Supreme court

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.

Cockburn isn’t much for parades, but one happened to pass him by on Thursday when protesters with the Center for Popular Democracy rallied to overturn the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For a while, Cockburn walked alongside the protesters, watching as people in blue vests herded them along until they reached an intersection, where they promptly sat down. Cockburn, being the exquisite legal scholar that he is, deduced that this was illegal. And the demonstrators knew it too. The event was intended as a “mass civil disobedience.” Once sat down, they enjoyed chants, songs, and generally being arrested by the police. One particularly excited speaker said into the microphone: Together we gather full of righteous indignation, threatened by a radical minority...

While Cockburn is never one to look for trouble, trouble often finds him. And so it was, following his habit of daily strolls through DC's hotspots, he unthinkingly meandered past the Supreme Court this past weekend. The crowds there had diminished in size a few days off from the Dobbs ruling, but they have grown no less fervent. On Saturday, Cockburn encountered speakers touching on subjects of race, revolution and fighting back against the system. There were several signs, along with pro-abortion stickers and pamphlets. At one point, somebody actually gave him a pamphlet featuring rules of revolution (Saul Alinsky would be proud), detailing diverse ways to topple the current governmental system and “replace it with something that benefits everyone.

Many are worried about losing their abortion rights now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade. In some states, abortion will now be heavily or fully restricted, while other states are busy trying to keep the procedure available throughout all nine months of pregnancy — even though 65 percent of Americans support banning most abortions after the first trimester. With Roe gone, each state will have free rein to create abortion laws, and some are intent on expanding and maintaining radical, unregulated options. It’s not just about access to abortion, but proper medical care for women undergoing them and protection for babies who may ultimately survive them. To this end, abortion radicals have little to offer.

Set aside your opinions about abortion for a moment. Throw down the fluttering placards about "THE PRO-LIFE GENERATION" and "KEEP ABORTION LEGAL"; avert your eyes from the demonstrators praying outside Planned Parenthood. And ask yourself this: was Roe v. Wade good law? Was it sound that a "right to privacy" was conjured out of pseudo-constitutional dust and then used to overturn abortion laws in all fifty states? My guess is that even left-wing law professors have their doubts. Now, the Supreme Court has finally gone and rectified this hideous blunder. Pro-lifers rejoice: the day we've hoped for has finally arrived. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Center was handed down on a bright and sunny morning in Washington, DC.

When Cockburn took a rainy-day stroll past the United States Supreme Court on Thursday, he didn’t expect to see many people. To his surprise, there were several protesters outside, anticipating a decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which could overturn Roe v. Wade. Cockburn decided to stop and chat with both pro-life and pro-choice demonstrators, briefly catching interviews between shouting matches laced with obscenities and references to genitalia. “Roe is a barbaric remnant of a eugenic past. [It’s] responsible for the murder of 60 million babies," said Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder and executive director of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.“I believe in equity, nonviolence, and nondiscrimination.

Although the public has other things to worry about — like runaway inflation and a collapsing stock market — there has been a lot of static about the January 6 show trials that opened last Thursday on location in Washington, DC. I’ve contributed to the cacophony myself, though not without misgivings. As rumors swirl about important changes in the cast next year — Liz Cheney, for example, is said to be returning to her real constituency in Georgetown — a friend writes to remind me that the entire show may be eclipsed by a new kid on the block: the June 8 House Select Committee to investigate the plot to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his home in a partially disclosed, insecure location.

Conservative media seems to have missed this story, and the limited liberal press it got took it as a simple win. But the real showdown is coming this fall. Later this year, it is possible — not likely, but possible — that the Supreme Court will take away the right of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. This would have the effect of granting some level of First Amendment protection, now unavailable, to conservative users of those platforms. The potential for change hinges on a law struck down by the lower courts, Netchoice v. Paxton, which challenges Texas law HB 20. That law addresses social media companies with more than 50 million active users in the US, like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen predicted Tuesday during a CNN interview that the upcoming midterm elections could be rife with violence, implying that Trump supporters were gearing up for a January 6 redux. Barely a day later, it was someone on his own side who attempted to exert political influence with deadly force. Nicholas John Roske, a 26-year-old man from California, was arrested and charged with attempted murder Wednesday after he showed up to Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home dressed in black and armed with a Glock 17 handgun, ammunition, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, and duct tape. Roske, who was upset that the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade, found Kavanaugh's address online and arrived at his home in a taxi shortly after 1 a.m.

It's been almost a month since Politico scooped its bombshell leak, an unprecedented revelation of a draft majority opinion in a still-pending Supreme Court case. That leaked draft opinion, penned by the stalwart Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, would finally overturn 1973’s infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Alito’s draft opinion does not go far enough, at least as far as the proper pro-life end goal is concerned, but it is a praiseworthy development and an admirable start toward an abortion-free America.

Something felt off about Mother’s Day this year. For one weekend every May, we post social media tributes and bow to marketing campaigns thanking our moms, letting them know they’ve given us something that can never be repaid. But that same weekend, the national news cycle was caught up in the drama — and the fear — generated by the mysterious leak less than a week earlier of a draft majority opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return the issue of legal abortion to the states. By that Sunday, we’d seen maternity clinics and Catholic churches vandalized, protests in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, and ominous warnings from the mainstream press explaining what women stand to lose if Roe falls.

Americans just got a window into why the left holds the “right” to an abortion to be so sacrosanct. During an exchange between Senator Tim Scott and Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Yellen told Scott, "What we are talking about is whether or not women will have the ability to regulate their reproductive situation in ways that will enable them to plan lives that are fulfilling and satisfying for them. One aspect of a satisfying life is being able to feel you have the financial resources to raise a child." What message does that send to young women? That money, not starting a family, is how one lives a life that is fulfilling and satisfying. That one cannot lead a life that is meaningful with a burden, er, baby.

At the conservative Christian schools I attended from kindergarten through the end of undergrad, I became familiar with two types of believers: the knuckle-draggers and the nuance-mongers. The knuckle-draggers didn’t swear or drink. They watched dumb faith-based movies like God’s Not Dead. Secular music was suspect. Any engagement with the products of mainstream culture was accompanied by a humorless and formulaic discussion of how said opus fit into a “Christian worldview.” And when election time rolled around, they didn’t have to think twice. Only one issue mattered. Democrats wanted to kill babies, so voting anything other than a straight GOP ticket was out of the question.

Not one American in a hundred has read Roe v. Wade, and perhaps no more of us really understand how a Supreme Court majority of seven justices barred — or, if you prefer, relieved — everyone else from coming to political terms on abortion. Think of Roe as a dispensation from the fraught business of democratic decision-making. It appears that respite is now nearing an end. Europe has set the example. It's where the US seems headed — into years of political fights in one jurisdiction after another, but in states rather than countries. Only with time has most of Europe managed to settle into norms usually established by legislatures reaching compromise aside from any creed, whether that of the Catholic Church or Planned Parenthood.

Can the left-wing hysteria over the Supreme Court's leaked opinion on abortion get any more ridiculous? Corporate media have claimed that the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade marks only the beginning of a slew of conservative judicial decisions that will ban everything from sodomy to birth control. "Next they'll go after gay marriage and maybe Brown v. Board of Education," Joy Behar postulated on The View. “They want to send us back to the dark ages,” 85-year-old woman Eleanor Oliver, who procured an illegal abortion in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, told a Washington Post columnist. The justices who have reportedly endorsed the draft opinion have been called “barbarous and cruel.” The prospective ruling has been accused of racism.