Step Away From The Truck 🛻

Here's one person's view on that. https://t.co/dKLvZ4i1MR https://t.co/wziIMiHtAb pic.twitter.com/Qb7L9fssf2

— George Conway🌻 (@gtconway3d) June 25, 2022

Given this, would there have been an anti-abortion movement anyway? Because the Falwell’s efforts were certainly anti-democratic and a response to court rulings; but those rulings weren’t Roe.

Notorious RBG is right about basing the case in privacy v. women’s rights. But that presumes the arguments she later successfully made would have found sympathetic ears in 1972. True, she was making those arguments at the time. Whether they would have prevailed in 1972 is an open question.

The first issue of “Ms. Magazine” was published in July of that year. Just sayin’.

And women’s rights? Where do we find that in the Constitution? Justice Alito is asking.

(Besides, her argument can be applied as well to Brown. Falwell was responding to the progeny of Brown. And the Roberts court has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. Anti-democratic seems to have become the driving force of the court. So should we have waited?

In the 1970's Texas (briefly) had a legislature so progressive (and Democratic) it passed a consumer protection bill that was probably the most advanced in the country.  20 years later it was whittled away to a nubbin.  I don't think Roe had much to do with that, or the general trend towards conservatism in the states. Ronald Reagan was Governor of California! And a reminder: Roe and Lawrence and LBJ came out of Texas (the '70's legislation was the apogee of LBJ's influence here). But so did Shelby; and Texas had a far more restrictive trigger for the repeal of Roe than Mississippi. Texas is also the second most populous state in the country, with some of the worst voter suppression laws. How much of that was a response to Roe, and how much to the success of Ginsburg’s arguments? How do we know the dancer from the dance? I think reality trumps both RBG and Conway.)

And so on, and so on:

So is *now* the time for a national consensus about paid family leave, further expansion of Medicaid, more funding for childcare, mandatory child support, and other ways to make it easier for those who are less well-off to raise their children, or nah?

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) June 25, 2022

How it started: “The political conditions for revisiting Obergefell don’t exist.”

How it’s going: https://t.co/3JlEQ6ALRR

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) June 25, 2022

In addition to being bad at law, he’s also bad at math. https://t.co/5zady8N2XP

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) June 25, 2022

The "laboratories of democracy" have become the playgrounds of mad scientists with their “Junior Chemistry” sets.