Justices are supposed to be interpreting the law and the Constitution, not legislating. The race and gender of a Justice should not matter. Unfortunately, liberal jurists have imposed their personal opinions for so long, the court is now perceived as a legislative body and that is why some think the gender and race of the court matters. Abortion is not an issue addressed by the Constitution or fairly interpreted as part of the Constitution and the court should never have entered the discussion. The matter should have been settled like other matters that are in dispute, a vote of the people.</p>
<p>So I guess you feel the same way about executive privilege? That’s not in the Constitution and has never been legislated. Why not have a vote and let the people decide if the Senate can have the emails it asked for?</p>
<p>ETA: And race and gender do matter even in interpreting the law, because interpretations of the law do vary between people (hence the frequent requests to state Attorney Generals to issue a ruling on the legality of this or that), and people can be biased for all sorts of reasons, including race and gender.</p>
<p>"You may not be a radical right winger, but you sure argue like one. Pretending that your rights are in question just because someone disagrees with you is a common tactic of theirs, especially on CC. (All the more silly here, because no one has rights on a private message board but the owners).</p>
<p>Please point me to where someone tried to get your posts taken down or you banned for posting your opinions, and I’ll believe that somehow your rights are so threatened that they need a positive assertion.</p>
<p>The First Amendment does not give anyone the right to universal acclaim for his speech or a right to universal agreement with it."</p>
<p>Please, I resist all labels! (Only in the mind of the interpreter?) I was not making a statement about the First Amendment, I just felt like using an exclamation point!!!</p>
<p>I agree. That’s why this decision is so disturbing. The Court overturned its own long-standing precedent that abortion laws much include a provision that protects the mother’s health. In effect, they created contradictory precedent with this ruling, a situtation that drives the lower courts nuts. That’s the whole point of stare decisis.</p>
<p>As for your larger point, you must live in a fairy tail land if you think that the Supreme Court is not every bit as political as the Legislative and Executive branches. The Court has always been cognizant of prevailing political fashion. The justices are political appointees. Their decisions are political documents.</p>
<p>Actually, to his credit, Kennedy was amazingly political in this decision. He threw a big slab of red meat to the anti-abortion lobby, but also included very specific language about “intent” detailing why this law will never actually be enforced. Per Kennedy’s instructions, all a doctor has to say is that he had no intent to cross the anatomical dividing line specified in the law. Kennedy was quite clear that there would be no violation if the doctor crossed the anatomical line, as long as his intent was not to do so.</p>
<p>Like I say, “political”. Kind of like the UMICH affirmative action cases in which Sandra Day O’Conner’s opinion was so “political” that both sides thought they had won.</p>
<p>Think about these things on a more sophisticated level than the Fox News soundbytes. Read the opinions. That whole “strict constructionist” nonsense is just political sloganeering.</p>
<p>Interesteddad: How about the whole argument that abortion has nothing to do with the 14th amendment and that was just a bunch of political grandstanding?</p>
<p>I read Kennedy’s decision the same way: while nominally a victory for those opposed to abortion generally, the “intent” language would seem to ensure there will be no change in partial-birth abortion practice. As I’ve written previously, I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I think I am capable of reading the decision and discerning its potential effects.</p>
The separation of powers concept has been around since the Constitution was written. Subpoenas have historically been issued by court at the request of parties. Courts quash subpoenas all the time for various reasons. In U.S. v. Nixon the vote was 8-0 in favor of executive privilege. The personal preferences of the justices did not play a part in the decision making because they knew their ruling would apply with respect to all presidents regardless of party. </p>
<p>I can’t recall seeing anything in the Constitution giving the Senate the authority to issue subpoenas intruding on another branch of government. If the Senate has the authority to issue subpoeans to another branch of government, then surely the executive branch has the authority to issue subpoenas and force the senators to come before the executive branch as part of the president’s investigation of some important issue. I guess you would like to see the president conduct a public investigation into your favorite democrat senator?</p>
<p>I doubt many doctors would take the risk. It would have to be a very compelling situation to do one, and it really is unlikely that it would be the only procedure that could save the life of a mother. These pretty much were used recently as late abortions of “defective” babies.</p>
You obviously did not read the decision. The court overturned nothing. The court addressed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 (Act) which proscribed a particular method of ending fetal life in the later stages of pregnancy. The Act does not regulate the most common abortion procedures used in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the vast majority of abortions take place.</p>
<p>I believe several of the justices think their job is to impose their personal opinions and legislate. They are the liberal justices and I don’t care for their personal opinions and there is no reason to believe future generations will agree with their personal opinions. The conservative justices, on the other hand, try to avoid imposing their personal opinions and leave it to the legislature to determine public policy. That is the correct approach.</p>
<p>In the total scheme of things, there haven’t been that many of them. The Kennedy “exception” looks to me like one through which one could drive a truck. And then, under those circumstances, who is the complainant? A nurse under the doctor’s supervision? A co-committer of the crime? Is she going to turn herself in?</p>
<p>There are plenty of nurses and other health personnel who would blow the whistle on a doctor whom they think breaks the law. People feel strongly about this issue. Or imagine if a procedure did not go well. Then yes the woman could say that the procedure was not explained properly to her and she did not realize that there was a legal problem. But now she wants to complain. It’s not worth the risk if there is a potential legal problem!</p>
<p>But I can’t see a doctor ever being in a position where he does not communicate “intent”; everything is recorded these days for just that reason. I used to work for our State Board of Health - In 9 years, I never saw a a single case of state medical board finding against a doctor for a procedure “gone awry” when intent is documented or recorded - not once.</p>
<p>People felt strongly about the issue before the law, and the current law has now been in operation for several years with very, very little impact on actual medical practice. I’m not sure I’m happy about that fact, but that doesn’t make the fact doesn’t go away.</p>
<p>I think ultimately doctors in general will try to do what is right for their patients. But many will not know the fine points of the law, and will want to avoid anything that may be controversial. A lot of doctors won’t do abortions just to avoid the potential fallout. That is one thing that has changed; it is getting much harder to find doctors in many states that will perform abortions.</p>
<p>I think that is absolutely true, but since this law has already been in effect for several years, I don’t see changes coming out of the decision and, if anything, the Kennedy “exception” might make it more, rather than less likely, that doctors feel confident using the procedure. Now they have quite specific legal cover for what they do when, before, they didn’t.</p>
<p>Yes. While I mock them for being political hacks, most Supreme Court justices are very intelligent political hacks steeped in the careful use of language. Kennedy did not have to go on and on spelling out every last detail of intent. However, he did. And, I have to assume that he did so for a very specific reason. Just like he chose very inflammatory language (as pointed out by Ginsberg) for a reason. The whole section with the nurse describing the procedure had no business in a Supreme Court decison. That was a political ad.</p>
<p>To me, the troubling aspect of this decision was upholding a law with no women’s health protection exception. That just creates a muddied mess of precedent as previous deciisons (Casey?) had hinged on the requirement for just such a provision.</p>
<p>All in all, I see this decision as pretty much the same thing as a row of Senators making speeches during a Congressional hearing. Political theater for the constituents more than anything else. Nothing wrong with a little political theater. The whole decade long harangue about intact D&E procedures has been political theater…throwing a bone to the Falwell crowd, with little real impact on the practice of medicine.</p>
<p>Bingo. It will be like the checklist they call out at the quickie lube oil change shop. The doc will just simply read his statement of intent at the beginning of every procedure. Kennedy spelled it all out in the rulebook.</p>
<p>It is quite possible that a few of the justices figured this decision (which has no real-world impact) would buy them some breathing room. In other words, by throwing a victory to the constituents on this one, they might buy themselves some leeway on a future case where they might not be so inclined.</p>
<p>I have to believe that most Supreme Court justices have had their fill of abortion litmus test zealots and would be quite content to live out their lives never hearing another abortion case.</p>
<p>This is why it’s so important for nurses and others who aren’t doctors to understand that AMA’s position that in extraordinary cases, Intact D&X can be the only procedure that saves the woman’s life.</p>
<p>People who refuse to accept that this is ever the case will demand that the doctor be prosecuted if he doesn’t sacrifice the mother for the child.</p>
<p>Not necessarily speaking about any individuals here, for it’s dangerous to extrapolate from a group to all individuals in the group, but I would take the anti-abortion folks more seriously at face value in terms of reducing or eliminating abortion if they just as strongly pushed fact-based sex education instead of abstinence and made artificial birth control widely available, no questions asked. The fact that, as a group, they don’t merely confirms that they’re the American would-be ayahtollahs, with much more in common with the mullahs who run Iran than they’d like to think. </p>
<p>I’ve also looked at the voting data and, as a bloc, their concern for “life” is, as a group, not marked by political support for public health, education, addressing the conditions that promote gang membership, and provide support for victims of spousal abuse…and that just off the top of my head. In fact, with respect to the last, many seem to be of the “marriage at all cost, damn the quality of the woman’s life” school of practice. </p>
<p>So while I’m not wild about abortion, I’m extremely averse to politicians or clergy making medical or reproductive decisions for a women and am not about to become a fellow traveler of those who seem to want to inflict a narrow sectarian view on one narrow issue while hypocritically ignoring the larger picture.</p>
<p>Jake: disturbed but not surprised. You get what you paid for and any slightly informed political observer could see that one coming from a long way off.</p>
<p>TheDad you raise some good points. The Republican anti-choice crowd has pushed through some large cuts in Medicaid services to low income children in the past few years. Already the infant mortality rate is up in some of the poorest states.</p>