Slate - "Hello, Justice Kavanaugh. Farewell, Roe."
Democrats had a shot at stopping Kavanaugh and saving the constitutional right to abortion access. They blew it.
By MARK JOSEPH STERN
SEPT 03, 2018 7:00 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/can-democrats-stop-brett-kavanaugh-from-overturning-roe-v-wade.html
In a few weeks, the Senate will likely confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he will serve a lifetime appointment. A few years after he joins the bench—or as early as next June—Kavanaugh will cast the decisive vote in a 5–4 decision that will eviscerate Roe v. Wade. Within hours, days, and weeks of that ruling, a slew of states will outlaw or severely limit abortion; others will resume enforcing abortion bans that remain on the books. None of this is hypothetical or seriously debatable. The American conservative movement has spent decades waiting for this exact moment. Now that it has arrived, they are determined not to miss their opportunity—and by all indications, they will not. Republicans are on the brink of achieving their long sought-after goal of abolishing the constitutional right to abortion access.
It is not surprising that conservatives have perfectly executed their well-laid plan to reverse Roe. What is remarkable, however, is how little resistance they have faced from progressives. While a majority of Democratic senators have already voiced their hostility to Kavanaugh, their base has utterly failed to mount a vigorous, sustained opposition to his nomination. If, today, liberals could channel a fraction of the outrage they will feel after Kavanaugh overturns Roe, they would have a shot at keeping him off the court. Instead, their relative apathy toward his impending confirmation has likely doomed reproductive rights for at least a generation.
Kavanaugh has not been particularly subtle about his distaste for Roe and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In his current job on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh attempted to manipulate these precedents in order to prevent an undocumented immigrant minor from terminating her pregnancy. Under Casey, the government cannot impose an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion before viability. Yet the Trump administration had imposed a flat ban on abortion for undocumented minors in federally funded shelters. (It maintained that minors who wished to terminate their pregnancies should either find a sponsor in the U.S.—a near impossible task for many without family here—or leave the country.) Kavanaugh held that this position did not constitute an undue burden, in a ruling which would have forced “Jane Doe,” a 17-year-old who was already 15 weeks pregnant, to continue her unwanted pregnancy.
There is little mystery to how all this ends.
The full D.C. Circuit swiftly overturned Kavanaugh’s ruling and granted Doe access to abortion. In response, Kavanaugh penned a furious dissent that brimmed over with anti-abortion rhetoric. The majority, he sneered, had granted Doe “abortion on demand”—a phrase that, as Irin Carmon notes, is deployed by the right to “denote women capriciously making decisions for themselves.” He claimed that Doe was not mature enough to make this “major life decision” on her own, even though she had already received the necessary judicial bypass from a state court. And he asserted, incredibly, that the Trump administration was being unlawfully forced to “facilitate” Doe’s abortion by merely stepping aside and letting her obtain it. (This argument is fundamentally theological, not legal.)
snip - lots more....this is really depressing - thoughts, DU???
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