On the heels of Roe - same-sex marriage and contraception (1 Viewer)

[Bleu Raeder]

As Supreme Court overturns abortion rights, could same-sex marriage be next to go?

No other justices signed onto Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion, but it nonetheless served...

www.houstonchronicle.com

"Justice" Thomas wants to burn it all down...except for interracial marriage.

WASHINGTON — As the Supreme Court on Friday declared the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the court should also reconsider past rulings establishing rights to contraception, same-sex relationships and gay marriage, as well.

“We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion, pointing to landmark decisions that protected the right to obtain contraception, the right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts, and the right to same-sex marriage.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

Yep, this is who they are:

"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said he is “willing and able” to defend a Texas law that bans gay people from having sex in their own homes........"

I never thought I'd hear this kind of thing again. I thought we were decades past this kind of thinking. I'm stunned. smh

 

[coldseat]

"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said he is “willing and able” to defend a Texas law that bans gay people from having sex in their own homes........"

I never thought I'd hear this kind of thing again. I thought we were decades past this kind of thinking. I'm stunned. smh

I'm not. This is there ultimate goal, to control "other" people.

 

[Optimus Prime]

By its own maneuvering, the modern Supreme Court has made itself the most powerful branch of government. Superior to Congress. Superior to the president. Superior to the states. Superior to precedent, procedure, and norms. In effect, superior to the people.

Most talked about in this regard, of course, is the Court’s ending of long-established reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the assertion of extreme power extends well beyond the issue of abortion.

For example, in a case called TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the conservative majority in 2021 narrowed Congress’s Article I power to give consumers the right to sue over data deliberately mishandled by credit-reporting agencies, reasoning that the legislature can only recognize theories of harm analogous to ones that existed as a matter of “American history and tradition.”

And this year, the Court is considering a handful of lawsuits by states challenging the exercise of discretion by the executive branch on the theory that federal policy affects state budgets, which could effectively enable states—and thus the Court—to function as the ultimate overseers of federal policy.

One of those, Haaland v. Brackeen, is poised to possibly upend roughly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent that recognizes American Indian tribes as political sovereigns, as well as Congress’s plenary power over American Indian affairs.

The outcome of the case, which involves a decades-old federal statute that sets child-welfare standards for American Indian children, could put hundreds of U.S. tribal treaties at risk as well.

The mere fact that the Court agreed to consider these and other extraordinary claims this term exposes the right-wing majority’s appetite for asserting massive power under the auspices of judicial review.

In a November essay for the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law School professor Mark A. Lemley describes this Court as an “imperial” one that has embarked on “a radical restructuring of American law across a range of fields and disciplines.”

The means run along two lines: substantive changes to the Constitution made under the guise of interpretation, and procedural power grabs executed despite traditions of deference. This has pushed our constitutional system dangerously off balance, with little opportunity for correction.

Ironically, the danger comes from the “conservative” wing of the Court, born in part out of a purported rejection of “activist” court decisions, which it criticizes as policy making—territory that belongs to the elected branches of government.

All six of the purportedly conservative justices—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—have professed a commitment to textualism and originalism, methods of constitutional interpretation that theoretically should constrain judges’ discretion to the “plain” language of the text, with occasional reference to historical understandings of the Framers’ contemporaneous intent.

Many folks blithely assume that the right-wing justices are more restrained than their progressive counterparts as a result. The precise opposite is the case.............

What will constrain this Court? Not its constitutional philosophy, and not respect for precedent either. The decision in Dobbs was stunning not just because it gutted a constitutional right many counted on. It was also a snub to the vitality of judicial precedent itself, which has long operated as a check on the power of the Supreme Court.

What about states? No, their power won’t constrain the Court either, despite the traditional conservative concern for states’ rights. To be sure, in Dobbs, the Court gave state legislatures the power to regulate abortion, but in Bruen, the same Court struck down a more-than-100-year-old New York State handgun-licensing law that regulated the carrying of concealed weapons in public. Dobbs enhanced state legislatures’ control over abortion. Bruen took it away over guns and public safety..............

The Supreme Court Just Keeps Deciding It Should Be Even More Powerful

Whatever conservative ethos of restraint there once was has vanished.

www.theatlantic.com