Reply #31: What isn't true? ... [View All]

[Igel]

the punchline.

That by arguing that a law was inappropriately being applied so as to set bad precedents if upheld, he excused the tactics used--even though he also denounced the tactics in the same court appearance. So he excused what he denounced? Ah--but the denunciation wasn't included in the ad, and the excusal was attributed, not a quote.

This was one ad that started off accurate, and then, to actually make the ad meaningful for people that can't distinguish between arguing law and arguing for a client, veered off into error.

As a kind of vague parallel: The use of drugs (whether alcohol or crack). One could easily claim that fetuses are a protected class, entitled to civil rights protections, and that what the mothers are doing is a civil rights violation, a conspiracy entered into by them and the purveyors of the drugs. In fact, by limiting the abuse to crack users, one could make the case that the victims (at least at one point in the '90s) were primarily black--an even clearer civil rights violation.

This would have been a faulty argument leading to bad law. A lawyer arguing narrowly for his client should have argued against extending the civil rights laws in such a case to help his clients. But a lawyer interested in sound law would make the same argument to defend sound legal principles. That would not mean he was arguing on behalf of negligent mothers and crack dealers, even though the outcome's the same.

There is a way to argue that Roberts was taking an anti-choice side in this. But you have to realize that by setting up women seeking abortion as a protected subset of a protected class, "all women", you then raise the bar for any kinds of legal limits to be imposed on abortion after the first trimester. Because they're a protected class, and any such law would be targetting a protected class. But that's complicated: The claim that Roberts argued for setting free a clinic bomber is so much easier to understand.

edited to repair a sloppy cut/paste op.