conservatives’ vision of a good society, along the lines of Adrian Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism.”</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">And yet Dobbs “was a huge boost for the conservative legal movement as a practical, sociological matter,” Girgis said. The decision proved that the traditionalists inside of the conservative legal movement aren’t just the Charlie Brown to a libertarian Lucy’s football; the long strategy of creating an alternative intellectual milieu in the law actually succeeded.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Now that conservatives have won, the legal work begins. One effect of Roe and Casey was to make abortion-related policy and scholarship feel somewhat low-stakes. Conservative legislators could introduce any bill they wanted, knowing it would eventually be struck down by the courts. Scholars could make any theoretical argument they wanted, knowing that Roe’s viability standard would ultimately guide abortion jurisprudence. But, in post-Roe America, “the legal nerd in me is intrigued by the very difficult and mostly unsettled legal questions about the kinds of policies that states are likely to pursue,” Girgis said. Can Texas stop its residents from travelling to another state to obtain an abortion? Can Mississippi ban abortion drugs, even when they’re approved by the Food and Drug Administration? Can the federal government limit or expand abortion access without an act of Congress? These questions have taken on “a new practical urgency, and there’s not a ton of law on some of them,” Girgis said. “That combination is exciting for me. Because it means that your expertise is both needed and practically relevant.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But, although the conservative legal movement was united in its belief that abortion is not a constitutionally protected right, it has always been divided on the question of whether abortion should be illegal.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;In May, leaders of some of the top pro-life activist groups in the country signed a letter opposing “any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women” for abortions. This came after a Louisiana legislator had introduced a bill allowing prosecutors to charge women who terminated their pregnancies with murder. “The penalties that should be imposed should be on the supply side—<b>essentially those who are profiting from the death of children</b>,”&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Waggoner, of A.D.F., told me. The Louisiana bill died, but there’s only so much control that legal élites will have on the next phase of abortion policy in America</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. “Part of the problem is that, on abortion, there aren’t many people in the academy leading the strategy” when it comes to legislation, Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, said. When I asked Girgis whether state legislators actually listen to guys like him when they’re drafting new laws, he laughed. “I suspect that many don’t care,” he said. “But I also suspect that at least some do, if only because they want a good assessment of how likely their law is to be held unconstitutional by courts.” (That being said, he added, “Academics very easily overestimate their own relevance.”)</span></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Some people in the conservative legal movement are more philosophical about the consequences of overturning Roe. In their view, the error of the original ruling—a “constitutional deformity,” as one Federalist Society insider put it—has been corrected. Now the democratic process begins. “I do think that things tend to settle out,” Otis, the Federalist Society founder, who now leads the organization’s faculty division, said. “By the time a law gets through, it does usually reflect, when it’s adopted, the views of the people.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Girgis is usually cautious not to inject his personal views into his legal analysis. But, a few days after Dobbs came out, he briefly traded the detached voice of a legal academic for that of someone who cares deeply about the pro-life cause. “A year from now, there will be infants going from milk to soft foods because Dobbs triggered laws and shuttered clinics on Friday and not Monday,” he wrote, on the popular legal Web site SCOTUSblog. “Now gestating, they’ll learn to walk, catch fireflies, fall in love, comb gray hair, because of appointments canceled last Friday. Not just by good fortune but—for the first time in generations—by legal right.” The legal world he was writing for still largely misunderstands the moral motivations on the conservative side, he told me: “The moral stakes on both sides of the issue are about to become much more visible and textured for everybody.” Girgis, who has two young kids and another due in September, said that as a parent “you have a more immediate encounter with the nature of human life.<b>&nbsp;But you also have a more immediate encounter with the potential burdens of parenthood, and the ways that they make very serious and life-altering demands on people.” It’s an insight that would never show up in an originalist legal decision—that moments like this have consequences.</b></font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BS</font></div><div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW</font></font></font></font></div><div><b>Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s Plain-Spoken Defender</b></div><div>He has emerged as an important justice with a distinctive interpretive method that is pragmatic yet rooted in originalism and textualism.</div><div>By&nbsp;<b>David B. Rivkin</b>&nbsp;Jr. and&nbsp;</div><div>James Taranto</div><div>July 28, 2023&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>via realclear</div><div>
</div><div><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the Supreme Court usually makes news by making decisions, and it’s done plenty of that lately. In its first two terms with a 6-3 conservative majority,<b>&nbsp;the justices have revisited old precedents and established new ones [THAT IS IGNORED STARE DECISIS] on abortion, gun rights, racial discrimination, freedom of speech and religion, the power of unelected federal regulators and more.</b></p><div data-block="doNotPrint" class="css-1u1rran-Wrapper e1a87je71" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="article-news-front css-17jwauc-Container e1a87je70" style="box-sizing: border-box; width: 620px; margin: 24px 0px;"><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By comparison with the previous eight decades or so, the court has frequently declined to defer to<b>&nbsp;elite</b>&nbsp;political opinion</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, and as a result it has made news in other ways. A draft abortion opinion was leaked to the press.&nbsp;<b>An armed man was arrested outside the home of Justice&nbsp;Brett Kavanaugh&nbsp;and charged with attempted assassination</b>.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The justices have come under attack from President Biden (“this is not a normal court”) and Democratic lawmakers. Partisan journalists have tried to gin up “ethics” scandals&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">and incite animus against disfavored justices.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year,” Justice&nbsp;Samuel Alito&nbsp;</b>says during an early July interview at the Journal’s New York offices.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;In the face of a political onslaught, he observes, “the traditional idea about how judges and justices should behave is they should be mute” and leave it to others, especially “the organized bar,” to defend them. “But that’s just not happening. And so at a certain point I’ve said to myself, nobody else is going to do this, so I have to defend myself.”</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He does so with a candor that is refreshing and can be startling. He spoke with us on the record for four hours in two wide-ranging sessions,&nbsp;<a data-type="link" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-samuel-alito-this-made-us-targets-of-assassination-dobbs-leak-abortion-court-74624ef9?mod=article_inline" rel="" target="blank" class="css-1h1us5y-StyledLink el06won0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">the first</a>&nbsp;in April in his chambers at the court.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the interim, he wrote an&nbsp;<a data-type="link" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/propublica-misleads-its-readers-alito-gifts-disclosure-alaska-singer-23b51eda?mod=article_inline" rel="" target="blank" class="css-1h1us5y-StyledLink el06won0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">op-ed</a>&nbsp;for these pages responding in detail to a hit piece from ProPublica,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>&nbsp;a self-styled “independent, nonprofit newsroom&nbsp;</b>that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” Many of the court’s critics claim to want more “transparency.” Their hostile reactions to our April interview and his June op-ed suggest—no surprise—that they’re really after ideologically congenial rulings, not to mention&nbsp;<b>conformist press coverage.</b></span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Justice Alito, 73, was appointed in early 2006 and is now the second most senior associate justice.&nbsp;<b>He has emerged as an important voice on the court with a distinctive interpretive method that is rooted in originalism and textualism—</b>adherence to the text, respectively, of the Constitution and statutes—</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">but in some ways more pragmatic than that of Justice&nbsp;Clarence Thomas&nbsp;or&nbsp;Neil Gorsuch.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“There are very serious differences” in how the six conservative justices approach cases, Justice Alito says. The simplest difference involves respect for precedent<b>: Justice Thomas “gives less weight to stare decisis</b>&nbsp;than a lot of other justices.” It is, “in its way, a virtue of his jurisprudence,” Justice Alito says. “He sticks to his guns.”</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>That’s why Justice Thomas writes many lone concurrences</b>. In&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</em>&nbsp;(2022), he argued that “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” including those involving same-sex marriage, contraception and consensual sodomy. Justice Alito’s majority opinion carefully distinguished those issues from abortion. Justice Thomas often disregards precedents with which he disagrees and follows his own route to the majority’s destination—to cite a recurring example, by relying on the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than the Due Process Clause. The disadvantage of this approach, Justice Alito says, “is that you drop out of the conversation, and .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. lose your ability to help to shape what comes next in the application of that rule.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Justice Gorsuch has an ornery streak that has shown itself in cases involving Indian law, crime and discrimination. “He’s definitely not a consequentialist,” Justice Alito says of his colleague—meaning he is less concerned with the real-world effects of following his principles.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An example is&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Ramos v. Louisiana</em>&nbsp;(2020), which overturned a pair of 1972 precedents and held that the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial requires unanimity for a finding of guilt in state court. Every state but Louisiana and Oregon already required unanimous verdicts, but&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">“Ramos&nbsp;</em>potentially affected many, many criminal convictions that had been obtained .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. using nonunanimous jury verdicts, which had been specifically approved by the Supreme Court,” Justice Alito says. “Overruling those decisions had potentially vast consequences. .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. That was not a big factor in his analysis.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As for Chief Justice&nbsp;John Roberts, “he puts a high premium on consensus. He rarely dissents.” He filed no outright dissenting opinions in the 2022-23 term and only one in 2021-22. He also “has expressed a very strong tendency to protect the prerogatives of the judiciary</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">,” as in&nbsp;</span><em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">Bank Markazi v. Peterson&nbsp;</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(2016). The court upheld a law directing that Iranian assets targeted by successful plaintiffs in a specific terrorism case be seized to pay the judgment. The chief justice dissented against what he called an unacceptable intrusion on judicial power: “Hereafter, with this Court’s seal of approval, Congress can unabashedly pick the winners and losers in particular pending cases.”</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>On the liberal side of the court, by contrast, “I don’t see that there’s a difference in interpretive method</b>,” Justice Alito says. Yet he emphasizes that “we don’t always line up 6-3, 5-4, the way some people tend to think. If you look at all the cases, there are cases where the lineup is unusual.” C</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">hief Justice Roberts wrote two election-law decisions this term,&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Allen v. Milligan&nbsp;</em>and&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Moore v. Harper,</em>&nbsp;in which he was joined by the three liberals and Justice Kavanaugh, along with Justice&nbsp;Amy Coney Barrett&nbsp;in the latter case.</span></p><div class="ad-portal" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another prime example is&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">National Pork Producers Council v. Ross,</em>&nbsp;which upheld a California law banning the sale of meat from pigs that are “confined in a cruel manner”—almost all of which is produced in other states. The council argued that the law violated the Dormant Commerce Clause, a doctrine that limits states’ authority to enact policies that burden interstate commerce.</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Justice Alito, who agreed with that view, says “it’s no secret that Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch don’t think that there is such a thing as the Dormant Commerce Clause.” Justices Barrett,&nbsp;Sonia Sotomayor&nbsp;and&nbsp;Elena Kagan&nbsp;signed on to parts of Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, providing a majority that let the law stand.</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I have not joined Justice Thomas, Justice [Antonin] Scalia, Justice Gorsuch in saying we should get rid of the Dormant Commerce Clause,” Justice Alito says. “I’ve written this in the Tennessee wine case—that the Constitution surely was meant to contain some principle that prevents the balkanization of the economy. That was one of the main reasons for calling the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He refers to his 7-2 ruling in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Assn. v. Thomas</em>&nbsp;(2019). In dissent, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas cited the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition and gave states broad authority to regulate alcohol. Justice Alito’s majority opinion treated that provision “as one part of a unified constitutional scheme,” within which the lawmakers who ratified the 21st Amendment understood that “the Commerce Clause did not permit the States to impose protectionist measures clothed as police-power regulations.”</p><div class="ad-portal" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>That demonstrates a central feature of Justice Alito’s jurisprudence: its emphasis on historical context.</b>&nbsp;“I think history often tells us what the Constitution means,” he says, “or at least it can tell us what the Constitution doesn’t mean.”&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His dissent in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Obergefell v. Hodges&nbsp;</em>(2015) is a case in point. “It’s perfectly clear that nobody in 1868 thought that the 14th Amendment was going to protect the right to same-sex marriage,” he says. Before this century, “no society—even those that did not have a moral objection to same-sex conduct, like ancient Greece—had recognized same-sex marriage.” The first country to legalize it was the Netherlands, effective in 2001</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The same attention to history informs Justice Alito’s textualism. “I reject the idea that a statute should be interpreted simply by looking up the words in the dictionary and applying that mechanically,” he says. Justice Gorsuch did something like that in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Bostock v. Clayton County</em>&nbsp;(2020), in which the court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. sex,” covers “sexual orientation and gender identity.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Justice Gorsuch reasoned that because sex is essential to the definition of both categories, such discrimination is “because of” sex. But in 1964 homosexuality was subject to widespread disapprobation, and gender identity “hardly existed as a concept, even among professionals in the field,” as Justice Alito says. “When it’s very clear that the author of the text .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. cannot have meant something, then I don’t think we should adopt that interpretation, even if a purely semantic interpretation of the statute would lead you to a different result.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Justice Alito’s respect for precedent has limits</b>: “Some decisions—and I think that&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Roe&nbsp;</em>and&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Casey&nbsp;</em>fell in this category—are so egregiously wrong, so clearly wrong, that’s a very strong factor in support of overruling.” Those are the 1973 and 1992 abortion cases that&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dobbs</em>&nbsp;overturned, with Justice Alito writing for a majority of five. Chief Justice Roberts provided a sixth vote to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but urged “a more measured course” that would narrow the precedents while deferring the question of whether to overturn them altogether.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Justice Alito has been known to take a similarly incremental approach. His opinion for the court in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Janus v. Afscme</em>&nbsp;(2018) held that compelling public employees to pay union dues violated the First Amendment, and it overturned a 1977 precedent,&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.</em>&nbsp;A foretaste came in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Harris v. Quinn&nbsp;</em>(2014), also written by Justice Alito, which subjected&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Abood</em>&nbsp;to a withering critique but left it standing.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The question how broad a decision should be—should we overrule a prior precedent when we really don’t have to in order to decide this case?—it’s a judgment call,” he says. “There can be reasons for deciding the case more narrowly. Maybe we’re not sure whether it should be overruled. Maybe we think it would be better if the issue were highlighted for others to address first—scholars, lower-court decisions. Maybe it’s a question of what a majority of the court is willing to go along with.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That last contingency sometimes depends on events more than philosophy. Justice&nbsp;Ruth Bader Ginsburg&nbsp;died in September 2020, and President Trump appointed Justice Barrett to succeed her. Had Ginsburg lived a few months longer, the chief justice’s tentative approach might have prevailed in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dobbs.</em>&nbsp;Or perhaps the justices wouldn’t have taken the case.</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the 2023-24 term, the court will consider whether to overturn<b>&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Chevron v. NRDC</em>&nbsp;(1984), an increasingly disputed precedent that requires courts to defer to administrative agencies’</b>&nbsp;interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Justice Alito is careful not to state a position on&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Chevron,&nbsp;</em>but he does make a pertinent broader point about precedent: “I’m not in favor of overruling important decisions just by pretending they don’t exist but refusing to say anything about them.”</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He says that’s what his colleagues did last month in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">U.S. v. Texas,</em>&nbsp;the term’s only case that had him alone in dissent. The court threw out Texas’ challenge to lax Biden administration immigration guidelines on the ground that the state lacked standing to challenge them in court. But Justice Alito says Texas’ claim of injury “was the same as—in fact, stronger than—that of Massachusetts in&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Massachusetts v. EPA</em>,” a 2007 case that opened the door to federal regulation of greenhouse gases. “The court just hardly said a word about&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Massachusetts v. EPA.”</em></span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Biden policies suspended all enforcement measures for certain categories of illegal aliens, despite statutory language to the contrary—a clear violation, in Justice Alito’s view, of the president’s express constitutional duty to ensure that the law be faithfully executed. How did all eight of his colleagues end up on the other side? “I have no idea,” he says. “I honestly don’t. Why did it turn out that way? Because it involves immigration? Because it’s vaguely connected to Trump? I don’t know. I don’t know what the explanation is.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After the justices reconvene on the first Monday in October, they will continue making news in the usual way. Among the issues on the fall docket, along with the reconsideration of&nbsp;</span><em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box;">Chevron</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">: whether South Carolina impermissibly gerrymandered its congressional districts by race, whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding scheme is unconstitutional,</span><b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">whether Congress can tax unrealized investment income,&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">and whether someone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order can be deprived of his right to possess firearms. (Mr. Rivkin and a law partner,&nbsp;Andrew Grossman, represent the appellants in&nbsp;<b><em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Moore v. U.S.,&nbsp;</em>the tax case.)</b></span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The attacks on the court are sure to keep coming as well. Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to advance Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, which purports to impose on the justices and their clerks regulations “at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Justice Alito says he voluntarily follows disclosure statutes that apply to lower-court judges and executive-branch officials; so do the other justices.&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But he notes that “Congress did not create the Supreme Court”—the Constitution did. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” he says. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Do the other justices agree? “I don’t know that any of my colleagues have spoken about it publicly, so I don’t think I should say. But I think it is something we have all thought about.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The political branches have other weapons they could deploy against the court. The Constitution doesn’t specify the number of justices, so Congress could pack the court by enacting legislation to expand its size. Last week a pair of leftist law professors issued an “<a data-type="link" href="https://balkin.blogspot.com/2023/07/an-open-letter-to-biden-administration.html" rel="" target="blank" class="css-1h1us5y-StyledLink el06won0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">open letter</a>” urging President Biden to “restrain MAGA justices” by applying their rulings as narrowly as possible. The day the court decided&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Biden v. Nebraska,</em>&nbsp;striking down Mr. Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan, the president announced that he was undertaking legally questionable alternatives.</span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Justice Alito wonders if outright defiance may be in the offing for the first time since the aftermath of&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Brown v. Board of Education&nbsp;</em>(1954): “If we’re viewed as illegitimate, then disregard of our decisions becomes more acceptable and more popular. So you can have a revival of the massive resistance that occurred in the South after&nbsp;<em data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Brown.”</em></span></p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Will the justices’ recent rulings endure? The court shows little sign of yielding to external pressure, but its three liberal members stand ready to overturn many recent precedents from which they dissented. Whether they’ll have the opportunity likely depends on who holds the White House and the Senate when future high-court vacancies arise. About that prospect, Justice Alito demurs: “We are very bad political pundits.”</p><p data-type="paragraph" class="css-k3zb6l-Paragraph e1e4oisd0" style="box-sizing: border-box; --summary-font-color: var(--secondary-text-color); --summary-bullet-small-font-color: var(--primary-text-color); direction: var(--article-direction); line-height: calc(1.58824); margin: 0px 0px 1em; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span data-type="emphasis" class="css-i6hrxa-Italic e1ofiv6m0" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Mr. Taranto is the Journal’s editorial features editor.</span></p></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">comm dr an</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>dem orig?!</b></font></div><div><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Legal experts said Friday that a federal judge's ruling in West Virginia illustrates the danger posed by the U.S. Supreme Court's right wing majority, which ruled this year in&nbsp;</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Bruen&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">that restrictions on firearms must fall within the so-called "historical tradition" of gun laws.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, who was appointed to the Southern District of West Virginia by former Democratic President Bill Clinton,&nbsp;<a href="https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3687788-judge-rules-federal-law-banning-guns-with-serial-numbers-removed-is-unconstitutional/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">ruled&nbsp;</a>against a federal law prohibiting people from possessing firearms with serial numbers that have been "altered, obliterated, or removed."</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">"Serial numbers were largely unknown to the Framers, Goodwin wrote. And so the Second Amendment confers a right to remove them from modern weapons."</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Serial numbers have been required for guns since the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and are intended to prevent the illegal sale of guns and to allowing law enforcement to trace firearms.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">But basing his ruling on the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/06/23/devastating-supreme-court-blows-massive-hole-state-gun-control-efforts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">majority Supreme Court opinion&nbsp;</a>written by Justice Clarence Thomas in June, Goodwin said Wednesday that requiring serial numbers is not part of the "historical tradition of firearm regulation" and therefore runs afoul of the Second Amendment.</b></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In his majority opinion in&nbsp;<b>Bruen,</b>&nbsp;which&nbsp;<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/06/23/devastating-supreme-court-blows-massive-hole-state-gun-control-efforts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">overturned</a>&nbsp;New York's state law restricting the concealed carry of firearms in public, Thomas wrote that for a gun control law to stand, the federal, state, or local government "must affirmatively prove that its firearm regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms."</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Goodwin's opinion, said Demand Justice, which advocates for Supreme Court reform, demonstrates the far-reaching impact the&nbsp;<em>Bruen</em>&nbsp;ruling could have on gun laws across the country.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"That radical ruling is impacting measures as basic as a requirement that guns have serial numbers," said the group.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The case heard by Goodwin&nbsp;<a href="https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3687788-judge-rules-federal-law-banning-guns-with-serial-numbers-removed-is-unconstitutional/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">originated</a>&nbsp;with a traffic stop in Charleston, West Virginia during which police found a gun with the serial number removed. The driver, Randy Price, had also been convicted of a felony.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Price argued in court that he had a constitutional right to have the firearm, while lawyers for the federal government said the law regarding serial numbers was a "commercial regulation" that did not violate the Second Amendment.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On Thursday,&nbsp;Slate&nbsp;journalist Mark Joseph Stern&nbsp;<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/supreme-court-ghost-guns-serial-number-clarence-thomas.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">wrote</a>&nbsp;that while Goodwin's ruling "might sound bizarre... his analysis closely follows Thomas' test" that requires the government to prove a gun regulation had a historical "analogue" in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, or 1868, when it was imposed throughout the U.S.:</span></p><blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; font-size: 17.5px; line-height: 32px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); width: 602.542px; font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;">The only remaining question is whether the government could find an analogous regulation from 1791 or 1868 that restricted the possession of guns with an altered serial number. It could not, for a fairly obvious reason: Serial numbers only became common following the mass production of firearms, which took off in the decades after the Civil War.

Serial numbers were largely unknown to the Framers, Goodwin wrote. And so the Second Amendment confers a right to remove them from modern weapons.
<blockquote style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); margin: 1em 40px 1em 20px; line-height: 32px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); width: 554.333px;"><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">When&nbsp;Bruen&nbsp;was handed down in June, Stern&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1539983314345500674" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">called</a>&nbsp;the ruling "a revolution in Second Amendment law" which would ultimately go "so, so far beyond concealed carry."</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Goodwin noted in his opinion on Wednesday that firearms that can't be traced using a serial number "are likely to be used in violent crime and therefore a prohibition on their possession is desirable," but said that argument "is the exact type of means-end reasoning the Supreme Court has forbidden me from considering."</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Stern suggested that parts of Goodwin's opinion read "as if the judge is desperate to show readers just how dangerous and radical [the&nbsp;Bruen] ruling is."</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to the Supreme Court, Stern wrote, "all that counts is that serial number laws arose over the last century, so they are too modern to comport with the Second Amendment. Goodwin made this point over and over again; it almost sounded like he was quietly protesting the extreme and dangerous results demanded by the&nbsp;Bruen&nbsp;test."</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">"His decision thus doubled as a warning," he added. "The Supreme Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence has grown so radical that it now shields criminals trying to conceal their involvement in a violent crime.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"</span></p></blockquote></blockquote></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div>=<div>an 12 22</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/supreme-court-robert-borks-revenge/">https://www.alternet.org/supreme-court-robert-borks-revenge/</a></div><div><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>This is the first of a multi-part Dig series, The Supreme Court’s War on the Future, investigating how the Supreme Court was remade in the image of Robert Bork.</b></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">To fully appreciate and understand the Supreme Court’s hard cut to extremism, start with the failed nomination of&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Robert Bork</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;in 1987. Bork never made it to the summit of the judiciary, but the legal theory of “</span><a href="https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2362&context=facpub" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">originalism</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” he pioneered now thoroughly dominates the bench.</span></b></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Supreme Court’s controlling majority of six Republican activists has embraced originalism as an article of faith and practice. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has deployed its tools and techniques to reinterpret the Constitution and create a legacy of legal devastation with a series of landmark rulings on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">voting</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">rights</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/18-422" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">gerrymandering</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-1466" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">union</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-curbs-union-power-farm-access-dispute-2021-06-23/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">organizing</a>, the&nbsp;<a href="https://casetext.com/case/glossip-v-gross" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">death penalty</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">environmental protection</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep554/usrep554570/usrep554570.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">gun</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">control</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">abortion</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">campaign finance</a>. The court’s current session, which opened in early October, promises to deliver more of the same, with cases on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/303-creative-llc-v-elenis/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">“religious liberty” and LGBTQ discrimination</a>, the “<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/moore-v-harper-2/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">independent state legislature</a>” doctrine,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/students-for-fair-admissions-inc-v-university-of-north-carolina/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">affirmative action</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/terms/ot2022/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">more</a>.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Roberts and company are Bork’s ideological offspring and revenge. Their jurisprudence is the culmination of a project that began with Bork long before his rejection by the Senate.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Until his failed Supreme Court nomination, Bork had a storied career. In March 1973, while on hiatus from Yale, Bork joined the Nixon administration as solicitor general. In October of that year, he was named acting attorney general and subsequently followed Nixon’s orders to fire Archibald Cox, the first Watergate special prosecutor, in what became known as the&nbsp;<b>“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Saturday Night Massacre</a>”. In 1982, Reagan appointed Bork to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, a position he held until 1988.</b></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>As a primary architect of originalism, Bork had become by the mid-1980s — along with&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Meese" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Ed Meese</a>, Reagan’s attorney general — the face of a legal counterrevolution aimed at reversing the expansion of civil rights and liberties that had been achieved during Chief Justice Earl Warren’s tenure on the court (1953-1969).</b>&nbsp;His mission was to turn back the judicial clock to a pre-New Deal version of the United States</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2720&context=ilj" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">prolific</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://casetext.com/case/dronenburg-v-zech" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">writer</a>&nbsp;as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/07/27/an-odyssey-of-ideas-from-yale-to-watergate/1ff7a5c8-0646-49f9-93d5-14b77a3a5c6d/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">both an academic and an appellate judge</a>, Bork argued at various points in his career that the Constitution contained no implied right to privacy, that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/07/27/an-odyssey-of-ideas-from-yale-to-watergate/1ff7a5c8-0646-49f9-93d5-14b77a3a5c6d/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Roe v. Wade&nbsp;was wrongly decided</a>, and the&nbsp;<b>Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional. He also&nbsp;<a href="https://www.history.com/news/robert-bork-ronald-reagan-supreme-court-nominations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">rejected</a>&nbsp;the “one person, one vote” principle of legislative districting.</b>&nbsp;Bork’s outspokenness and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/20/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-419219" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">abrasive demeanor</a>&nbsp;set him apart from the growing corps of conservative lawyers and legal scholars that were coalescing in the 1980s, making him a vulnerable target for Democrats determined to keep him off the nation’s highest judicial body.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">* * </p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The campaign to torpedo Bork’s nomination took shape quickly. On July 1, 1987, the day&nbsp;<a href="https://youtu.be/u6QKdiSIW0c" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Reagan proudly announced Bork’s nomination</a>, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) took to the senate floor to denounce Bork’s selection to replace retiring conservative jurist&nbsp;<b>Justice Lewis Powell.</b></span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;(Powell is&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-right-wing-legacy-of-justice-lewis-powell-and-what-it-means-for-the-supreme-court-today/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">best remembered in progressive circles</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;for a&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.thwink.org/sustain/articles/017_PowellMemo/PowellMemoReproduction.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">confidential memo</a></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;he penned in 1971 urging business leaders to become more involved in high-stakes litigation and the selection of judges, advice that led to the formation of institutions such as the&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Roundtable" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Business Roundtable</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, the Heritage Foundation, the&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Pacific Legal Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society and the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chamberlitigation.com/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Chamber of Commerce National Litigation Center</a>.)</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In words that would come to doom Bork’s nomination and spark a roiling debate about originalism that continues to this day, Kennedy decried&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robert_Bork's_America" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">what he called</a>&nbsp;“Robert Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For 12<a href="https://archive.org/stream/bork_transcripts/Bork-3_djvu.txt" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">&nbsp;days in September</a>, the Senate Judiciary Committee debated Bork’s qualifications, and heard five days of candid testimony from Bork himself. Much of the scrutiny focused on originalism as a method of constitutional interpretation and judicial decision-making. The prominent constitutional scholars that testified against Bork included&nbsp;<b>Professor&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/23/us/the-bork-hearings-foe-warns-bork-views-pose-a-serious-risk-to-freedoms.html" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Laurence Tribe of Harvard</a></b>&nbsp;and Professor&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_B.Kurland" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago</a>, who had worked as a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/18/us/philip-b-kurland-74-scholar-who-ruled-on-nixon-tapes.html" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">consultant</a>&nbsp;to the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Outside the D.C. Beltway, another fierce battle took place. By the time the Senate hearings commenced, anti-Bork forces&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/11/us/washington-talk-fund-raisers-bork-as-a-bonanza.html" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">had raised</a>&nbsp;a war chest of $12 million. In a manner similar to today’s political campaigns, the money was spent on focus groups, opinion polls, media consultants and especially on print, radio and TV advertising.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A&nbsp;<a href="http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=reviews" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">newspaper ad</a>&nbsp;taken out by the National Abortion Rights Action League asserted a vote for Bork was the equivalent of voting for a politician who threatened to reverse “every advance women have made in the 20th century.” Similar ads were placed by the National Education Association and Planned Parenthood.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Most devastating of all was a 60-second&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOkqcUF7E1A" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">television spot</a>&nbsp;paid for by People for the American Way and narrated by the famed actor Gregory Peck. In his best Atticus Finch voice, Peck sounded the tocsin:</b></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"Robert Bork wants to be a Supreme Court justice, but the record shows he has a strange idea of what justice is. He defended poll taxes and literacy tests which kept many Americans from voting. He opposed a civil rights law that ended 'whites only' signs at lunch counters. He doesn’t believe the Constitution protects your right to privacy. And he thinks that freedom of speech does not apply to literature and art and music. Robert Bork could have the last word on your rights as citizens. But the Senate has the last word on him.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>On the other side of the divide, Reagan went to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/04/us/reagan-implores-the-public-to-aid-in-fight-for-bork.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">great lengths</a>&nbsp;to salvage the nomination, describing Bork’s appointment as his “top domestic priority.” But even the “Great Communicator” couldn’t get his message to resonate</b>. Public opinion, which trended slightly in favor of Bork in early September, turned decisively against him by the end of the month. A Tribune Media poll released on Sept. 28 showed the public&nbsp;<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1987-09-28/news/mn-6979_1_public-opposes-bork" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">opposed the nomination</a>&nbsp;by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Bork’s prospects officially&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/24/us/bork-s-nomination-is-rejected-58-42-reagan-saddened.html?pagewanted=all" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">came to an end</a>&nbsp;on Oct. 23, 1987. With six Republicans crossing party lines, the full Senate turned thumbs down against him by a vote of 58-42, the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsuccessful_nominations_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">most lopsided vote</a>&nbsp;against a high court candidate in U.S. history.</b>&nbsp;His fall from grace was colossal. Ever since, judicial nominees have come to be wary of being “Borked,” a term that has entered the lexicon as a synonym for rejection in the face of adverse publicity and harsh cross-examination. Bork resigned from the Court of Appeals in 1988 and returned to academia, becoming a dyspeptic critic of liberalism, bemoaning the decline of Western culture, which he addressed with special bile in his book,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=slouching+towards+gomorrah&gclid=CjwKCAiAs8acBhA1EiwAgRFdwy_3T6rcWVnbMv1k2scB01koW_hWEQpELjXq2RF4jgt7eQl6jvoGhRoCLh8QAvD_BwE&hvadid=241650429008&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9030974&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=12766727428836704257&hvtargid=kwd-59368346&hydadcr=9366_10387240&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_9h2llcjfqo_e" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline</a>&nbsp;(1996). He died in relative obscurity in 2012.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> * *</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Bork was defeated, but originalism lived on. Even before his nomination, the theory had established a beachhead on the court with the confirmation of&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Scalia#Nomination_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States(1986)" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Antonin Scalia</a>&nbsp;in 1986</b>. Although Scalia was in many ways as doctrinaire as Bork, the Senate&nbsp;<a href="https://www.congress.gov/nomination/99th-congress/1193" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">unanimously confirmed him 98-0</a>&nbsp;on the same day it voted in favor of William Rehnquist’s elevation to the position of chief justice by a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/18/us/senate-65-to-33-votes-to-confirm-rehnquist-as-16th-chief-justice.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">margin of 65-33</a>. Having spent their capital in a losing bid to block Rehnquist,&nbsp;<a href="https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2008-12-22-court_N.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Senate Democrats were either too dispirited, disorganized or not yet fully aware of the dangers and potency of originalism</a>&nbsp;to put up a fight against the first Italian-American justice. Compared to the treatment Rehnquist and Bork received, Scalia’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CHRG-SCALIA/pdf/GPO-CHRG-SCALIA.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">confirmation hearing</a>&nbsp;was a lovefest.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Scalia was nine years younger than Bork and had served with him on the D.C. Court of Appeals. Scalia also had a background in academia. In 1982, as a law professor at the University of Chicago, Scalia helped organize one of the first&nbsp;<a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/antonin-scalia-supreme-court-justice-and-former-uchicago-law-professor-1936-2016" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">chapters of the Federalist Society</a>,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;and became the chapter’s faculty advisor. He&nbsp;</span><a href="https://fedsoc.org/contributors/antonin-scalia" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">remained active in the society</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;as a coveted speaker and symposium guest until his passing in 2016.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In 1991, the Senate narrowly confirmed another self-declared originalist and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/01/02/feature/conquerors-of-the-courts/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Federalist Society member</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Clarence Thomas</a>, after a bitter confirmation hearing highlighted by Anita Hill’s explosive allegations of sexual harassment</b>.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Nominated by President George W. Bush, Thomas also came to the high court by way of the D.C. circuit,&nbsp;<b>but had produced only a modest paper trail</b>, obscuring his future political machinations. Two years later, however, according to The New York Times,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/27/us/2-years-after-his-bruising-hearing-justice-thomas-can-rarely-be-heard.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Thomas told</a>&nbsp;two of his law clerks that he planned to serve on the court until 2034, and until then would make the lives of liberals “miserable.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Scalia and Thomas brought a new brand of originalism to the court that arose in response to&nbsp;<a href="http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/Class%20Readings/ALCReadings/Brest_MisconceivedQuest.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">critics</a>&nbsp;who charged that the actual intentions of the framers of the Constitution were too varied, conflicting and often ambiguous to serve as a basis for judicial decision-making. Instead of emphasizing original intent, they and other “<a target="blank" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">new originalists</a>” focused on the “original public meaning” of Constitutional provisions, which, they contended, could be ascertained from the recorded debates of the founding era and from such sources as late 18th-century dictionaries.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;The key, as law professors Michael Rappaport of the University of San Diego and John McGinnis of Northwestern University, explained in an influential&nbsp;</span><a href="https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1550&context=concomm" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2007 law review article</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;would be to determine “how a reasonable person at the time of the Constitution’s adoption would have understood its words and how they thought they should be interpreted.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">All originalists — whether of the old or new stripe — contend that their approach limits the&nbsp;<a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1200&context=lawfacpub" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">subjectivity of judges</a>&nbsp;and acts as a restraint on judicial activism.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In fact, originalism does nothing of the sort. Fordham University history professor Saul Cornell summed up the fatal flaws of the theory in a scathing 2011&nbsp;Dissent&nbsp;article,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-originalism-a-constitutional-scam" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">New Originalism: A Constitutional Scam</a>. The first academic iteration of Originalism, Cornell wrote,&nbsp;rested on “shaky historical foundations” because the Founders “did not speak with a single voice on most constitutional questions.”&nbsp;New Originalism, embodied by the more activist Federalist Society, was in Cornell’s estimation even more dubious, amounting to “little more than an intellectual shell game in which contemporary political preferences are shuffled around and made to appear part of the Constitution’s original meaning.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Result-oriented judging, of course, has existed from the earliest days of the republic. Originalism in a nascent form existed long before the term was attached to a specific legal philosophy in the latter part of the 20th century. One of its earliest expressions came in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dred Scott</a>&nbsp;case of 1857, perhaps the most odious decision ever issued by the Supreme Court, which held that Black Americans of African descent could never be U.S. citizens.&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v.Ferguson" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Plessy v. Ferguson</a>, the 1896 decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation even after the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, is another originalist landmark.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Originalism in a nascent form existed long before the term was attached to a specific legal philosophy in the latter part of the 20th&nbsp;century. One of its earliest expressions came in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dred Scott</a>&nbsp;case of 1857, perhaps the most odious decision ever issued by the Supreme Court, which held that Black Americans of African descent could never be U.S. citizens.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>As the court entered the second decade of the 21st century, however, it remained divided between conservatives, liberals and centrists, often dividing 5-4 in major rulings. The ascension of Donald Trump as the 45th president in 2016 and the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 2020 radically altered the balance.</b></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised that, if elected, his judicial nominees would “all [be] picked by the Federalist Society.” Before the election, Trump released&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Supreme_Court_candidates" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">two lists</a>&nbsp;of Supreme Court candidates, both compiled by the Federalist Society and the far-right Heritage Foundation.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">After the election, Trump proved for once true to his word, meeting with Leonard Leo, then the Federalist Society’s executive vice president, to map out plans for selecting Scalia’s successor. Soon thereafter, Leo took a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/01/02/feature/conquerors-of-the-courts/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">leave of absence</a>&nbsp;from the society to formally advise Trump on the confirmation process for both Neil Gorsuch, who succeeded Scalia, and Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced the retiring centrist Anthony Kennedy. Leo had done the same in 2005-06, counseling President George W. Bush on the nominations of Roberts and Samuel Alito.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s easy to understand why Trump was attracted to the Federalist Society. From its fledgling beginnings as a debating club at a handful of elite law schools in the early 1980s, the society had mushroomed into a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Federalist-Society-Conservatives-Took-Liberals/dp/082651877X" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">nationwide network&nbsp;</a>of 70,000 economic, social and Christian conservatives, along with right-wing libertarians, organized in lawyers’ chapters in 90 cities, and with&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">student affiliates in nearly every major law school. No longer a shoestring operation, the society’s 2016&nbsp;<a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363235550" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">budget</a>&nbsp;exceeded $26 million, raised in large part from contributions by&nbsp;<a href="https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3520072/ConservativeDonors-DocCloud.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">right-wing philanthropists</a>&nbsp;like the Koch brothers and other deep-pockets like the Mercer, Scaife, and Lynde and Harry Bradley foundations.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Trump also pledged during the 2016 campaign that his Supreme Court nominees would be “<a href="https://www.heraldnews.com/story/opinion/2018/07/03/trump-s-best-supreme-court/11607434007/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">originalists</a>” in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/512891485" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the mold</a>&nbsp;of Scalia</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. He fulfilled that pledge, too, with the selection of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and, finally,&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Barrett%20Responses%20to%20QFRs.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Amy Coney Barrett</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Barrett’s confirmation in 2020 brought the number of&nbsp;</span><a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/03/in-audiobook-takeover-noah-feldman-lidia-jean-kott-explore-how-federalist-society-captured-supreme-court/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">former or current Federalist Society members</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;on the tribunal to six. (Though Roberts says he doesn’t recall belonging to the Federalist Society, the group&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/07/25/roberts-listed-in-federalist-society-97-98-directory/07462c8a-f148-4b4f-97f5-b44cfc3c1333/?utm_term=.a32386eea5bf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">listed him as a member</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;in its 1997-98 directory.)</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For the most part, Barrett followed the post-Bork strategy of other high-court nominees, refusing in her confirmation hearing to give direct answers to important questions such as whether the Constitution requires a&nbsp;<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/barrett-is-poised-to-become-the-most-radical-right-wing-member-of-supreme-court/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">peaceful transfer of power</a>, or if a president can&nbsp;<a href="https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-politics-amy-coney-barrett-judiciary-fc8c525326ba7027532dc3afaddb4f3e" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">pardon</a>&nbsp;himself for federal crimes.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>New Originalism, embodied by the more activist Federalist Society, was in Cornell’s estimation even more dubious, amounting to “little more than an intellectual shell game in which contemporary political preferences are shuffled around and made to appear part of the Constitution’s original meaning.”
</strong></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But when asked by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) what it means to be an originalist,&nbsp;<a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/10/14/amy-coney-barrett-hearing-voting-rights-act/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Barrett readily replied</a>: “In English, that means that I interpret the Constitution as a law and that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time, and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.” In an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/13/amy-coney-barretts-most-telling-exchange-abortion-roe-v-wade/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">exchange with Sen. Amy Klobuchar</a>&nbsp;(D-MN), she also revealed that&nbsp;Roe v. Wade&nbsp;was not a precedent the court could never reconsider and overrule.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And so, the stage was set for the court to implement an even more regressive form of originalism. In June, it handed down its opinions in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen</a>. In Dobbs, the court not only upheld a restrictive Mississippi abortion law, but finally made the far right’s fevered dream of overturning&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-18" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Roe v. Wade</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1991/91-744" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Planned Parenthood v. Casey</a>&nbsp;come true. In Bruen, the court struck down a century-old New York state regulation on concealed handgun permits as violative of the Second Amendment</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In both cases, the court abandoned the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/strict_scrutiny" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">traditional methods of judicial scrutiny</a>&nbsp;that require judges to determine the constitutionality of challenged laws by balancing the governmental interests advanced by the laws in question against the competing rights of individuals affected by the laws. In place of interest-balancing, the court substituted a test based exclusively on the Justices’ highly selective reading of history and their sense of tradition.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Writing for a 5-4 majority in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-18" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dobbs</a>, Alito advanced the march toward&nbsp;<a href="https://progressive.org/magazine/new-era-rightwing-judicial-supremacy-blum/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">right-wing judicial supremacy</a>, declaring that both&nbsp;Roe&nbsp;and&nbsp;Casey&nbsp;were “egregiously wrong from the start”&nbsp;<b>because the word “abortion” doesn’t appear anywhere in the first eight amendments to the Constitution, or anywhere else in the text. He also held that abortion cannot be considered an implied or “unenumerated” fundamental right under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause — as&nbsp;Roe&nbsp;and&nbsp;Casey&nbsp;both held — because it is not “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition.</b>” As a result, he concluded, the court was free to overrule&nbsp;Roe&nbsp;and&nbsp;Casey&nbsp;unconstrained by the doctrine of&nbsp;stare decisis, which&nbsp;<a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">holds that</a>&nbsp;judges should adhere to precedent.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Instead of respecting precedent, Alito reached deep into the bowels of Anglo-American common law to override it. He cited, among other sources, the work of Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century English cleric and judge who condemned abortions as homicide, and a 17th-century English jurist who described abortion as a “great crime” and sentenced at least three women to death for witchcraft. By the time the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, Alito raged on, “three-quarters of the States [had] made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy,” in order to prove his point that abortion rights are not deeply rooted in our history.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The only solution, in Alito’s view, was to strip abortion of its Constitutional protections and return the issue to “the people’s elected representatives,” opening the door to state abortion bans and the possibility of a future federal statute outlawing abortion nationwide.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Alito’s reading of history was shoddy. Not only did he give no weight to the 50 years that&nbsp;Roe&nbsp;had been the law of the land, but he ignored the actual early history of abortion rights in America.</b>&nbsp;As University of Illinois history professor Leslie J. Reagan&nbsp;<a href="https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft967nb5z5&brand=ucpress" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">explained</a>&nbsp;in her definitive study,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/abs/leslie-j-reagan-when-abortion-was-a-crime-women-medicine-and-law-in-the-united-states-18671973-berkeley-university-of-california-press-1997-pp-xiii-387-1895-paper-isbn-0520216571/964C1176404C7BFBB7D7C2BC0FD691E0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">When Abortion Was a Crime</a>, “During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries…abortions were illegal only after ‘quickening,’ the point at which a pregnant woman could feel the movements of the fetus (approximately the fourth month of pregnancy).”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Repudiating&nbsp;Roe&nbsp;and&nbsp;Casey&nbsp;was also unnecessary. The court easily could have upheld the Mississippi statute, which outlawed almost all abortions after 15 weeks, without scrapping the federal right entirely, as Roberts urged in a separate opinion.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Clarence Thomas wrote the 6-3 opinion in&nbsp;Bruen,</b>&nbsp;which was joined by all the court’s Republican appointees, including Roberts. Like Alito, Thomas applied a specious history and tradition test to strike down New York’s long-standing handgun permit system. In so doing, he dismissed the broad history of gun regulation in the U.S., dating back to the earliest days of the republic. As Fordham’s Professor Cornell, one of the foremost authorities on the actual history of the Second Amendment,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-originalism-a-constitutional-scam" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">observed</a>&nbsp;in a critique of&nbsp;Bruen&nbsp;published by&nbsp;SCOTUSBlog:</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The originalist methodology applied by Thomas has one set of rules that apply to interpreting legal texts that support gun rights, and another more demanding set of standards that apply to those that undermine them.<b>&nbsp;The Thomas version of originalism might be summarized as follows: No amount of evidence is enough to support gun control, but no iota of evidence is too little to legitimate gun-rights claims.&nbsp;</b>If one of the goals of originalism was to limit judicial discretion (a value few originalists continue to espouse now that they have a supermajority on the court), then the&nbsp;<b>Thomas rule does the opposite. It provides a license to cherry-pick evidence with reckless abandon&nbsp;</b>if the materials support the ideological agenda of the Federalist Society.”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Combined with the public leak of the draft of Alito’s&nbsp;Dobbs&nbsp;opinion in May and the fast-brewing scandal involving the role of Ginni Thomas in events related to the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court’s move to the right has&nbsp;<b>triggered a crisis of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/justices-join-debate-supreme-courts-legitimacy-abortion-ruling-rcna47795" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">legitimacy</a>.&nbsp;</b>In increasing numbers,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/27/overturning-roe-is-unpopular-and-viewed-largely-political/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Americans have lost trust in the court as an institution, and have come to see it correctly as a political body</a>&nbsp;rather than an impartial arbiter of justice. The&nbsp;Dobbs&nbsp;decision is deeply unpopular, with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/27/overturning-roe-is-unpopular-and-viewed-largely-political/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">60% of respondents</a>&nbsp;in recent rolls disapproving of the ruling. According to a June&nbsp;<a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/394103/confidence-supreme-court-sinks-historic-low.aspx" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Gallup</a>&nbsp;survey, Americans’ confidence in the court has plummeted to a new low. A mere 25% of respondents told Gallup they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Court.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And more bad decisions are on the horizon. In his concurring opinion in&nbsp;Dobbs, Thomas called upon his benchmates to revisit such privacy-based precedents as the right to contraception (Griswold&nbsp;v. Connecticut, 1965), the right to engage in same-sex intimacy (<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-102" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Lawrence v. Texas</a>, 2003), and the right to same-sex marriage (<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/14-556" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Obergefell v. Hodges</a>, 2015). Thomas and Gorsuch are also on record as favoring reconsideration of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/39" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">New York Times v. Sullivan</a>&nbsp;(1964), another product of the Warren Court that shields the media from potentially crippling defamation lawsuits. Reaching even farther into the future, originalist academics such as the University of San Diego’s Rappaport have questioned&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/usd-law-professors-view-of-originalism-debated-at-supreme-court-confirmation-hearing/509-a60531e1-f42d-4596-a4de-f3d00086f00b" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the constitutionality of Social Security and Medicare</a>.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">There is a better and more reality-centered way to adjudicate constitutional issues. Originalism’s rival, known variously as “living or dynamic constitutionalism,” asserts that while the text of the Constitution may be the starting point of any analysis, the meaning of the Constitution should evolve over time and accommodate contemporary values, social needs and changing traditions.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A good example of the alternative can be found in Kennedy’s majority opinion in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf#page=73" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Obergefell</a>. As the court’s swing justice, Kennedy sometimes adopted originalism, as he did in his 2010 opinion in&nbsp;<a href="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep558/usrep558310/usrep558310.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Citizens United v. F.E.C</a>. In Obergefell, he took a full-throated living constitutionalism approach, writing:</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It is no small irony that Kennedy was nominated to the court after Bork was defeated. But Kennedy retired in 2018, replaced by Kavanaugh, whose confirmation Senate Democrats were unable to halt.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">There’s no denying the future of the Supreme Court looks grim. Still, as the successful fight against Bork long ago demonstrated, hope should never be abandoned. With enough public pressure and effective organizing, the court can be reformed and brought to serve the nation’s needs in the 21st century.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The prospects for reform will be subject of part II of this series.</p></div><div>=</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/this-is-nazism-kanye-west/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/clarence-thomas-griswold/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/12/clarence-thomas-griswold/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As president,&nbsp;<a href="https://qz.com/1323253/what-is-originalism-why-trump-wants-an-originalist-on-the-supreme-court" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Donald Trump</a>&nbsp;vowed to only nominate socially conservative Supreme Court justices who embraced an “originalist” philosophy of jurisprudence, pointing to Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia as the sort of justices he favored. Some right-wing Republican-appointed High Court justices, although fiscally conservative, turned out to be socially liberal when it came to issues like abortion and gay rights — for example, retired libertarian Justice Anthony Kennedy. Trump, however, wasn’t looking for the next Kennedy.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump was looking for the next Thomas or Scalia. And the three justices he appointed (Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett) have been hailed by Fox News pundits as examples of “originalism” or “textualism” in action.</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But one media figure who is highly critical of “originalist” or “textualist” ideology is Washington Post opinion columnist Ruth Marcus. In her&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/01/originalism-liberal-lawyers-supreme-court-trap/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">December 1 column</a>, Marcus slams “originalism” as painfully flawed and warns “liberal lawyers” against buying into it.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>READ MORE:</strong><strong>&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/the-supreme-court-is-dirty/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>The Supreme Court is dirty. Time to clean it up</strong></a></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Liberal lawyers — and liberal justices, for that matter — risk being caught in an originalism trap,” Marcus explains. “Originalism, the belief that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at the time it was adopted, is the legal theory that dominates the thinking of this conservative Supreme Court. Not all of the conservative justices are committed originalists. I count four of the six — all but Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and perhaps Samuel A. Alito Jr., who describes himself as a ‘practical originalist.’ But they have all written or joined originalist rulings.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Marcus continues, “Given that reality, liberals can’t lightly dismiss conservatives’ insistence that the Constitution should be interpreted based strictly on the original meaning of its text. In the current circumstances, liberal advocates appearing before the Court would be remiss not to make an originalist case. But there’s also little evidence, at least in the highest-profile cases, that it will do them much good.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to Marcus, “liberal lawyers” who try to use “originalist” arguments to make their case are not competing in a “fair fight” but rather, are up against “conservative justices” who will “cherry-pick competing originalist interpretations that comport with their underlying inclinations.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The more liberals present originalist arguments, the more they legitimate originalism rather than refuting it and offering a compelling alternative,” Marcus warns. “Courtroom advocates need to win the case at hand, yet that undermines the more critical long-term effort to wrench the Court away from its reliance on what is, at least as currently practiced, a flawed doctrine that peddles the illusion of impartiality in the service of a conservative result.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>READ MORE:&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/conservative-justices/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Right-wing Supreme Court justices are dragging the court deeper into a 'crisis of legitimacy': Missouri editorial</strong></a></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">Marcus continues, “Because originalism purports to freeze our understanding of the Constitution as written at the end of the 18th Century or amended in the second half of the 19th, it is skewed to a cramped reading of the document, unleavened by modern science and sensibilities.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Why should we understand — much less accept — the constitutional meaning as fixed at a time when women lacked the right to vote, when recently enslaved Black people attended segregated schools, when the economy was agrarian, and when the notion of gay rights was unthinkable?”</span></p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Originalism, according to Marcus, was a “fringe legal theory” when it started to emerge in the early 1970s as a “reaction to the perceived excesses of the Warren Court.” And she urges “liberal” attorneys and judges to “push back” against originalism rather than pretending that a “flawed approach” has merit.</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Conviction, however sincere, does not make a flawed approach legitimate,” Marcus writes. “And the flaws embedded in originalism are magnified by its use, or misuse, by conservative justices and judges focused on a desired outcome. This brand of originalism isn’t just bunk — it’s rigged, dishonest bunk. The more forcefully liberal lawyers and justices push back on it — the faster they make their way out of the originalism trap — the better.”</p><p style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Georgia, sans-serif; font-size: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>READ MORE:&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/samuel-alito-militant-christianity-problem/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="color: rgb(11, 13, 101); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>Why Samuel Alito’s 'militant Christianity' is a 'problem for the rest of us': journalist</strong></a></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/clarence-thomas/">
</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/clarence-thomas/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/clarence-thomas/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>How Clarence Thomas’ conservative activism defies 'a fundamental principle' of US democracy: political scholar</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Neil Roberts and&nbsp;<b>The Conversation October 10, 2022</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Neil Roberts, University of Toronto</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With the opening of the U.S. Supreme Court’s new session on Oct. 3, 2022, Clarence Thomas is arguably the most powerful justice on the nation’s highest court.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In 1991, after Thomas became an associate justice and only the second African American to do so, his power was improbable to almost everyone except him and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He received U.S. Senate confirmation despite lawyer Anita Hill’s explosive workplace sexual harassment allegations against him.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Today, Thomas rarely speaks during oral arguments, yet he communicates substantively through his prolific written opinions that reflect a complicated mix of self-help, racial pride and the original intent of America’s Founding Fathers.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He isn’t chief justice. John Roberts Jr. is.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But with Thomas’ nearly 31 years of service, he’s the longest-serving sitting justice and on track to have the lengthiest court tenure ever.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>June Jordan, pioneering poet and cultural commentator, observed in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas that people “focused upon who the candidate was rather than what he has done and will do.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As a scholar of political theory and Black politics, I contend we haven’t learned from this vital insight.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Conservative activism</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thomas’ service is under increasing scrutiny as his wife, a conservative activist, testified on Sept. 27, 2022, before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that she still believes false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to documents obtained by that committee, Ginni Thomas was instrumental in coordinating efforts to keep former President Donald Trump in office. Her efforts included sending emails to not only former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows but also state officials in Arizona and Wisconsin.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Of particular concern to the Jan. 6 committee is testimony from Thomas on her email correspondence with John Eastman, her husband’s former law clerk, who is considered to be the legal architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to subvert the 2020 election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In my view, Clarence and Ginni Thomas’ intertwined lives highlight a distressing underside to their personal union: the blurring of their professional and personal lives, which has had the appearance of fracturing the independence of the executive and judicial branches of government.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In this light, Thomas’ sole dissent in the case involving Trump’s turning over documents to the Jan. 6 committee is all the more alarming.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">‘What he has done and will do’</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Clarence Thomas has cultivated a distinct judicial philosophy and vision of the world – and a view of his place in it.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">From what can be gleaned from his own writings and speeches,&nbsp;<b>his vision has been derived from Black nationalism, capitalism, conservatism, originalism and his own interpretations of the law.</b></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Since Thomas’ confirmation, his ideas and rulings have attracted many critics.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But his interpetations of the law are now at the center of the high court’s jurisprudence.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In his concurring opinion of the court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Thomas argued that the court should reconsider reversing other related landmark rulings, including access to contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut, LGBTQ+ sexual behavior and sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In short, Thomas’ sentiments reveal a broader ultraconservative agenda to roll back the social and political gains that marginalized communities have won since the 1960s.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The rulings in those cases, Thomas wrote, relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and “were demonstrably erroneous decisions.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“In future cases,” Thomas explained, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Other recent Supreme Court rulings, on Second Amendment rights, Miranda rights, campaign finance regulations and tribal sovereignty, are also evidence of Thomas’ impact on the nation’s highest court.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The long game</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In his memoir and public speeches, Thomas identifies as a self-made man.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Though he has benefited from affirmative action programs – and the color of his skin played a role in his Supreme Court nomination – Thomas has staunchly opposed such efforts to remedy past racial discrimination. Like other notable Black conservatives, Thomas argues that group-based preferences reward those who seek government largesse rather than individual initiative.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">With the exception of guidance of Catholic Church institutions and his grandfather Myers Anderson, Thomas claims he earned his accomplishments by effort, hard work and his own initiative.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a 1998 speech, Thomas foreshadowed his judicial independence and made clear that his attendance before the National Bar Association, the nation’s largest Black legal association, was not to defend his conservative views – or further anger his critics.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“But rather,” he explained, “to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I come to state that I’m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please,” Thomas went on. “I’ve come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others. But even more than that, I have come to say that,&nbsp;<b>isn’t it time to move on?</b>”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But like many of Thomas’ complexities, his own self-made narrative distorts the ideas of the first prominent Black Republican who remains one of his intellectual heroes – Frederick Douglass, the statesman, abolitionist and fugitive ex-slave whose portrait has hung on the wall of Thomas’ office.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But in “Self-Made Men,” a speech he first delivered in 1859. Douglass disagreed with the idea that accomplishments result from solely individual upliftment.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Properly speaking,” Douglass wrote, “there are in the world no such men as self-made men. That term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Law against the people</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thomas’ view of the law is rooted in the originalism doctrine of an immutable rather than living U.S. Constitution.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Since the 1776 Declaration of Independence, modern America for Thomas has been predominantly a republic, where laws are made for the people through their elected representatives. Unlike a pure democracy, where the people vote directly and the majority rules, the rights of the minority are protected in a republic.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dating back to ancient Rome, the history of republicanism is a story of denouncing domination, rejecting slavery and championing freedom.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yet in my view, American republicanism has an underside: its long-standing basis in inequality that never intended its core ideals to apply beyond a small few.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thomas claims consistency with America’s original founding.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In my view, Thomas’ perilous conservative activism works against a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution – “to form a more perfect union.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thomas’ rulings reveal a broader ultraconservative agenda to roll back the social and political gains that marginalized communities have won since the 1960s.The Conversation</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Neil Roberts, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an ah 7 22</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the Bill Clinton years, the term “originalism” was primarily used in connection with two far-right U.S. Supreme Court justices:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/with-roe-overturned-clarence-thomas-is-now-preparing-for-a-full-frontal-on-contraception-gay-rights/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Clarence Thomas</a>&nbsp;and the late Antonin Scalia. Others on the High Court, from the late liberal Clinton appointee Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to Justice Anthony Kennedy — a right-wing libertarian and Ronald Reagan appointee who was fiscally conservative yet protective of gay rights and abortion rights — rejected originalism, which is often synonymous with far-right social conservatism.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Clinton years are long gone. O’Connor (now 92) and Kennedy retired, Ginsburg died in 2020, and the originalist thinking now dominates the High Court — where Republican-appointed justices have a 6-3 supermajority. One-third of the Court now consists of justices appointed by former President Donald Trump: Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/meet-people-of-praise-heres-why-this-far-right-cult-shouldnt-be-allowed-anywhere-near-the-supreme-court/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Amy Coney Barrett</a>, all of whom joined Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito in overturning&nbsp;<em>Roe v. Wade</em>.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Author/legal expert&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theusconstitution.org/staff/david-h-gans/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">David H. Gans</a>, who serves as director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, & Citizenship program at the Constitutional Accountability Center, examines the originalist doctrine as practiced </b>by 2022’s Supreme Court in a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/roe-overturned-alito-dobbs-originalism/670561/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">biting think piece published by The Atlantic</a>&nbsp;on July 20 — and lays out some reasons why it has been a total disaster.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">[READ MORE:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/why-clarence-thomas-has-grown-increasingly-influential-on-the-supreme-court-report/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">How Clarence Thomas went from a 'fringe figure with extremist views' to the Court’s 'center of gravity': report</a></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“When Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court in 2020,” Gans explains, “conservatives celebrated that ‘there are now four avowed originalists on the Court.</b>’ To those on the right, the latest version of the Roberts Court had the potential to be the greatest originalist Court in history. But this term’s biggest decisions show how wrong those conservatives were —even as they got all the results they wanted. Although conservative originalists have, for years, been touting their method as restrained, sensible, and tightly tethered to constitutional text and history, this term blew away such pretenses. If this is the great conservative originalism, then those professing it have finally and conclusively revealed it to be what many skeptics already considered: a hollow edifice designed to hide an ugly and aggressive ideological agenda.”</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The problem with originalism as practiced by Thomas, Barrett, Alito and other Republican-appointed justices, Gans argues, is that they “cherry-pick” the parts of U.S. history that they like and gloss over the parts that they don’t.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This is a radical Court dominated by conservatives who treat the past practices of state legislatures as determinative of the Constitution’s meaning, warping the broadly worded language that was meant to enshrine fundamental principles of liberty and equality in our national charter,” Gans observes. “This is a Court that insists it is following history and tradition where they lead, while cherry-picking the history it cares about to reach conservative results. These are damning moves for conservative justices who pride themselves on fidelity to the Constitution’s first principles.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gans tears apart the High Court’s ruling&nbsp;<b>Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization&nbsp;and its decision to overturn&nbsp;Roe v. Wade&nbsp;</b>after 49 years. Alito argued that&nbsp;<em>Roe</em>&nbsp;was inconsistent with U.S. “history and tradition,” and Gans explains why his use of that concept is badly flawed.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>READ MORE:&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/supreme-courts-white-christian-theocracy/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>The Supreme Court’s nod to white Christian theocracy</strong></a></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to Gans, “Alito’s account of ‘history and tradition’ ignores the most salient aspect of the Fourteenth Amendment’s history: the horrific abuses that led the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment to push through changes to the Constitution to broadly guarantee the protection of substantive fundamental rights…. Alito’s sweeping condemnation of unenumerated fundamental rights ignores the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment sought to guarantee rights to bodily integrity and to marry and raise a family, and the right to decide for oneself whether, when, and with whom to form a family…. In short, reproductive freedom is in the Constitution. Alito simply refuses to grapple with the Constitution’s true history.”</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Gans writes that while&nbsp;<em style="">Dobbs</em>&nbsp;“deployed selective history to take away a fundamental right,” the 2022 Court’s 6-3 ruling in&nbsp;New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen&nbsp;“deployed selective history to create one: a radically expansive right to be armed in public</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.” And Gans notes that “in this term’s religion cases,&nbsp;Carson v. Makin&nbsp;and&nbsp;Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the 6-3 conservative majority dramatically expanded the protections of the free-exercise clause, without a whiff of attention to history and tradition, while whittling down the Establishment Clause in light of historical practice.”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When it comes to “history and tradition,” Gans stresses, the U.S. Supreme Court’s “originalists” are willing to ignore parts of U.S. history that don’t fit their narrative.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“<b>As these examples illustrate, ‘history and tradition’ is the new calling card of a Supreme Court that is willing to upend our constitutional order in the name of traditionalism,”</b> the author/legal expert laments. “Do not label the Roberts Court ‘originalist,’ if that term is to have the methodological meaning its supporters have been advertising for years. It is not. It is a deeply unprincipled conservative Court majority that manipulates both the Constitution and history to reach conservative results, reversing rights it despises and supercharging those it reveres.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>READ MORE:&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/supreme-courtrig-2024-election/" target="self" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><strong>The Supreme Court is laying the groundwork to pre-rig the 2024 election</strong></a></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">yikes&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[[<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ginni-and-clarence-thomas-steal-2024-election-coup.html" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/ginni-and-clarence-thomas-steal-2024-election-coup.html</a></font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dahlia &</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx many</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Clarence and Ginni Thomas Are Telling Us Exactly How the 2024 Coup Will Go Down</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">MAY 23, 2022</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Justice Clarence Thomas sits side-by-side with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news that Ginni Thomas sent emails to Arizona elections officials asking them to set aside the will of the voters and submit a slate of fake electors who would support Donald Trump, even after he demonstrably lost the 2020 presidential election. The news barely caused a ripple because there is seemingly nothing to be done about Justice Clarence Thomas’ refusal to recuse in cases that materially affect his spouse, even as he has already decided several matters surrounding the 2020 election … and also because that same spouse had written far more inflammatory, QAnon-style texts to Trump’s chief of staff urging him to set aside the 2020 contest, and nothing was done about that either.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In reality, of course, there is plenty to be done about Supreme Court justices who decline to be bound by federal recusal statutes and judicial ethics canons. But unless and until there is a ravenous public appetite for reforms to the court, we will continue to watch this play out in mute horror, as though it’s a Netflix special about the Tudors, and the only recourse we have is to return to our mutton farming. Reforms aside, there is another more crucial lesson from the Thomases’ tag-team efforts to seat a president who lost an election: What’s past is prologue, and what was done sloppily in 2020 is being mapped out by experts for 2024.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s easy to dismiss the demented texts and emails from a sitting justice’s spouse to public officials who have long-standing professional connections to that justice as zany conspiracy theorizing. Ginni Thomas can be lumped into the QAnon weirdos bucket with Cleta Mitchell, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Lindell—hapless insurrection enthusiasts who were unable to marshal a single winning argument in an actual court of law after the 2020 election. But the other way to look at the texts and emails that were pinging around the highest echelons of power and influence in the weeks after November 2020 is as a warning and road map for what is already being put into place for the next presidential contest.<b>&nbsp;But next time, the lawyers won’t be sweating brown makeup or referencing crackpot theories of Italian election meddling.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What Thomas was emailing was a prefabbed piece of legal advocacy that urged Arizona state officials to “Please stand strong in the face of&nbsp;</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">political and media pressure</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Please reflect on the awesome authority granted to you by our constitution.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;And then please take action to ensure that a<b>&nbsp;clean slate&nbsp;</b>of electors is chosen for our state.” That isn’t just words. It’s actually a theory underlying the subversion of an entire presidential election.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">It’s also a theory her husband has endorsed as a matter of constitutional law. It didn’t work in 2020 because the legal and political structures to support it weren’t in place at the time. Those pieces are being put into place as we type this.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Recall, for instance, that back in November of 2020, it wasn’t clear there were five votes at the Supreme Court to support the proposition that state legislatures could simply set aside election results they deemed tainted by impropriety. Recall that when lawyer/insurrectionists&nbsp;<b>John Eastman (a Thomas clerk) and Jeffrey Bossert Clark floated that notion at the White House and elsewhere</b>, serious DOJ attorneys told them in no uncertain terms to go away</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Recall finally that one of the&nbsp;<b>lawmakers in Arizona, Shawnna Bolick,</b>&nbsp;is married to a state Supreme Court justice and is parent to Clarence Thomas’ godchild. Bolick,&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">as Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported in 2021,<b>&nbsp;later introduced legislation that “would enable a majority of the legislature to override the popular vote</b>&nbsp;… and dictate the state’s electoral college votes itself.” In other words, what Bolick couldn’t lawfully do in 2020 is a thing she hopes to do under color of law in future.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">&nbsp;Oh, and Bolick is now running for secretary of state, the office that oversees state elections.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The New York Times reported this weekend on the proliferation of Bolick’s fellow travelers: election-deniers seeking or holding office in states that will decide the winner of the 2024 presidential race.&nbsp;</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">According to their tally, at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in swing states “have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That number amounts to&nbsp;<b>“44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided.”</b>&nbsp;<b>Moreover, election deniers around the country are running for secretary of state and attorney general—vying to be swing states’ top election officer and top cop, respectively. I</b>f successful, they can use this power to aggressively investigate bogus claims of voter fraud, attempt to nullify Democratic ballots, refuse to certify the true results, and even try to approve an “<b>alternative” slate of electors for the loser. This is what Ginni Thomas was pushing two years ago, and what her husband has already deemed constitutionally permissible.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Will any of this work? The Thomases clearly think it will. At the same time Ginni was lobbying state legislators to overturn the results<b>, Clarence was developing and promoting a constitutional theory that would lend legitimacy to just such a brazen coup. The justice has become an avid fan of the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a verifiably false, pseudo-originalist theory&nbsp;</b>that allows state legislatures to ignore the real results and rig elections for Republicans</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.&nbsp;</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thomas repeatedly deployed this theory during the 2020 race in an effort to void mail ballots in battleground states&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(which disproportionately favored Democrats)</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. He later peddled a somewhat sanitized version of the Big Lie, falsely asserting that mail ballots—specifically, those used to elect Joe Biden in 2020—are highly susceptible to voter fraud.&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Ever since, he has continued to champion the theory whenever lower courts’ election law rulings happen to help Democrats. As our colleague Richard Hasen has pointed out, it looks increasingly likely that the Supreme Court will decide this issue by 2024.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>The symmetry between Ginni and Clarence Thomas’ work has never been more obvious</b>. While Clarence fought to give state legislatures the constitutional authority to reject election results, Ginni lobbied state legislators to do exactly that.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>A casual observer might assume they were working in tandem, with Clarence handling the law and Ginni working on the political side. They aren’t particularly subtle about it. You need only read Ginni’s emails and Clarence’s opinions to see exactly how the 2024 coup attempt will go down because it’s identical to the 2020 coup attempt</b>: If a Democrat prevails, red state officials will question the legitimacy of the results, giving state legislatures an opportunity to throw them out and declare the Republican to be the real winner. This has nothing to do with liberals squelching Ginni Thomas’ feminist drive to have a separate and distinct political life apart from that of her spouse. More power to her. This has everything to do with two public actors working together to ensure that red state legislatures decide future elections in lieu of the voters.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The question remaining isn’t whether it’ll happen; the question is whether it’ll succeed.</b>&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Thomases tried this approach in 2020, but like Trump’s other allies, they developed their strategy a bit too late and didn’t buff out the crackpot edges until recently.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;But this time they’re putting in the work with plenty of time to spare. If Republicans succeed in pulling off a much more respectable coup in 2024, Americans will have every right to be furious and appalled. But no one will have any excuse to be surprised, because Clarence, Ginni, Eastman, Clark, and their many powerful friends are currently laying out the game plan right before our eyes.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>For more on Ginni Thomas’ role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, listen to this episode of What Next.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>----</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>lnx</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>...r</b>ecall, for instance, that back in November of 2020, it<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/north-carolina-pennsylvania-neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-ballots.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;wasn’t clear there were five votes at the Supreme Court</a>&nbsp;to support the proposition that state legislatures could simply set aside election results they deemed tainted by impropriety. Recall that when lawyer/insurrectionists John Eastman (a Thomas clerk) and<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/jeffrey-bossert-clark-trump-justice-department-election-coup.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;Jeffrey Bossert Clark</a>&nbsp;floated that notion at the White House and elsewhere,<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/john-eastment-jeffrey-clark-coup-consequences.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;serious DOJ attorneys told them in no uncertain terms to go away</a>. Recall finally that one of the lawmakers in Arizona, Shawnna Bolick, is married to a state Supreme Court justice and is parent to Clarence Thomas’ godchild. Bolick, as Jane Mayer of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">the New Yorker reported</a>&nbsp;in 2021, later introduced legislation that “would enable a majority of the legislature to override the popular vote … and dictate the state’s electoral college votes itself.” In other words, what Bolick couldn’t lawfully do in 2020 is a thing she hopes to do under color of law in future. Oh, and Bolick is now running for secretary of state, the office that oversees state elections.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/22/us/politics/state-legislators-election-denial.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR2G-P0X6CoKK_XK-xXBhhh6H__Rt2INqD7nxsuqqSahzG5jzWZsUiK8OdM" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">New York Times reported this weekend</a>&nbsp;on the proliferation of Bolick’s fellow travelers: election-deniers seeking or holding office in states that will decide the winner of the 2024 presidential race. According to their tally, at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in swing states “have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.” That number amounts to “44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided.” Moreover, election deniers around the country are<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/michigan-gop-endorses-trump-backed-election-denier-secretary-state-rac-rcna25243" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;running for</a><a href="https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-presidential-race-and-ethnicity-biden-cabinet-donald-trump-31992ff4490575e54b466fee1e55ae33" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;secretary of state</a>&nbsp;and<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/election-deniers-say-trump-won-2020-are-running-top-cop-4-battleground-rcna29705" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;attorney general</a>—vying to be swing states’ top election officer and top cop, respectively. If successful, they can use this power to aggressively investigate bogus claims of voter fraud, attempt to nullify Democratic ballots, refuse to certify the true results, and even try to approve an “alternative” slate of electors for the loser. This is what Ginni Thomas was pushing two years ago, and what her husband has already deemed constitutionally permissible.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><p class="

    slate-paragraph slate-graf" data-word-count="167" data-uri="slate.com/_components/slate-paragraph/instances/cl3j4rzkc001a3g6kbu16jo8i@published" style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1.2em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Will any of this work? The Thomases clearly think it will. At the same time Ginni was lobbying state legislators to overturn the results, Clarence was developing and promoting a constitutional theory that would lend legitimacy to just such a brazen coup. The justice has become an avid fan of the “independent state legislature doctrine,”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>&nbsp;a<a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/supreme-court-democracy-independent-state-legislature.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;verifiably false, pseudo-originalist theory</a></b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;that allows state legislatures to ignore the real results and rig elections for Republicans. Thomas</span><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/supreme-court-pennsylvania-election-late-ballots.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;repeatedly</a><a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20a72_5hek.pdf" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;deployed</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;this theory during the 2020 race in an effort to void mail ballots in battleground states (which disproportionately favored Democrats). He later peddled a somewhat sanitized version of the Big Lie, falsely asserting that mail ballots—specifically, those used to elect Joe Biden in 2020—</span><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/clarence-thomas-voter-fraud-trump-pennsylvania.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">are highly susceptible to voter fraud</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Ever since, he has</span><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/supreme-court-democracy-independent-state-legislature.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;continued</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;to champion the theory whenever lower courts’ election law rulings happen to help Democrats. As our colleague Richard Hasen</span><a href="https://electionlawblog.org/?p=129446" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; outline-color: transparent; transition: color 0.12s ease 0s, fill 0.12s ease 0s, border-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-color 0.12s ease 0s, outline-style 0.12s ease 0s; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-color: var(--theme-color,#ff0e50);">&nbsp;has pointed out</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, it looks increasingly likely that the Supreme Court will decide this issue by 2024...</span></font></p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><br /></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">stern</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>the Supreme Court will not overturn a century of pro-democracy precedent and two centuries of historical practice to give state legislatures unlimited power over elections—yet.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That’s the upshot of the court’s orders on Monday in two huge</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;redistricting</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;cases out of Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The court refused to block new congressional maps drawn by the high court of each state, declining—for now—to embrace a radical theory rejecting state courts’ authority over election law.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;In the process, however, four justices did endorse this theory, and three attempted to blow up North Carolina’s upcoming election in a dissent with terrifying implications for democracy. The court stepped back from the abyss, but the ensuing reprieve may not last for long.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Both of Monday’s orders involve this year’s redrawing of congressional maps. In Pennsylvania, the Republican-controlled legislature drew a GOP gerrymander, which the Democratic governor vetoed. Because of this impasse, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepped in to draw new, fairer districts. In North Carolina, the Republican-controlled legislature drew a GOP gerrymander, which the Democratic governor could not veto under state law. Voters challenged the map under the state constitution, and in February, the state Supreme Court struck it down. The legislature drew a new map, which a trial court rejected and replaced with its own, fairer version.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;Republicans appealed both court-drawn maps to SCOTUS. They claimed that these plans violated the U.S. Constitution’s elections clause, which says that the “manner” of federal elections “shall be prescribed” by the “legislature.” For at least a century, SCOTUS has read this language to give other organs of state government a say in election law. But conservative scholars have devised a theory known as the “</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">independent state legislature doctrine” that would give legislatures complete control over elections, including voting rules and redistricting. Under this theory, state constitutional provisions governing elections would be null and void, and state courts would have no power to intervene in election disputes. The legislature alone would set the rules—and, in extreme versions of the theory, even dictate the outcome of an election.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The Supreme Court has never endorsed this doctrine, and has explicitly rejected it as recently as 2015. There is a good reason why:</b>&nbsp;It contradicts the original meaning of the elections clause as well as historical practice reaching back to the early days of the republic. A mountain of evidence proves that Framers never intended to give states lone authority over federal elections, and instead expected state constitutions to impose substantive limits on election law.<b>&nbsp;Exhaustive research demonstrates that—aside from a few opportunistic arguments raised by congressional partisans in the 19th century—state legislatures, state courts, federal courts, and Congress have all rejected the doctrine for more than two centuries.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">And yet, for nearly two decades, the conservative legal movement, working alongside Republican politicians, has pushed relentlessly to enshrine this theory into law. It nearly succeeded during the 2020 election, when&nbsp;<b>Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh</b>&nbsp;deployed the theory in an effort to void thousands of disproportionately Democratic ballots. They failed, but their stance encouraged Republicans to try again this year—hence Monday’s cases.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b><br /></b></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">Perhaps the most galling aspect of Alito’s dissent is its hypocrisy.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Pennsylvania challenge was always a tougher sell: The plaintiffs demanded at-large congressional districts for the first time since the 18th century because there was no backup map in place and no time for the legislature to draw one. Moreover, the case invoked the most extreme possible version of the independent state legislature doctrine, which excludes even the governor from redistricting. It was no surprise, then, that the court disposed of that challenge with no noted dissent.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By contrast, the North Carolina case teed up the elections clause issue perfectly, and thus divided the court. Because it’s a shadow docket order, we don’t know exactly how each justice voted, but it appears that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberals in turning away the challenge without comment. Kavanaugh wrote that Republicans had “advanced serious arguments on the merits” but concluded that it was too late for the federal judiciary to intervene, citing the Purcell principle. Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, dissented, declaring that the North Carolina Supreme Court had likely violated the elections clause by striking down the legislature’s congressional map.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Alito’s dissent, which wholeheartedly adopted the independent state legislature doctrine, is a master class in disingenuousness.</b>&nbsp;He omitted more than a century of SCOTUS precedent rejecting the doctrine. He ignored the Purcell principle, which he has consistently used to halt lower court orders protecting voting rights. He disregarded the North Carolina legislature’s express approval of judicial supervision over redistricting. And he dismissed the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision as mere “legislation”—even though the majority engaged in an exhaustive overview of the state constitution’s guarantee that “all elections shall be free.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“This guarantee of ‘free elections’ dates all the way back to the North Carolina Constitution of 1776,” Alito wrote, “but for 246 years that language was not found to prohibit partisan gerrymandering.” Implying that the court’s Democratic majority was motivated by politics rather than law, he fumed: “Only this year did the State Supreme Court change course and discern in the State Constitution a judicially enforceable prohibition of partisan gerrymandering.” (The long dormancy of a constitutional provision did not stop him from adopting a novel reading of the Second Amendment in 2008.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Alito also complained that the North Carolina Supreme Court cited state constitutional guarantees of free speech, assembly, and association, which “make no reference to elections.” Unmentioned is the glaring fact that the First Amendment does not mention elections either, yet Alito has repeatedly used it to strike down election regulations. (It seems supporting Republican candidates counts as free speech, while supporting Democratic candidates does not.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Perhaps the most galling aspect of Alito’s dissent, though, is its hypocrisy.</b>&nbsp;When the court prohibited federal courts from evaluating partisan redistricting in 2019, it assured the nation that state supreme courts could still strike down such gerrymanders. “Our conclusion [does not] condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void,” the court insisted. Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch joined this opinion. Now they’ve revealed it was a bait-and-switch.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br /></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It is mildly encouraging that Kavanaugh did not join this flamethrowing dissent and applied his own rule against intervening on the eve of an election. But he also made it clear that he will vote to take up the North Carolina case next term. That makes four votes to consider the independent state legislature doctrine—all that’s required to put the case on the calendar. It now appears inevitable that, in 2023, the Supreme Court will decide whether state legislatures have unrestricted power to rig federal races for Congress and the presidency. Roberts has already disclaimed the theory, meaning the fate of democracy really is in Barrett’s hands. Her vote on Monday suggests she is hesitant to go along with this scheme. But then again, she might just be picking her battles, since her vote would not have changed the outcome.<b>&nbsp;If Barrett ultimately sides with the four far-right conservatives, the 2024 elections may be decided before they begin.</b>]]</div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>==</strong></font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>omg<br /></strong></font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.nationofchange.org/2022/07/07/opus-dei-supreme-indecency-extreme-deceit/">https://www.nationofchange.org<b>/2022/07</b>/07/opus-dei-supreme-indecency-extreme-deceit/</a></font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the<strong> </strong>current Supreme Court majority that just denied women a legal right to abortion (<em>Dobbs vs. Jackson</em>)

consists of religious fanatics whose careers have been fast-tracked (so

that young Justices can serve for decades) by ultra-wealthy,

like-minded lobbyists and political operatives. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The nexus of this

activity lies with a powerful arch-conservative organization within the

Catholic Church, Opus Dei, that in the U.S. operates out of the Catholic

Information Center in Washington D.C.</span>

</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I am not targeting Catholics but rather the Church’s reactionary,

fundamentalist wing. Many Catholic organizations are dedicated to

upholding the rights and lives of minorities (and majorities, such as

women), victims of pedophilic priests, gays, the poor, immigrants, etc.

The fundamentalist wing of any religion has more in common with other

creeds’ fundamentalisms than with many of its own co-religionists, whom

they often regard as enemies.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Catholic fundamentalism is obviously not

the only “brand” influencing American politics, but it is the one with a

dominant insidious influence on the judiciary.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Opus Dei and its partner organizations have poured tens of millions of dollars into <a href="https://rollcall.com/2019/08/06/conservative-judicial-group-is-top-donor-to-gop-state-elections-arm/">promoting the careers and appointments</a>

of Chief Justice Roberts and the five Justices who overturned Roe:

Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett</span> (Roberts, an

arch-conservative, nonetheless dissented on the abortion case).</b>&nbsp;</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Opus Dei was founded in Spain by Escriva de Balaguer in 1928 and grew

in power, wealth, and influence during the Fascist dictatorship of

Francisco Franco who, with significant military help from Nazi Germany,

overthrew the legitimate Spanish government and ruled over a police

state from 1939-1975. </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The group extended its power throughout Latin

America, supporting Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile and other

terrorizing dictatorships</span><b>. It consistently opposes gay, sexual, and

reproductive rights, and the Catholic liberation movements</b> that champion

the poor in Latin America. It has been involved in the Vatican’s

banking scandals but still wields enormous influence over Vatican

finances, as detailed by Robert Hutchison in his book, <em>Their Kingdom Come</em>.
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Opus Dei’s assets as of 2008 were $2.8 billion, but they have undoubtedly grown since.</b> Popes <a href="https://www.population-security.org/cffc-97-01.htm">John Paul II</a> and <a href="https://opentabernacle.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/pope-francis-increases-opus-dei-power/">Francis </a>both elevated Opus Dei officials to the highest Church offices. One of Opus Dei’s core principles, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130531231642/http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/oppositionwatch/documents/OpusDeiinLatinAmerica.pdf">as articulated by its founder</a>,

is to engage in “the sphere of public life”, not because they are human

or Catholic rights but because “they are God’s rights…May such

‘fanaticism’ for the Faith…become stronger every day.” Opus Dei is not

simply a conservative religious group, it is openly dedicated to

wielding political and financial power in nations throughout the world.

And that often means promoting and aligning itself with the most

violent, reactionary regimes and acting in the shadow realms of

political influence.</font>

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Opus Dei members were prominent in <a href="http://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/03/opus-deis-influence-on-the-u-s-judiciary/">Trump’s White House</a>, including Attorney General William Barr and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1108798387/jan-6-committee-subpoenas-pat-cipollone-trumps-former-white-house-counsel">Pat Cipollone</a>, Trump’s former <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/white-house-counsels-betrayal-his-office/605980/">White House counsel</a>. Opus Dei had <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/koch-lobbyists-and-opus-dei--whos-dropping-in-on-trump-budget-czar-mick-mulvaney.html">access to Trump’s budget </a>director,<b>

Mick Mulvaney</b>, along with other noted right-wing lobbyists (Heritage

Foundation, Koch Industries), meetings the Trump administration<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/koch-lobbyists-and-opus-dei--whos-dropping-in-on-trump-budget-czar-mick-mulvaney.html"> tried to keep secret</a>. <b><a href="https://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/06/opus-deis-influence-is-felt-in-all-of-washingtons-corridors-of-power/">Member Larry Kudlow</a></b>

was Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. It may well be

the most powerful political lobby in the world and yet its explicit

political agenda is absolutely subservient to its extreme, authoritarian

religious agenda.</font></span>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A key fixer in this effort is Leonard Leo. <a href="https://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/06/opus-deis-influence-is-felt-in-all-of-washingtons-corridors-of-power/">Leo is on the board of directors</a> of the Catholic Information Center (William Barr was a past director) and <a href="https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/politico50/leonard-leo/">Executive Vice President </a>of

the Federalist Society, a lobbying group that adheres to an

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">“originalist” interpretation of the Constitution</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"> </span>(more on this below).

The two organizations are close political allies, as Leo’s dual role

suggests. As Trump’s close advisor during his presidency, Leo was

responsible for selecting and guiding the Supreme Court nominations of

Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch and was instrumental in riddling

the lower Federal courts with <a href="https://abovethelaw.com/2017/03/lower-court-judicial-nominations-by-the-trump-administration/">Trump appointees</a>.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">&nbsp;Meanwhile, members of both Opus Dei and The Federalist Society include

Alito<b>, Clarence Thomas</b>, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia</span>. Chief

Justice Roberts is a Federalist Society member and the Society’s <a href="https://fedsoc.org/contributors">members and supporters</a>

are prominent in many of nation’s top law schools and most powerful law

firms, which allows it to have an untoward influence over judicial

selections. <b>When Clarence Thomas headlined a <a href="https://www.commoncause.org/democracy-wire/justice-thomas-crosses-the-line-again/">2013 Federalist Society fundraiser</a>,

guests were seated in proximity to him according to the size of their

donations. In effect, the Federalist Society and Opus Dei have become

the Supreme Court of the land.</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Much of Opus Dei’s influence was exerted via the Wellspring

Committee, established and run by Opus Dei members Ann and Neil Corkery

in 2008</b></span>. The Koch brothers were instrumental in providing Wellspring

with its first $10 million in seed money. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/03/30/behind-the-dark-money-web-that-put-barrett-and-kavanaugh-and-gorsuch-on-the-supreme-court/">According to Robert Maguire</a>

of <b>Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Corkerys

“have been the overseers of massive amounts of money that have gone into

federal judicial races.”</b>
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wellspring closed down in 2018 but not before

passing its mantle to the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN); in 2017

Wellspring transferred <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/262046485/02_2019_prefixes_25-26/262046485_201712_990O_2019022016111921">$14,814, 998.00</a>,

or 94% of its donations that year, to JCN. JCN was formerly directed by

Leonard Leo and now by<b> Carrie Severino, who served as Thomas’s law

clerk. (</b>Opus Dei’s Roger Severino, Carrie’s husband, was Director of

Trump’s Office for Civil Rights). JCN is a 501(c)(4) organization so its

donors can remain secret. JCN <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/26/secret-money-behind-push-ban-abortion?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=twitter">poured millions</a> into supporting Bush and Trump’s Supreme Court nominees (Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett) and millions <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/billionaires-try-to-buy-the-supreme-court">blocking </a>Obama’s Court nominee, Merrick Garland.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given Opus Dei’s absolute anti-choice ideology,&nbsp; global power, and

influence over the Supreme Court, it is clear the Court’s anti-choice

decision was not driven by legal arguments over the right to privacy,

strict or “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution, or states

rights. These were all just window dressing. The Supreme Court—and much

of our judiciary—has been taken over by fanatics with a strictly <em>theological </em>agenda: to replace “separation of Church and State” with “the Church <em>runs</em> the state”. It is a narrow, fanatical religious ideology that decided the case.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The so-called “originalist” theory of interpreting the Constitution

claims the Constitution only protects rights explicitly mentioned in the

text.</span> The Constitution itself rejects the “originalist” idea so central

to conservative ideology<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The Ninth Amendment reads, “The

enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be

construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This

clearly states that interpreting the Constitution is a living, evolving

process, for how else can those “other[s]” rights be “retained by the

people”? The Ninth is also a safety valve: “If we left out any important

rights, sorry, our bad, it doesn’t mean those rights aren’t protected

as well.” The Ninth has been used to uphold such diverse rights as

teaching non-English languages, sending kids to private schools,

protecting against forced sterilization, and the 1965 Griswold decision

overturning bans on contraception, in which privacy was deemed a

“penumbra” (also called “unenumerated”) right. The penumbra concept was

then applied to abortion in 1973’s Roe decision.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, citing both the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments: </b>“This

right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s

concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we

feel it is, or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the

people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not

to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose

upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent.” The Court also recognized that “When

those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy,

and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary…is not

in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Blackmun’s decision

includes an overview of the dramatic shifts in cultural and legal

attitudes towards abortion, though most views differentiated abortions

in the first 12-16 weeks (before the baby is usually felt moving inside

the womb) from those occurring later.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The “sanctity of the foetus”, that is, viewing abortion at any stage

of pregnancy as equivalent to murder, is the linchpin of the anti-choice

position and its driving emotional trigger. However, even the Catholic

Church’s historical opposition to abortion had nothing to do with the

sanctity of the foetus; it was <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12178868/">aimed at the “sin” of sexual pleasure</a>.

Church policy varied over the centuries but the foetus’s life was

either absent as an issue or secondary to sexual sin and other

theological concerns. St. Thomas Aquinas asserted that in its earlier

stages <a href="https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/st-thomas-aquinas-c-1225-1274">a foetus is in a “vegetal”</a>

and then “animal” state before achieving person-hood at some point,

most likely at the end of the third month.<b> It wasn’t until 1965 that the

Church banned abortion on the basis of sanctity of life rather than

sexual sin. </b>However, the Bible passages used to justify this claim 1) do

not really address abortion (the BIble is much more direct in advising

that adulterers be stoned to death); 2) are drawn mostly from the Old

Testament, a Jewish document, significant since the Jewish religion

allows abortion; and 3) are in the Bible, which has no legal standing in

the United States. Or didn’t.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Court’s decision in <b>Dobbs v. Jackson </b>is only the

beginning, as anti-abortion activists and GOP-led extremists mobilize to

assault a wide range of rights. The anti-choice movement was never only

about abortion. Abortion was used as the emotional catalyst for a broad

attack on the values of tolerance and social commitment embodied in

Federal guarantees backed by Constitutional authority. The well-being of

Americans and our system of government is now in the hands of religious

fanatics on a crusade against all those who do not believe in their

degraded, medieval version of truth. They are welcome to their beliefs

but are not welcome to impose those beliefs on the rest of us, nor to

challenge the fundamental values of the United States, which holds the

value of human beings above adherence to extreme and rigid political or

religious ideologies.
</font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong /></font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;"><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>=</strong></font></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></strong></p><p><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></strong></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></strong></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/originalism-scotus-rationalize-mass-murder/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/originalism-scotus-rationalize-mass-murder/</a></font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">swearingen kim</font></font></strong></font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I moved to New York City in 1981, I first stayed at the YMCA, and every day I encountered street hustlers on 34<span style="line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline; top: -0.5em;">th</span>&nbsp;Street, taking people's money with the shell game. You know how it goes: A pea or a little ball is placed under one of three cups and moved around rapidly; you are enticed to bet on where it ends up. (And after the first "lucky" guess, you are invariably wrong.)</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I've been thinking about those shell games because of the endless, reverent talk of "textualism" and "originalism" by conservative, Federalist Society–approved justices on the Supreme Court.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="">It was Justice Antonin Scalia who first articulated a handy way to expand "gun rights" beyond any reasonable limits, </b>and to render our Constitution as dead as any of the innumerable victims of American gun violence — in the process, going against the explicit wishes of some of the most prominent members of the founding generation, ounders, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In the 2008<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">&nbsp;Heller decision</a>, which somehow blithely dispensed with the whole "well regulated Militia" thing, and in various of his writings, Scalia outlined the right-wing constitutional interpretation now known as "textualism" or "originalism."</font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"Strict construction "— meaning an absolutely literal reading of the Constitution or of a statute — was supported by conservatives until it received too much criticism. That clenched-sphincter dodge was then replaced by "textualism" and later "originalism</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">," both of which, more or less, allow a judge just a bit more interpretive leeway.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Then there are the different kinds of originalism — one that seeks to divine the writer's original intent, and another that looks at original&nbsp;<em style="">meaning</em>, as supposedly understood by reasonable people at the time of the writing. Failing that, originalists, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who formerly clerked for Scalia, will <b>detour into a "common-law Constitution" (or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/living-constitution" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"living Constitution"</a>) and wander through English common law, historical documents and even favored philosophers until they find what they're looking for.</b></span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I don my tricorn hat and declare this "poppycock."</font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Historian Heather Cox Richardson&nbsp;<a href="https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-14-2020?r=2xh08&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy&s=r" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">has detailed</a>, referring specifically to<b> Barrett</b>, how conservative justices have used this interpretive technique to limit the powers of the federal government and reverse the gains made since World War II in regulating business activities or and in expanding civil and women's rights:</font></font></strong></font></p><blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.546px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>The originalism of scholars like Barrett is an answer to the judges who, in the years after World War Two, interpreted the law to make American democracy live up to its principles, making all Americans equal before the law</b>. With the New Deal in the 1930s, the Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt had set out to level the economic playing field between the wealthy and ordinary Americans. They regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.</span>
</font></font></strong></font></blockquote><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">And what about all of our nation's current problems, ones the founders could not possibly have anticipated? The simple algorithm for textualists and originalists appears to be: 1) If the founders didn't write explicitly about it, then we don't need to know about it, because the Founders were godlike and are still totally pertinent; 2) If the founders did write about it but were vague in their expression, we'll consult English common law or our fave-rave philosophers (e.g., Plato, Edmund Burke) for answers, because, well, everyone knows the founders were in a big hurry and often imbibed too much cider.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In other words, it's a rigged game in which you cherry-pick whatever quotes seem to support the decisions you are determined to make anyway. </b>We all try to fight confirmation bias when we go searching for evidence in other people's writings. Even a journalist writing an opinion piece with a solid point of view needs, at least, to appear reasonable to the other side, to state facts clearly, to link to reputable sources and to outline or otherwise anticipate the likely objections.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But Republicans have declared war, at least since the era of Ronald Reagan, on government itself, so making laws to address public needs has become anathema to those who want only to "starve the beast" or, in Grover Norquist's troubling and violent metaphor,&nbsp;<a href="https://theweek.com/articles/684754/gop-plot-drown-medicaid-bathtub" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">"drown it in the bathtub"</a>&nbsp;and thereby send power back to individual states.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So here we are, with only one functioning political party, while the other is enthralled with nonexistent voter fraud and other wacko conspiracy theories, harboring a growing devotion to authoritarian leaders, and doing anything possible — including flouting public health rules — to "own the libs." And now that unreasonable minority has supermajority control of the highest court in the land.</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Republicans steadfastly refuse to make laws that address issues of grave public concern — such as regulating gun ownership, for example — because they are deeply invested in proving that our form of government cannot or does not work.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That perverse effort has been in play for so long now that Republicans reflexively try to cast themselves as the victims and make tragedies like mass shootings further alienate Americans from one another, insisting that nothing can be done because sowing that sense of helplessness and isolation far and wide yields&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/05/26/republicans-solutions-to-mass-are-a-distraction/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">short-term political benefits for them</a>.</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Remember the Obama signs that said "HOPE," which Republicans countered with "NOPE"? They meant it. They told us then that they were the party that stood for hopelessness.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As least as they're utilized now by emboldened&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/05/26/5-decisions-from-this-term-that-are-terrifyingly-radical--and-not-about-abortion/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">right-wing judges</a>, both textualism and originalism are merely august-sounding forms of judicial obstructionism or revanchism.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the Heller ruling, any good-faith textualist reading of the Second Amendment would instantly reveal that the so-called right to bear arms depends on the continuing need for a well-regulated militia, an observation made by previous Supreme Court justices and other legal minds much more qualified than I am. <b>But even a dope like me can read the plain meaning of the text: The second part of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/10/25/amy-coney-barrett-and-the-second-amendment-why-her-expansive-view-is-utter-bs/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">that 27-word statement is dependent on the first part</a>. It's a conditional clause. If the first part is not true or no longer valid, the rest does not stand.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But, again, the so-called originalists will, from time to time, allow themselves to delve deeper and find their justifications wherever they can, in order to get that pea under the shell where they knew it would wind up from the beginning.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even if you steadfastly don't want to believe that, then ask the question so many people have asked about the Buffalo shooter, the Uvalde shooter, the Tulsa shooter and the dozens or scores of others:&nbsp;<b>Which well-regulated militia were they members of?</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scalia often wrote about the need for a "reasonable" interpretation of the Constitution, and that is exactly what has been abandoned, especially in his own on-the-fly remix of the Second Amendment.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The entire world sees it as it is, absurd and monstrous. If the United States is going to act as the "muscle" around the globe, we seriously need to get over our&nbsp;</span><a href="http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/heather-richardson/cowboy-mythology-twenty-years-since-reagan-revolution-rise-movement-conservatives/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">fake tough-guy fetish</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">&nbsp;and our "exceptionalism" and learn from what works in other developed or even developing countries, where these kinds of mass shootings simply do not happen.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The U.K. managed&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/national/how-countries-like-the-uk-have-quelled-gun-violence" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">to quell gun violence</a>&nbsp;after suffering tragedies, and now has a very low rate of homicide (0.04 per 100,000 people) relative to the U.S. (nearly 4 per 100,000). Australia and Ireland have done the same.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61641543" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Canada stands poised</a>&nbsp;to ban assault-style weapons and limit ownership of handguns. Speaking of Heller and the "right" to own a handgun in the home, more than half the gun deaths in the U.S. result from suicide, because having a gun in the house makes suicide attempts far more likely to be lethal.</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this particular shell game, Americans lose more than pocket money — they lose many hard-won rights, environmental regulation and consumer protection, almost any action on the existential threat of climate change and their freedom to feel safe, for themselves and their loved ones, in public places.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2018 New York Times op-ed</a>, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens urged post-Parkland protesters to do more than fight for gun regulation. He wrote that they should "seek more effective and more lasting reform" and <b>work for a repeal of the Second Amendment. </b>In his view, the amendment was originally intended only as a stopgap measure:</font></font></strong></font></p><blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.546px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that 'a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.' Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
</font></font></strong></font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My wife and I got to see our daughters finish elementary school and move on to middle school. My wife worked at their elementary school, and made lovely videos to commemorate those graduations to the next level. It breaks our hearts that the parents of all the children slain in the name of preposterous policies allowing for easy access to guns and assault weapons — or, for that matter, the parents who have lost a child to suicide made more efficient by a gun in the house — will never experience the joys and pains of seeing their kids grow up and become amazing adult versions of the beautiful children they once were.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But there are more guns to sell, more "patriotic" lobbyists trying to make a buck, more "pro-life" politicians to bribe, and a population that needs to be constantly reminded that government cannot work. (Especially when the Biden administration, in numerous ways, is proving that it can.</b> Even&nbsp;<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/good-things-biden-leslie-marshall" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Fox News admits to some positives</a>.)</font></font></strong></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At the moment, the Supreme Court looks&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/05/27/supreme-court-gun-control-massachusetts-impacts" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">primed to strike down</a>&nbsp;an eminently reasonable, century-old law in New York that regulates who can carry a handgun in public.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> So much for all the talk about being reasonable and including notions of fairness and good policy in decisions. Or even precedent — a once-cherished concept, now tossed to the wind.</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They want you to listen up when you are told that, after the prayers, we will move on from this tragedy.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As gun fanatics continue to make increasingly absurd and often&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/06/01/the-right-desperately-tries-to-women-for-the-21-in-the-uvalde-school/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">revealing</a>&nbsp;arguments about who or what is to blame for the endless slaughter of their fellow Americans, of even schoolchildren, people of good faith in this country need to do everything we can to quell the gun violence.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/anti-gun-ad-campaign.html" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Public health campaigns</a>&nbsp;are important, as are "red-flag" laws and regulations of semiautomatic weapons. But ultimately, Justice Stevens' solution will probably be necessary: The Second Amendment has to go.</font></font></strong></font></p></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/scotus-blood-on-its-hands/">https://www.alternet.org/<b>2022/05</b>/scotus-blood-on-its-hands/</a></font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">t<strong>he court is about to take Second Amendment fundamentalism to a new and even more dangerous level.</strong></font></font></strong></font></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If you're looking for someone or something to blame for the mass shootings that have left our schools, streets and communities soaked in blood, don't just point your finger at the deranged punks who pull the triggers, or the NRA and their lackeys in the Republican Party. Save at least some of your ire for the Supreme Court.</font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2008, the Supreme Court sold its soul to the gun lobby. In a 5-4 majority opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">District of Columbia v. Heller</a>, the court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms.[<b>cruz?]</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prior to&nbsp;<em>Heller</em>, the great weight of academic scholarship as well as the court’s 1939 decision in&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/307/174" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">United States v. Miller</a></em>&nbsp;had construed the Second Amendment, in keeping with the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GKKTYAG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?encoding=UTF8&btkr=1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">actual debates of the Constitutional Convention</a>, as<b>&nbsp;protecting gun ownership only in connection with service in long-since antiquated state militias.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2010, the court again genuflected to the gun lobby. In another 5-4 opinion in&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-1521" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">McDonald v. Chicago</a></em>, this time written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court extended&nbsp;<em>Heller</em>, holding that the individual right to keep and bear arms is “incorporated” by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and is therefore applicable to the states and local governments.</font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Scalia and Alito, thus became the law of the land. The amendment has since been elevated in right-wing circles to the status of holy writ.</span>
</font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Both&nbsp;<em>Heller</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>McDonald</em>&nbsp;were based on the implausible and perverse judicial philosophy known as "originalism."</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Originalism has led the court to enter a legal fantasy world in which the answers to contemporary questions about such matters as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">voting</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">rights</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/18-422" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">gerrymandering</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-1466" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">union</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-curbs-union-power-farm-access-dispute-2021-06-23/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">organizing</a>, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-7955_aplc.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">death penalty</a>,&nbsp;abortion and gun control are to be found solely in the meaning that the Constitution had for the Founding Fathers in the late 18th Century.<b>&nbsp;For originalists, the meaning of the Constitution is forever fixed, and can only be altered by constitutional amendments.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a tool of judicial decision-making, originalism has been around a long time.<b>&nbsp;One of its earliest expressions came in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/60us393" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><em>Dred Scott</em></a>&nbsp;case of 1857</b>, perhaps the most odious decision ever issued by the Supreme Court, which held that Black Americans of African descent could never be U.S. Citizens.&nbsp;<b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v.Ferguson" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;"><em>Plessy v. Ferguson</em></a>, the 1896 decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation even after the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, is another originalist landmark.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But as an explicit judicial theory, originalism came into its own in the&nbsp;<a href="https://progressive.org/magazine/supremely-conservative-blum/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">early 1980s</a>. Initially, as popularized by Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese and the late failed-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork,</b>&nbsp;the doctrine asserted that the most important terms and provisions that appear in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be understood according to the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers, rather than as broad concepts that acquire depth, content and more complete meaning over time in response to changing social conditions.</font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When&nbsp;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Originalism-as-Faith-Eric-Segall/dp/1316640469" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">critics</a>&nbsp;noted that the framers of the Constitution were a diverse group and that their actual intentions were varied and often ambiguous, proponents of the doctrine refined their approach. The current version—call it “new originalism”— focuses on the “original public meaning” of Constitutional provisions, which, they contend, can be ascertained from the recorded debates of the founding era and from such sources as late eighteenth-century dictionaries</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All originalists—whether of the old or new iteration—believe that their approach limits the&nbsp;<a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1200&context=lawfacpub" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">subjectivity of judges</a>&nbsp;and acts as a restraint on judicial activism.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In fact, originalism does nothing of the sort. As Fordham University history professor Saul Cornell, one of the foremost authorities on the history of the Second Amendment,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-originalism-a-constitutional-scam" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">noted</a>&nbsp;in a scathing critique published in 2011 in&nbsp;<em>Dissent</em>&nbsp;magazine:</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“[I]f one looks carefully at the murky methodology and dubious practices of new originalism, it is clear that its historical foundations are even shakier than that of old originalism. The new theory is little more than an intellectual shell game in which contemporary political preferences are shuffled around and made to appear part of the Constitution’s original meaning.”</font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The actual history of the Second Amendment is quite different from the fantasy versions advanced by Scalia and Alito. As the late Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by three of his colleagues, wrote for the minority in&nbsp;<em>Heller</em>:</font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The Second Amendment was adopted to protect the right of the people of each of the several States to maintain a well-regulated militia. It was a response to concerns raised during the ratification of the Constitution that the<b>&nbsp;power of Congress to disarm the state militias and create a national standing army posed an intolerable threat to the sovereignty of the several States.&nbsp;</b>Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">”</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although&nbsp;Heller&nbsp;and&nbsp;McDonald&nbsp;were the products of extreme rightwing judicial activism, they were technically limited in scope, as they dealt with the right to keep guns in the home. Ever since those cases were decided, however,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/footnote-looms-large-second-amendments-future/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the gun lobby</a>&nbsp;has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nssf.org/articles/scotus-frustrates-again-on-second-amendment-rights/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">worked</a>&nbsp;to bring&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/us/supreme-court-gun.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">a new test case to the Supreme Court</a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/296623-california-s-triggerman" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">extend</a>&nbsp;the right to bear arms beyond the home.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The lobby has finally found its vehicle in a new case--<a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/new-york-state-rifle-pistol-association-inc-v-corlett/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">New York State Pistol Association v. Bruen</a>-- that will be decided by the end of June, when the court completes its current term.
</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><em>Bruen&nbsp;</em>was brought by two individuals and the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association to overturn a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-843/164031/20201217110211298_2020-12-17%2520NRA-Corlett%2520Cert%2520Petition%2520FINAL.pdf" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">New York law</a>&nbsp;that places limits on the issuance of concealed weapons permits to carry guns outside the home. Under New York’s regulatory scheme, people seeking such permits are required to demonstrate a special need for protection — “<a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/400.00" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">proper cause</a>” in the words of the statute—to qualify. The NRA contends the law is unconstitutional.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>After losing in the lower courts, the&nbsp;<em>Bruen</em>&nbsp;plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, where they are likely to prevail.</b>&nbsp;With the addition of three Trump appointees—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—conservatives now hold a solid 6-3 majority on the bench. No longer constrained by the need for caution and compromise, they are set to dramatically extend gun rights under the Second Amendment.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Originalism was front and center during the oral arguments the court heard in the case last November.</b></font></font></strong></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">During the&nbsp;</span><a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2021/20-843_f2q3.pdf" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">arguments</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, the Justices paid scant attention to the dire consequences of unleashing more guns on the streets and subways of present-day New York City. They instead peppered the attorneys for both sides with questions about the origins under Anglo-American law of the right to carry arms in public places</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. At several points in the two-hour session, the attorneys were asked to share their thoughts on whether the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59158248#:_{:text=The%2520later%25201328%2520Statute%2520of,nor%2520in%2520no%2520part%2520elsewhere%2522.}" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Statute of Northampton</a>, an act of the English Parliament passed in 1328, banned the carrying of weapons other than by the king’s servants in fairs and markets.</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The questioning would have made for an amusing Saturday Night Live or Monty Python skit, but this was no stand-up bit</b>. Commenting on the oral arguments,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59158248" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Professor Cornell told the BBC</a>&nbsp;it was “beyond ironic” that anyone would look to Medieval England for resolution of the case. "It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever to anyone who really understands the complexity of English history. Obviously, that doesn't include many people in the gun rights community or many people sitting on some courts in America."</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Should the New York statute be declared unconstitutional,&nbsp;<a href="https://concealedguns.procon.org/state-by-state-concealed-carry-permit-laws/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">similar measures</a>&nbsp;in California, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and elsewhere will likely fall, with dire and deadly consequences for public safety. Worse still, depending on the scope of the court's ruling, other gun-control laws on background checks and the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines could become vulnerable to constitutional challenges.</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The gun homicide rate in the United States is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/24/980838151/gun-violence-deaths-how-the-u-s-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-world" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">nearly eight times higher</a>&nbsp;than the rate in Canada, and a whopping 100 times higher than in Britain.</b>&nbsp;This year is shaping up to be particularly horrific. As of May 30, the United States had recorded 17,817 deaths from firearms, counting both suicides and unlawful killings, according to the Washington, D.C.-based&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Gun Violence Archive</a>. We also had recorded 228 mass shootings (<a href="https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/methodology" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">defined</a>&nbsp;as an event involving four or more victims).</font></font></strong></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In any sane democracy, one might expect the highest court in the land to step in and do something to uphold sensible gun-control regulations when given the opportunity. But in fact, our Supreme Court is poised to do just the opposite. Keep that in mind when the next mass shooting inevitably occurs, perhaps in a neighborhood close to your own.</font></font></strong></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></strong></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></strong></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/clarence-thomas-trump/593596/">https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/clarence-thomas-trump/593596/</a></font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></strong></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></font></strong></font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></strong></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Clarence Thomas Effect</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The notoriously quiet Supreme Court justice has had a far-reaching influence on the personnel of the Trump administration, which may be his most lasting legacy.</span></div><div>
</div><div>By Emma Green</div><div>
</div><div><b>JULY 10, 2019</b></div><div>
</div><div>Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving justice currently sitting on the Supreme Court. For much of his tenure, court watchers and critics have dismissed his jurisprudence as largely irrelevant, demoting him to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s judicial sidekick. In the public imagination, he is most remembered for his worst moment. Last fall’s confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh resurrected the debate over Anita Hill, the woman who famously accused Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And yet, during his time on the Court, Thomas has written prolifically and introduced ideas that have gradually gained influence among other justices. Of all the Supreme Court justices, Thomas takes an approach to the law that is arguably the purest embodiment of the conservative judicial philosophies known as<b>&nbsp;textualism, which holds that the plain meaning of the text of a law is all that matters in judicial interpretation, and originalism, which holds that the Constitution should be interpreted only as its authors intended.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><b>The most significant part of Thomas’s legacy, however, may take shape long after he has stopped writing opinions.&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Personnel is policy</b>. Thomas’s vast network, more than that of any other justice, has defined President Donald Trump’s administration and the federal judiciary Trump has built. Through his clerks and mentees, the notoriously silent justice may end up with an outsize voice in the legal system for years to come.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Numbers are the first evidence of the sizable Thomas effect. He has had more of his former clerks nominated to federal judgeships under Trump than any other justice, past or present: 10, compared with Anthony Kennedy’s seven and Scalia’s five. Roughly one-fifth of Thomas’s former clerks either are in the Trump administration or have been nominated to the federal bench by the president. The clerks whom Thomas trained, has mentored, and actively stays in touch with are taking up lifetime appointments, and on the whole, they are quite young: Allison Jones Rushing, who now sits on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is just in her mid-30s.</span></div><div>
</div><div>[Read: Conservative women are leading the defense of Kavanaugh]</div><div>
</div><div><b>These relatively small numbers offer insight into the broad influence Thomas has had on the Trump-era legal establishment. Even clerks who aren’t in formal positions of public service have gained prominence under Trump: Laura Ingraham</b>, the conservative commentator who clerked for Thomas during his early years on the bench, has hosted one of the top-rated programs on Fox News since October 2017 and is an outspoken supporter of the president.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Another former clerk, Carrie Severino, the chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network, has been one of the most vocal advocates for Trump’s judicial nominees, including Kavanaugh.</span></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The Thomas effect started taking shape early on in the Trump administration. As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern noted as early as mid-2017, when the pattern was still nascent,&nbsp;<b>“Everywhere you turn in Trumpland, you’ll find a slew of Thomas’ former clerks in high places.”</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In part, this effect may have been driven by the people making the hires. Gregory Katsas, who clerked for Thomas on the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court, joined the Trump administration right after the inauguration as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel. Later, when Katsas was nominated to his own judgeship on the D.C. Circuit Court, he told U.S. senators that he had been involved in “interviewing and recommending candidates for various executive and judicial appointments.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At least three other people who have worked in Trump’s White House counsel’s office are also former Thomas clerks: John Eisenberg, David Morrell, and Kate Todd. When the Trump administration released its list of potential Supreme Court nominees in November 2017, four former Thomas clerks were included: Thomas Lee, Margaret Ryan, David Stras, and Allison Eid.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Any new administration has a huge number of positions to fill across the executive branch. When Trump took office, he also faced significant judicial vacancies—142 empty seats, according to data from the American Bar Association.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By comparison, when Barack Obama took office in 2008, there were only 53 federal judicial vacancies.&nbsp;</span>These jobs are filled like any other: through personal networks and recommendations. Under Trump, the most influential source of potential candidates for these vacancies has been the&nbsp;<b>Federalist Society,&nbsp;</b>a professional network for conservative and libertarian lawyers. “It happens that a lot of the people in the White House counsel’s office are Federalist Society members, and as a result of having been Federalist Society members, they have their own set of contacts,” said John Malcolm, who works on judicial issues at the&nbsp;<b>Heritage Foundation and is chairman of the Federalist Society’s criminal-law practice group.</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The organization’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, has had an influential role in advising the Trump administration on possible nominees.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Although stories about the Federalist Society often focus on the intellectual role and legacy of the late Justice Scalia, who was an early faculty adviser to the group at the University of Chicago,&nbsp;<b>Thomas is a central figure in the Federalist Society universe</b></span><b>.&nbsp;</b>William Eskridge, a law professor at Yale known for his work on LGBTQ legal issues, told me the Federalist Society is “a social circle. It’s a professional circle. It’s a circle that gives [the justices] law clerks. It’s a circle that gives them positive publicity.” And, he added, “Thomas is at the center of that.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>[Read: The Supreme Court hands a victory to the pro-life movement]</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"><b>Scalia famously described himself as a “fainthearted originalist,” although he later repudiated that label. By contrast, Thomas’s originalism has been “unflinching,</b>”</span> as one conservative law professor wrote in a recent column for The New York Times<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"><b>.</b><b style="">&nbsp;Scalia himself told a Thomas biographer that Thomas does not believe in the legal principle of generally following settled precedent.</b>&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Among Federalist Society members, he probably would be their No. 1 favorite justice of anyone on the Court,” Severino told me. “As wonderful as Justice Scalia is, Thomas is someone who has inspired a lot of young lawyers.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The Thomas effect may be due to more than just the power of networks, however. Thomas has been on the Supreme Court bench since 1991, and his clerks are entering their professional peaks during a Republican administration. Several former clerks told me&nbsp;<b>Thomas goes out of his way to stay in touch with his clerks and cultivate their careers; they have monthly lunches and regularly get together for intergenerational reunions</b></span><b>.&nbsp;Each year, Thomas takes his clerks on a field trip to the site of the deadliest battle in the Civil War. “I want them to go to Gettysburg&nbsp;</b>and to think about … the price that was paid for this country to exist,” he said in an interview with the appeals-court judge Diane Sykes at a Federalist Society event in 2013. “<b>I love my law clerks,” Thomas added. “These kids are my family.”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Thomas’s clerks tend to fit a particular profile. They come from all over the country, including law schools outside the Ivy League, which makes them particularly suitable candidates for federal judgeships. “Judges have to have ties to the local area typically,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a former Thomas clerk and professor of law at the University of Virginia. “The Thomas clerks, because they come from more regions in the country, and certainly go to law schools all over the country, are more apt to go outside of the I-95 corridor.</span>” After their clerkships, these lawyers often go into public service, taking up positions in U.S. attorneys’ offices or as professors, which means they don’t mind the pay cut that often comes with a move to the federal bench. (A federal district-court judge can expect to make slightly more than $200,000 a year; by comparison, partners at top-tier law firms can earn multimillion-dollar salaries.)<b>&nbsp;And, like Thomas, they tend to be very conservative, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">committed originalists and textualists. </span>As Eskridge put it, they are true believers.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The Trump administration’s most marked achievement in terms of shifting the federal judiciary has come throug<b>h Circuit Courts of Appeals.&nbsp;</b>Trump has far outpaced his recent predecessors, with 42 confirmed appointments to these courts over the past two and a half years; by comparison, Obama had gotten less than half as many appeals-court judges confirmed by this point in his first term</span>.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">These seats are where Thomas clerks will have the most influence—and are outpacing the former clerks for conservative justices. Former Thomas clerks have now been&nbsp;</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">confirmed to the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, along with two judges confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—Katsas and Neomi Rao, the former head of Trump’s&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.&nbsp;</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The D.C. Circuit is particularly influential, because it is responsible for reviewing the actions of federal agencies; in recent years, it has issued important decisions on topics ranging from Obamacare to gun rights</span>.</div><div>
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</div><div><b>Thomas is famously silent during oral arguments. But as a writer, he has been prolific:&nbsp;</b>He wrote the most concurrences, dissents, and opinions of any justice during each of the past five terms, according to data from SCOTUSblog<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">. Over time, his work has significantly shifted the window of acceptable legal opinions on various issues, said&nbsp;<b>John Yoo, a former Thomas clerk</b></span><b>&nbsp;</b>and law professor at UC Berkeley who is best known for his work on the George W. Bush administration’s torture memos.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“When I clerked for him, he published some opinions I thought were really radical, and the legal profession would never be interested,” Yoo told me. “Now those opinions are heavily debated in law schools and are very influential.” He specifically mentioned Thomas’s concurrence in a 1995 case on affirmative action, Adarand v. Peña, and another concurrence in a case on the Constitution’s commerce clause, United States v. Lopez.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>On the Court, Thomas’s purist approach may cost him the ability to convince his fellow justices on controversial cases. “He’s less of a traditional politician,” Yoo told me. “I think he’s more interested in saying, ‘This is the correct view of the Constitution,’ rather than assembling five votes. And that’s a trade-off.</b>” Thomas’s views often come out in dissents or concurrences, offered solo or joined by just one or two other justices.<b>&nbsp;“He has not, until recently, written any of the blockbuster majority opinions,” Yoo said, “because to do that, you have to horse-trade to get votes</b>.”<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;(Notable majority opinions by Thomas include a 2001 case concerning the rights of a religious student group, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, and a 2018 First Amendment case involving a crisis-pregnancy center, NIFLA v.&nbsp;<b>Becerra.)</b></span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">This is all the more reason the rise of Thomas’s former clerks is important. His approach to controversial legal questions—generally opposing affirmative action, favoring limited power for federal agencies, defending gun rights, and more—has been developed and popularized over his decades on the bench, and will be carried forward by a new generation of judges<b>. He openly defies what he sees as bad precedent—just last month, Thomas wrote in a concurrence that “the Constitution itself is silent on abortion.”</b></span></div><div>
</div><div>[Adam Cohen: Clarence Thomas knows nothing of my work]</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Other conservative justices’ clerks have had a significant footprint in the Trump administration. Two of former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s clerks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, now sit on the Supreme Cour</b>t. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, and his solicitor general, Noel Francisco, both clerked for Scalia, as did the White House counselor Emmet Flood and the recently confirmed Seventh Circuit judge, Amy Coney Barrett, who is widely thought to be on Trump’s short list for any potential future Supreme Court slots.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Thomas’s influence, however, is particularly broad, reaching from the Department of Justice to the White House to the federal bench. Thomas is now 71 years old. If he follows the path of his colleagues Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who are both in their 80s<b>, he could easily have a decade or more to go on the Supreme Court.</b>&nbsp;His greatest legacy, however, may be in the intellectual seeds he has planted in the generation of lawyers who came up studying his work.</div><div>
</div><div>Olivia Paschal contributed reporting to this article.</div><div>
</div><div>Emma Green is a former staff writer at ​The Atlantic.</div></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></strong></div></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></strong></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/antonin-scalia/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/antonin-scalia/</font></a></strong></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ah</font></strong></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>During his eight years as president, Ronald Reagan appointed three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court: Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981, libertarian Anthony Kennedy in 1987 and far-right social conservative Antonin Scalia in 1986. Scalia was by far the most extreme of the three, and law professor Eric Segall examines the late jurist's influence in a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dorfonlaw.org/2021/08/the-justice-scalia-mythology-that-still.html?m=1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">scathing article</a>&nbsp;published this week by the Dorf on Law blog.</b></font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Segall doesn't mince words in his article. The law professor, who teaches at Georgia State University, slams Scalia (who died in 2016) as an extremist and a reactionary who was hostile to "women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, and non-Christians." What he finds so disturbing, though, is that many public figures continue to honor Scalia and venerate him as an upstanding example of a justice.</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>"Justice Scalia's opinions and heated rhetoric in civil rights cases should disturb people of even moderate sensibilities,"</b>&nbsp;Segall explains. "It must be remembered, of course, that Supreme Court justices should be judged according to the values of the times in which they lived. There are numerous Supreme Court Justices, maybe most justices prior to 1954, who we still honor and who undoubtedly held racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ views. But Justice Scalia made all of the statements…. in the last 35 years."</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Segall goes on to cite specific examples.</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>"In 1996," the law professor notes, "he was the only dissenter in a case requiring the Virginia Military Institute, an elite state-funded military college, to accept women after it refused to do so for over a century.</b>&nbsp;Scalia argued that courts should defer to all but the most irrational of laws that discriminate against women. Even Chief Justice William Rehnquist, an opponent of civil rights progress for decades, disagreed with Scalia in the VMI case."</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Segall notes that Scalia "voted to strike down every affirmative action law he ever faced,</b>" and his "dissents and rhetoric about gays and lesbians bordered on the medieval." One of those dissents was in 2003's&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/02-102" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Lawrence v. Texas</a></em>, a landmark ruling that struck down a sodomy law in the Lone Star State as unconstitutional.</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>"In another case," Segall observes, "Scalia compared homosexual conduct to murder and bestiality.&nbsp;</b>When he was later asked about these statements by a gay Princeton student, he responded, 'If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things? I don't apologize for the things I raise.'"</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">And despite the fact that Scalia is held up as a principled advocate of "<b>originalist" interpretation </b>of the Constitution, Segall contends that his methodology was highly selective. Scalia only appealed to originalist ideas when they suited his purpose, and he was often happy to overlook historical arguments about what the framers thought when he wanted to achieve an ideological objective, according to Segall</span>.</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In light of all this, Segall is highly critical of law schools that have decided to honor Scalia.</font></strong></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>"The Republican Party still views Scalia as their hero, but that is what we would expect from a political party either hostile to or indifferent towards the issues facing people of color, women, religious minorities, and the LGBTQ community," Segall writes. "But law schools and great universities should know better…. The myth that Antonin Scalia was a principled, great jurist is one of the most dangerous misconceptions in American politics. He thought nothing of disparaging people unlike him as well as insulting even his fellow justices. Far from being a role model for our law students, he should be an example of how judges should not act."</b></font></strong></p><div class="around-the-web"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</font></strong></div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.438px; list-style: none;"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></strong><li class="from-your-siteitem"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/clarence-thomas-samuel-alito-calling-for-the-supreme-court-to-strike-down-its-historic-ruling-on-same-sex-marriage/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; 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</font></strong></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></strong></div></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></strong></div><div><strong><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/republicans-fantasy-constitution-trumps-attack-on-the-constitution-is-nothing-new-for-the-right-which-has-long-tried-to-write-its-own-version/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/republicans-fantasy-constitution-trumps-attack-on-the-constitution-is-nothing-new-for-the-right-which-has-long-tried-to-write-its-own-version/</font></a></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Republicans’ fantasy Constitution: Trump’s attack on the Constitution is nothing new for the right — which has long tried to write its own version</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon October 28, 2019</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Donald Trump’s recent criticism of the “phony emoluments clause,</b>” used in defense of his since-abandoned G7 scam, was striking for its bluntness. But it’s part of a long history of conservatives flagrantly ignoring the actual Constitution and substituting an imaginary version in its place. At Vox, Ian Millhiser thoroughly debunked the notion that Trump wasn’t violating the Constitution by seeking to hold a summit meeting at his own hotel, including reference to work by Georgetown’s John Mikhail, whose examination of 40 different dictionaries made mincemeat of any “public meaning” argument to try to defend Trump.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course Trump doesn’t care about such arguments, and doesn’t rely on typical conservative legal arguments either. But he does rely on the&nbsp;<b>underlying conservative impulse and assumption that the Constitution means whatever he wants it to mean, and that anyone who disagrees with him is subversive.</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This view can be found in the so-called “constitutional sheriff’s” movement</span>, which believes that county sheriffs get to pick and chose which laws to enforce and can keep federal law enforcement agents out of their counties. Tellingly, the word “sheriff” — like the word “God” — doesn’t even appear in the Constitution. Trump’s favorite convict sheriff, Joe Arpaio of Arizona, is a member of this movement. The far-right “Oathkeepers” movement has a similar fantasy-based view of the special constitutional status of anyone who’s sworn an oath to serve the government — and who then decides they’ve got a secret identity as a Supreme Court justice.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a fringe conservative view. Dangerous and troubling as these views and that organization may be, it’s the conservative constitutional fantasies from the actual Supreme Court that have done far more damage to our democracy.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Take, for example, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, which held that black people had no constitutional rights because when it was adopted, they were regarded as “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” What’s more, Taney claimed, “This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.”</span></font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">That was a lie, as I explained here, based on a fantasy past. In the real past, slavery was abolished in the Vermont Republic in 1777, well before the Constitution was drafted, and Quock Walker sued for and won his freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution in 1781 — again, before the Constitution was drafted.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Walker’s case deserves closer inspection to show specifically how wrong Taney was. Walker had been promised his freedom, but his master died before the promised date, and his widow married a man who not only refused to free Walker, but beat him as well. Walker won not one, but two civil jury trials, both of which affirmed his freedom and awarded monetary damages, after which the man who had abused him was convicted in criminal trial.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his charge to the jury, Chief Justice William Cushing stated that, “slavery is … as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence.” That unambiguous recognition of “the granting of rights and privileges” directly contradict Taney’s false premise in Dred Scott. The “fixed and universal” opinion he wrote about was a racist fantasy.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There was also a future fantasy involved in the Dred Scott decision — the fantasy that the decision would put an end to abolitionism,, and secure the institution of slavery once and for all. Instead, it only fueled the dynamic which eventually brought the Civil War, which was initiated by the South, based on yet another fantasy — the one about absolute states’ rights (except, of course, when it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves.)</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The fantasy of corporate personhood</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After that terrible struggle, we passed the Civil War amendments to firmly establish the full citizenship rights of black Americans, which in turn would become the subject of multiple conservative fantasies, primarily involving the 14th Amendment. First was the fantasy — still haunting us today — that the 14th Amendment established “corporate personhood” and was actually intended to protect corporations as much as freed slaves and their descendants. This fantasy, too, came to us from the Supreme Court, though in a remarkably muddled way, as<b>&nbsp;UCLA law professor Adam Winkler describes here.</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the court reporter (a former railroad president) inserted a headnote saying that justices agreed that corporations were people under the meaning of the 14th Amendment, even though the decision itself said nothing at all on the subject. To this day, that case is mistakenly cited as precedent establishing corporate personhood, despite its silence. One of the justices hearing the case, Stephen J. Field, got the ball rolling, as Winkler explains:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That’s only one facet of how muddled the story is, as Winkler explains. The idea was first advanced in 1882 by Roscoe Conkling, a lawyer</b>&nbsp;for Southern Pacific who was the last living member of the drafting committee responsible for writing the 14th Amendment. Conkling told the Court that the drafters had altered the wording, replacing “citizens” with “persons” specifically to cover corporations as well. There’s no other evidence supporting this claim, and substantial reason to doubt it. An unpublished journal of the committee’s deliberations that Conklin offered in support was later found to completely contradict his claim: The language had never been changed. “So far as anyone can tell, the rights of corporations were not raised in the public debates over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment or in any of the states’ ratifying conventions,” Winkler notes, nor had anyone else on the committee ever made such a claim.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even at the time, Conkling’s account was suspect, according to Winkler. He made the argument in a case that languished for three years before Southern Pacific suddenly settled it, after which the railroad brought a nearly identical case to the Supreme Court, with the same legal team — except for Conklin. “Tellingly, Southern Pacific’s lawyers omitted any mention of Conkling’s drafting history or his journal,” Winkler notes. “Had those lawyers believed Conkling, it would have been malpractice to leave out his story.”</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So everything else was premised on Conklin’s lie, which even his own colleagues didn’t believe. But there were so many other bad actors involved, it was like a Trump Cabinet meeting. In fact, Field sounded just like one of them, as Winkler describes:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Taxing the property of railroads differently, he said, was like allowing deductions for property “owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or young men.”</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">In short, this was a collective fraud perpetrated by a whole collective of scoundrels, creating a fantasy version of the 14th Amendment that’s become deeply and profoundly embedded in American law. It was famously used, Winkler notes, to strike down numerous economic regulations, including federal child labor laws, zoning laws, and wage-and-hour laws,” at the same time that Plessy v. Ferguson (the next case on our list) refused to apply the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of African Americans:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court would rule on 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>More white supremacist fantasies</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As we’ll see below, another strange wrinkle emerged in the modern era: for the Supreme Court’s hardcore conservatives, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause exists almost solely to strike down affirmative action.</b>&nbsp;But first, we need to turn to Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court ruled that segregated facilities (supposedly “separate but equal”) did not deprive blacks of equal protection under law. It’s a much more ornate and convoluted lie than the one in Dred Scott, as I explained here, but to boil things down into basic fantasies, we need consider only three. First was the fantasy that the problem was all in black people’s heads:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Second came the exact opposite fantasy, that black inferiority was an immutable fact that human laws could do nothing to alter:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Third was the fantasy that either nothing needed to be done, or that nothing could be done:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Of course, this last was pure sophistry. The civil and political rights were obviously not equal, which was why the case had been brought in the first place</b>. And that inequality perpetuated social inequality — specifically via segregation — as indeed was the whole point. It took decades of racist terror to get to the point where such an absurd concoction of fantasies could be propounded with such seriousness. The court pretended that black civil and political rights would still be protected, even after three decades of white racist violence proved otherwise, and that they could be neatly severed from “social rights” such as riding in an integrated railroad car — that being the issue at hand in Plessy.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fantastical nature of the Plessy decision is thrown into sharp contrast by the bracing realism of John Marshall Harlan’s dissent. “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution,” Harlan wrote. “It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” The phrase “badge of servitude” comes directly from the 13th Amendment, underscoring the broader context that gave meaning to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Next, fast forward a century to Bush v. Gore, the case that settled the 2000 presidential election. In that instance, conservative justices who had never applied the Equal Protection Clause to defend black voting rights suddenly discovered its overwhelming importance in protecting the rights of ballots to be counted equally — by paradoxically ensuring that no ballots were counted at all!&nbsp;</b>&nbsp;There was never any thought of who the voters casting the ballots might be, much less whether they could possibly constitute a class, as Equal Protection jurisdiction normally requires. It was not just a fantasy, but a farce.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rather than dig into the details of the case, I’ll merely draw on a big-picture observation made by Geoffrey R. Stone, an editor of the Supreme Court Review, whom I quoted from here in July. Stone noted that the three hardcore conservatives on the court at that time — William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—had cast 65 votes in non-unanimous decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause in the previous decade, 19 of which involved affirmative action. Collectively, they’d cast exactly two votes finding Equal Protection Clause violations in those cases — one less vote in an entire decade than they cast in the Bush v. Gore decision.&nbsp; Summing up, Stone wrote:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What does this tell us? It tells us that Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas have a rather distinctive view of the United States Constitution. Apparently, the Equal Protection Clause, which was enacted after the Civil War primarily to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, is to be used for two and only two purposes — to invalidate affirmative action and to invalidate the recount process in the 2000 presidential election.</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Put simply, the Equal Protection Clause those justices recognized does not exist. It was a bad-faith fantasy of their own invention.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Fantasies of guns and God&nbsp;</b></font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Race is clearly a major driver of conservative constitutional fantasies. But it’s not the only one, as shown by the Court’s Heller decision, the first ever recognize an individual right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment — a position that former Chief Justice Warren Burger (a Republican appointee) once called “a fraud on the American public.” The decision by Antonin Scalia was so roundly criticized that Scalia co-authored a book in its defense, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” which was ripped to shreds by then-appeals court judge&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Richard Posner, in a devastating review titled “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.” To be clear, both Burger and Posner were highly respected conservative jurists. But they were not fantasists when it came to the Second Amendment.</span></font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Posner has a great deal to say about Scalia more generally, but my point is simple: Scalia claimed to be a textualist, but he completely ignored the following italicized text of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That text clearly articulates a collective need, thereby justifying a collective right. This is how the Second Amendment had always been understood, until, as Michael Waldman explained, the National Rifle Association embarked on a multi-decade propaganda campaign to brainwash the American public. Brainwashing can effectively spread a fantasy. But it is powerless to transform it into truth.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as the NRA waged a decades-long propaganda war to push their constitutional fantasy through the Supreme Court, many on the religious right are organizing to do the same with the First Amendment now. They’d like to use their fantasy version of “religious freedom” as a license to discriminate, and ultimately create a two-tiered society, just like the one enshrined long ago by Plessy. They’ve at least gotten their foot in the door with decisions like Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Progressive activists, both secular and religious, have been fighting back in recent years, particularly focused on reclaiming the true meaning of Religious Freedom Day, as I’ve written about here in 2016, 2017,&nbsp; 2018 and 2019. I’ve also written repeatedly about Project Blitz (here, here, here and here), a state-level campaign employing this “religious freedom” fantasy to advance a three-stage, state-level theocratic agenda, first uncovered by researcher Frederick Clarkson last year. All this is embodied in a more sweeping fantasy of America as a Christian nation, a fantasy thoroughly debunked by Andrew Seidel in “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American” (Salon interview here), and challenged on the ground by a new initiative, Christians Against Christian Nationalism (Salon story here). Directly confronting the constitutional fantasy aspect, the third part of Seidel’s book is entitled “The Ten Commandments versus the Constitution,” and it shows how each has elements opposed to principles of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has yet to write this fantasy into law, but shown by the examples above, it would hardly be out of character for them to do so.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond the examples cited — and others like them — there’s another way in which conservative constitutional fantasies lead us astray, not at the level of individual decisions, but at the level of judicial philosophy. I already mentioned Posner’s refutation of Scalia’s version of textual originalism, but that’s only one version of the broader originalist approach, which Georgia State law professor Eric Segall dismantled in his 2018 book “Originalism as Faith,” which I wrote about here. In Segall’s view, originalism meets a lot of psychological needs, not just for judges, but for the broader public as well:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the justices connect us to our past by supporting their decisions with persuasive evidence of prior agreements, they cultivate and maintain a distinctively American approach to hard public policy questions.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition, judicial appeals to original meaning might suggest that the justices are following the decisions of the founders, not imposing their own personal values. The justices want the American people to have faith that their decisions are grounded in prior law, not personal predilection, and references to originalist sources make that goal easier.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s a soothing “just-so story,” in other words. But it utterly fails in practice, as Segall told me in our interview:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virtually every constitutional law case [decided by the Supreme Court] involves text that is imprecise, unclear, vague — equal protection, due process, establishment, unreasonable search and seizure, whatever. And as applied to the facts of any modern case, the history behind that is going to be extremely contested, even if we assume its relevance, which I don’t necessarily assume.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thus, originalism is worthless at best. At worst, it’s a smokescreen for bad decisions:</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The main argument in my book is that originalism doesn’t do anything. It’s never done anything. Forget about it. We should stop pretending text, history and precedent dictate Supreme Court decisions, and we should make [the justices] explain exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing — for transparency purposes.</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But transparency is the last thing that the conservative peddlers of constitutional fantasies want. They didn’t want it in Dred Scott, nor in Plessy, Santa Clara, Heller or Bush v. Gore. At bottom, President Trump’s “phony emoluments clause” was nothing new for conservatives. In fact, it was part of a very long tradition. You might even say it was evidence that he’s a true conservative after all!</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></strong></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.</font></strong></div></div><div><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></strong></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>