Thursday, May 5, 2022

The Damp Judicial Loincloth

The leaking of Injustice Alito's draft of the majority opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Women's Health Org. has Chief Injustice John [Taney] Roberts scrutinizing the halls of justice for damp spots that might reveal who wet the judicial loin cloth. While doing so he is also expressing what passes for righteous indignation by calling the leak a “singular and egregious breach” of trust. I do not mean to make light of this breach of confidentiality because making such drafts public could discourage the candid deliberations the court needs in order to reach well reasoned decisions. In this instance, however, the draft opinion, which would strike down Roe v. Wade, is incredibly oppressive, dangerous, and anything but well reasoned. Many women are quite correctly saying that Alito's opinion is misogyny wrapped up in the dogma of an outmoded religiosity that regards women as nothing more than the intellectually inferior helpmates of men.

If a majority of the court adopts Alito's draft they will be ignoring fifty years of judicial precedent, not to uphold or protect the rights of individuals but to destroy some of those precious rights. In light of that, I consider leaking the draft of Alito's opinion to be analogous to leaking the Pentagon Papers. It is not that we did not know the government was lying to us during the Vietnam war, and it is not that we did not know the (mistakenly called) conservative justices were lying to us during their confirmation hearings. In both instances, however, the proof of the dishonesty revealed by the leaked documents is shocking, and the consequences of those lies are far more extensive and damaging than we feared. If you read Alito's rationalizations (reasoning would be a misnomer) you will see that any right not stated as such in the constitution is not considered a right by Alito, and he believes the government can violate and/or take those unstated rights away from you as it deems fitting and proper! Do not call this judicial activism! Judicial activism is a pejorative term conservatives use to describe the overturning of well established but unjust precedents. It would also be wrong to call this draft opinion conservative. Conservative means to preserve or resist change, and the intent of the majority of this court is harmfully radical change!

Strangely enough Alito is wittingly or unwittingly fulfilling the wish list Moscow Mitch stated when he, Mitch, packed and politicized the Supreme Court. I say strangely because although Moscow Mitch (forever the Machiavellian fascist) wants to deprive women of the freedom to make their own health care decisions and reproductive choices, he knows that actually depriving people of such popular rights so close to an election where they can make their displeasure known in a meaningful and consequential way is probably not a wise thing to do. All I can say about that is let your displeasure be known in a meaningful and consequential way; vote the sanctimonious fascists out of office. “Kill The Damn Elephant Before He Kills You!”

I might add here that if Chief Injustice Roberts is really concerned about the reputation of the Court, he will do something about the egregious violations of ethics so frequently committed by Injustice Thomas! I presume that Injustice Roberts can look for the source of the dreaded puddles at the same time.