The crudeness of the decisions is its own message (Dobbs & Bruen)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://indignity.substack.com/p/indignity-vol-2-no-52-special-pleading

*snip*

Read back to back, the rulings conveyed nothing but contempt. "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision," Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in Dobbs. In Bruen, meanwhile, Clarence Thomas wrote passionately and at length about a constitutional right to "individual self-defense," which he described—quoting the court's earlier decision against Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban in District of Columbia v. Heller—as "'the central component' of the Second Amendment right.” The Constitution, of course, makes no reference to individual self-defense, and those words certainly do not appear in the amendment where Thomas described them as being the central component.

Likewise the majority in Dobbs spent pages on pages deriding the trimester-based limits put forth in Roe v. Wade, and the "undue burden" standard set by its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, as arbitrary inventions put forth by the court. Throughout the Bruen decision, when Thomas wrote about the substance of the Second Amendment, the text he quoted was almost invariably not from the 27 words of the amendment—13 of which declare that the amendment's purpose is to set the terms for government regulation of militias—but from Antonin Scalia's decision in Heller. A prior court's extensions of the Constitution are valid if the current majority finds them useful, and invalid if those justices find them inconvenient.

One could go back and forth between the texts endlessly. On Thursday, Thomas wrote that "the bare existence of" 19th century bans on carrying weapons in the Western Territories "cannot overcome the overwhelming evidence of an otherwise enduring American tradition permitting public carry." On Friday, Alito wrote that the absence of laws against early-term abortion in some states "does not mean that anyone thought the States lacked the authorty" to pass such laws. Where laws did exist, they weren't real; where laws didn't exist, they could have been real.

The dissent in Dobbs directly pointed out that the two majority decisions contradicted each other on principle. In Bruen, the right-wing justices rejected arguments invoking pre-colonial English laws about bearing arms; in Dobbs, the majority's citation of legal arguments against abortion, "goes back as far as the 13th (the 13th!) century," the dissenters wrote. "Historical evidence that long predates [ratification] may not illuminate the scope of the right," they added, citing and quoting the day-old Dobbs ruling verbatim.

*snip*

[TwilightZone]

1. Ever since Kavanaugh's tantrums, I've expected that all bets are off.

Seems that is indeed the case. "Acting like children" is now the right-wing justices default behavior.

[J_William_Ryan]

2. Such hypocrisy and inconsistency are typical of conservative jurists.

The right to privacy is no more a ‘made up’ right than the individual right to possess a firearm and the right to self-defense.

Indeed, nowhere in the text of the Second Amendment will one find the words ‘individual’ or ‘self-defense.’

Whereas the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments clearly recognize and codify the right to privacy – the Fourth Amendment in particular.

[Higherarky]

3. The Constitution

makes no direct reference to defecation. Hence, that could be another right we could lose.

[Xipe Totec]

4. No shit. nt

[Higherarky]

5. Thanx

for making me laugh. I needed that.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

6. I read the original leaked draft and thought that it was a piece of dreck

I have not read the actual opinion yet, but I understand that it is substantially the same as the draft