By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On Wednesday, December 1, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important abortion case to come before the Court since it heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey 30 years ago. The mood on December 1 was light-years away from that during the Court’s discussion of Casey. There was tension in the air, as the Court’s once-confident pro-abortion majority realized that for the first time, they might be outnumbered.
Those stalwarts delivered valiant defenses of “stare decisis,” the principle that the Court should rely on precedent — in this case, Roe v. Wade and Casey (making abortion a “super-precedent,” in Justice Breyer’s words).
Yes, it’s sort of ironic that the Left should so warmly praise tradition, normally its enemy and target for annihilation. But, as Lenin instructed the enlightened, “Whatever furthers the Revolution is ethical.” The dialectic permits its practitioners to return tomorrow to contradict today at will — for isn’t that the price of “progress”?
On that Wednesday, the Orwellian task required to sully and slime the notion that the unborn might have rights after all was assigned to a clearly perturbed Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She was shocked, Shocked!! at the possibility that that Roe v. Wade, the Left’s Prime Mandate for a half-century, might indeed be consigned to the dustbin of history. The bitterness fairly burst from her rant, which was designed to be glorified in friendly media as the preferred slur to cast at the Court’s advocates of a restoration of the Constitution’s integrity. Sotomayor packaged her remarks in the language of the sewer so dear to Karl Marx in his salad days:
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception — that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible,” she said early in the hearing.
Each word brims with crass DoubleThink. “Institution”? The Supreme Court was indeed instituted by the Founders in their desire for the separation of powers — and it is Democrats, not Republicans, who threaten to destroy it if the Justices don’t bow to their revolutionary agenda.
“Public perception”? Here Madam Justice pretends to read the hearts and minds of the public, while in reality giving her marching orders to the Thought Police of the elites’ public persuaders. And it is those elites and their institutions, by the way, who have happily embraced, even celebrated, the “stench” that is the battle cry of the destroyers of morality, order, freedom, and life itself, even of the most innocent.
Sotomayor helpfully reminds us that the Left always blames its enemies for its own sins. They taunt us with lies to appeal to our moral sense even as they seek to destroy it. Rather tiresome, actually.
In coming months, endless analysis will prosper as the nation awaits the Court’s ruling in Dobbs. If tradition prevails, the decision is likely to be announced at the end of the Court’s current term next June. Here we will focus on Madam Justice Sotomayor and the rancorous wreckage of her comment.
A Nice, Smart Catholic Girl
Sonia Sotomayor was born in the New York City borough of The Bronx. Her family lived in Bronxdale Homes, a public housing project, while she attended Blessed Sacrament Grade School, where she graduated as the valedictorian of her eighth-grade class. She then attended Cardinal Spellman High School before entering Princeton, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1976.
In all those years of study, she apparently didn’t learn the history of her own state.
On July 26, 1788 the government of New York convened a convention to consider the Constitution written by the Founders in Philadelphia the year before. By a vote of 30-27, the assembled delegates approved New York’s entry into the United States, and became the 11th state to ratify the Constitution, according to the New York Historical Society. That was a close vote because many New Yorkers, like their neighbors who had lived under the Articles of Confederation for seven years, were reluctant to confer too much power on a more-centralized federal government.
Sotomayor complained on December 1 that the Court, and thus the Constitution, was “political,” but the Constitution voted on by New Yorkers was a political document that was the subject of a fierce political debate. The documents known today as the Federalist Papers were published as newspaper columns. Their goal was indeed political — to encourage citizens of the state to support the Constitution proposed by the Founders in Philadelphia the year before. Those New York citizens, by the way, had on the average a fourth-grade education, yet reading and debating the same text today is beyond the ability of many college students and perhaps even a few fourth-grade teachers.
And while the Constitution was ratified by conventions in states gathered politically, it was based on history and principle. Signposts along the way include pre-Norman Saxon law, the Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact (which begins, “In the Name of God, Amen”), and the Declaration of Independence, which mentions God six times. In fact, even today, the Constitutions of 47 of the original 48 states begin with a bow toward the bountiful Providence of the Almighty.
Roe And Bigotry: Twin Evils
Yes, in a most ladylike fashion, Sotomayor invites Americans to attack her fellow justices, especially those nominated by Donald Trump, as garbage — or worse.
Let’s look at Mme. Sotomayor’s “precedent.”
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last year, we observed: “The current uproar engulfing Washington, also known as ‘mourning the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,’ proves once more that abortion is the issue, period. After all, if you can kill the most innocent, you can kill anybody.”
Those on the Left who today cheer “precedent” were celebrating Mrs. Ginsburg’s “legacy” — which consisted solely of rubber-stamping Roe in the spirit of the sacred “precedent” set not by the Founders or the Court, but by Margaret Sanger.
“Frankly,” Ginsburg told The New York Times in 2009, “I had thought that at the time that Roe was decided, there was a concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
So even the Left’s secular goddess recognized that Roe was based not on “precedent” or “stare decisis,” but on racism, bigotry, and the false gospel of population control preached by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, full of sheer slop which today stands as the paragon of the population controllers’ false “science” and ideological bombast.
To be sure, senior Democrats were already waging war on the Constitution long before Mrs. Ginsburg’s death. Hillary Clinton advocated abolishing the Electoral College. Cong. John Dingell, Jr., the longest-serving Member of Congress in history, wanted to abolish the Senate.
Joe Biden is today an ardent defender of Roe. If the court’s decision next year reverses Roe or, as Justice Barrett suggested December 1, simply sends it to the dustbin, count on Biden to work with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to pack the Supreme Court, FDR-style.
In her star “stench”-spewing performance, we note that Sotomayor must appeal to feeling, not logic and argument. That is good news, in that even this very intelligent jurist cannot find a legal to justify her position.
The bad news is that, in public schools in the 48 years since Roe was decided, a couple of generations of American students have been trained to feel, not taught to think.
Whatever the Court decides, our work is cut out for us. And prayers are in order.
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