A pedestrian walks past the U.S. Supreme Court Building, now behind fencing and barricades, on May 9 in Washington, D.C.
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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade asserts that women have no constitutional right over their own bodies that man or law must respect.
This arbitrary opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, part of the brazen effort of reactionary judges to roll back decades of progress toward a more perfect union, scorns the will of the vast majority of Americans.
That the Supreme Court now convenes huddled behind concrete bunkers and unscalable metal fences is testament to the fury that this judicial wilding has already sparked.
The parallels to the Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 are chilling. In Dred Scott, a politicized court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, ruled that African Americans were not citizens under the Constitution and therefore had no rights that a white man need respect, or that the federal government could protect. The decision contributed directly to the political divisions that culminated in the Civil War.
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As with Alito’s draft, the Dred Scott decision was leaked ahead of time. As with Alito’s opinion, it was preceded by a disingenuous campaign to urge citizens to respect the decisions of the court as grounded in law, not politics.
In Dred Scott, Taney relied on a rigid standard of interpretation that ignored precedent and opinion. He argued that Black people could not be American citizens because at the time of the founding they were considered “beings of an inferior order … and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
In Dobbs, Alito similarly adopts a rigid standard, arguing that the Constitution contains no words about abortion and that abortion was widely outlawed at the time of the founding. Of course, at the founding, women were not citizens, didn’t have the right to vote, and were treated largely as property of their husbands.
The Dred Scott decision left the question of slavery not to the national majority, which sought to outlaw it in western lands, but to state legislatures that reserved voting to white men. Alito’s decision reverses a settled national precedent, supported by the majority, and leaves the question to state legislatures, most of which remain dominated by white men.
In Dred Scott, Taney reviewed the laws of the original American states, distorting and ignoring actual history to make his case. Alito reviews the laws of the states, and distorts and ignores history to bolster his opinion.
Taney believed that the decision would help temper the growing controversy over slavery that was dividing the nation. Alito …read more
Source:: Chicago Sun Times
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