It seems everyone in Washington was alarmed at the way arguments on Mississippi’s anti-abortion law played out at the Supreme Court on Wednesday. This, because the Republican-appointed justices kept signaling their intent to betray legal precedent, even common sense, to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that granted abortion rights.
Nicole Wallace was communications director for former President George W. Bush. I know from binge watching cable news during last year’s lockdown that she, Joy Reid, and Rachel Maddow host the best shows about politics on TV. And all three just happen to be on MSNBC.
Therefore, it came as no surprise when Wallace restated best the alarm they all felt on yesterday’s edition of her MSNBC show, Deadline White House.
She introduced the segment by playing this searing admonition from Democratic-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which seems bound to be quoted as a classic in perpetuity:
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.
If people believe it’s all political. How will the Court survive?
(MSNBC, December 1, 2021)
Wallace agreed, insisting that such rabid display of partisanship, which informed every question and comment the Republican-appointed justices uttered, presaged “a new thing.” Except that, with all due respect to Sotomayor and Wallace, there’s nothing new about this stench.
As it happens, I wrote about it just months ago in “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Supreme Court Begins Most Transformative Term With Least Public Trust,” October 6, 2021. But, truth be told, it has been self-evident for decades that a judge’s ruling invariably reflects the political ideology, or further the political agenda, of the president who nominated them. Here is how I lamented this fact years ago in “Supreme Court Rules Voter ID Laws OK,” October 18, 2014:
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Neither this decision, nor its breakdown along partisan lines, should surprise anyone who knows anything about the ‘politics’ (as opposed to the legal reasoning and judicial precedents) that guide this Court’s rulings. For the one thing that distinguishes this Court is that the justices Republican presidents nominated invariably vote on the side of issues that affirms conservative ideology; whereas those Democratic presidents nominated invariably vote on the side that affirms liberal ideology.
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That said, unlike every other commentator, I do not think these Republican political hacks masquerading as justices on the Supreme Court will overrule Roe. Instead, I think Chief Justice John Roberts will prevail upon them to see the political wisdom in crafting a ruling that leaves it legally in effect but renders it effectively meaningless.
Specifically, I can see them pulling a Pontius Pilate by ruling that it remains “settled law”, but that it does not preclude states like Mississippi from imposing restrictions on abortions consistent with their prevailing social values.
As for the Court’s survival, its fate in these times of growing division between red states and blue states seems ominously analogous to its fate in the years of growing division between states on either side of the Mason-Dixon line before the Civil War. Think about that folks …
For now, though, I rest my case.
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Oyez, Oyez… civil war looms…