Justin's Political Corner

CHICAGO (AP) — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she supports a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, but feels her predecessors’ landmark Roe v. Wade ruling 40 years ago was too sweeping and gave abortion opponents a symbol to target.

Ginsburg, one of the most liberal members of the nation’s high court, spoke Saturday at the University of Chicago Law School. Ever since the decision, she said, momentum has been on abortion opponents’ side, fueling a state-by-state campaign that has placed more restrictions on abortion.

“That was my concern, that the court had given opponents of access to abortion a target to aim at relentlessly,” she told a crowd of students. “… My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum that was on the side of change.”

The ruling is also a disappointment to a degree, Ginsburg said, because it was not argued in weighty terms of advancing women’s rights. Rather, the Roe opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, centered on the right to privacy and asserted that it extended to a woman’s decision on whether to end a pregnancy.

Four decades later, abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in American life, and anti-abortion activists have pushed legislation at the state level in an effort to scale back the 1973 decision. This year, governors in North Dakota and Arkansas signed strict new abortion laws, including North Dakota’s ban on abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Ginsburg would have rather seen the justices make a narrower decision that struck down only the Texas law that brought the matter before the court. That law allowed abortions only to save a mother’s life.

A more restrained judgment would have sent a message while allowing momentum to build at a time when a number of states were expanding abortion rights, she said. She added that it might also have denied opponents the argument that abortion rights resulted from an undemocratic process in the decision by “unelected old men.”

Among the questions now is whether the justices will set a nationwide rule that could lead to the overturning of laws in more than three dozen states that currently do not allow same-sex marriage. Even some supporters of gay marriage fear that a broad ruling could put the court ahead of the nation on a hot-button social issue and provoke a backlash similar to the one that has fueled the anti-abortion movement in the years following Roe.

The court could also decide to uphold California’s ban — an outcome that would not affect the District of Columbia and the 11 states that allow gay marriage.

Ginsburg did not address the pending gay marriage cases.

h/t: TPM

A year ago, when Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a television interview that he supported same-sex marriage, such unions were legal in six states.

In an email to members of his Pray In Jesus Name Project yesterday, Gordon Klingenschmitt said that Religious Right activists must become “the voice” of the “abused kids” raised by same-sex parents, who he says are “not only recruited into but used as pawns for the homosexual agenda.”

Klingenschmitt responded to Justice Kennedy’s statement about the need to remember the “voice of those children” who “live with same-sex parents” while hearing the Proposition 8 case by arguing that “those abused children really wanted one mom and one dad, they just didn’t know better having been misled by California Judges who impose homosexual parents upon innocent kids, against their will, and against the will of California voters.”

He also claimed that Christians cannot support politicians who favor legalizing same-sex marriage and warned that gay rights advocates are bent on “taxing heterosexuals more to pay homosexuals to engage in immorality” and “reward their acts of sodomy.”

h/t: Right Wing Watch

Phyllis Schlafly wants America to get “back to basics.” And when it comes to preventing “marriage mayhem,” that means talking about sodomy, which is “a central feature of same-sex marriage.”

Specifically, it means talking about sodomy in the “Anglo American legal tradition,” from its criminalization in English common law as early as 1533 through the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v Hardwick upholding state sodomy laws.  In Schlafly’s April 15 Eagle Forum missive she admiringly quotes from Chief Justice Warren Burger’s concurrence in Bowers, in which he quotes 18^th Century commentator William Blackstone to the effect that sodomy is worse than rape.

But all this grand history was upended, Schlafly complains, with the Supreme Court’s “anti-tradition” decision in Lawrence v Texas, which overturned state sodomy laws and upheld the privacy and sexual freedom of consenting adults.  And that, she says, has led to the marriage equality cases currently being considered by the Court. Not surprisingly, Schlafly has strong opinions on those cases:

If the pro-homosexual rights forces win, that which is natural to the human race —marriage — is destroyed, and our venerable Constitution and legal tradition are slammed by Humanistic forces wanting to reconstruct American law and society on an anti-Judeo-Christian foundation.

Of course, Schlafly has her own “traditional” views about rape.  She has repeatedly denounced the concept of marital rape, saying that “when you get married you have consented to sex. That’s what marriage is all about.” 

H/T: Right Wing Watch

The upcoming debate over confirmation of U.S. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan to the country’s second highest court is seen by Democrats as a pivotal moment in the interconnected debates over gridlock of judicial nominations and Senate filibuster rules.

Srinivasan, President Obama’s nominee to fill the seat vacated in 2005 by now-Chief Justice John Roberts on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, where Republicans intend to quiz him on his judicial temperament and views on the Constitution.

“We haven’t had a new person on that court since 2006 or [200]7. Some say it’s a court more important than the Supreme Court of the United States. [Republicans have] blocked … new people coming on that court,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told reporters Tuesday. “We’re going to have this young man — we hope that that can be done very quickly.”

Republicans recently forced Obama to withdraw his prior nominee to the powerful court, Caitlin Halligan, by filibustering her confirmation back in 2011 and again last month. The White House and Democratic leaders view Srinivasan, who has broad support among legal stars across the ideological spectrum, as a test case for whether the GOP will permit any nominee to be confirmed or whether they’d rather maintain the court’s notoriously high vacancy rate in order to preserve its conservative lean.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pushed back on the accusations of GOP obstinacy, arguing that Republicans “have treated the president’s judicial nominees very, very fairly by any objective standard.”

“We just today confirmed the 10th judicial nomination of President Obama’s second term,” he told reporters Tuesday at his weekly briefing. “At this point in President Bush’s second term, he got zero judges. None. With regard to vacancies, about 75 percent of the vacancies that we have in the judiciary don’t even have nominees.”

All of those nominees were confirmed to courts less influential than the D.C. Circuit, where four of 11 active seats are vacant.

Reid has been ratcheting up the threats to weaken the filibuster with 51 votes mid-session if Republicans don’t ease up. If they filibuster Srinivasan — and they’ve offered no hints so far — Reid will face growing pressure to revisit the rules.

h/t: TPM DC

The number of lawsuits challenging the Obama administration’s contraception coverage mandate climbed to 60 last week, and legal experts on both sides of the issue are predicting that the Supreme Court will take up the issue within the year.

Thirty-two nonprofit organizations, including religious hospitals and schools, have challenged the rule. The mandate is part of the Affordable Care Act, and it requires third-party insurance companies to provide contraception coverage to the nonprofits’ employees if they decide not to do so. While many of the lawsuits are either failing in court or moving slowly because they fall under President Obama’s one-year grace period for nonprofits, the 28 for-profit companies that are suing the administration are seeing their cases move much more quickly.

The most prominent of those cases — Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius — took a significant step forward last week, when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Hobby Lobby’s request to expedite the case and hear it en banc (by all judges on the court). Kyle Duncan, the attorney representing the Christian-owned Hobby Lobby against the Department of Health and Human Services, said he expects one or more of these cases to catch the Supreme Court’s attention soon.

“The action of the court on Friday really raises the prominence of what was already a prominent case even higher,” Duncan told HuffPost in a phone interview. “I think there’s a very good chance the Supreme Court takes this up. You’ve got a nationwide mandate and many different plaintiffs all suing at the same time—presumably you’re going to have courts going in different directions, so you’ve got very good conditions for Supreme Court review.”

According to the rules of the Affordable Care Act, religiously affiliated nonprofit organizations, such as schools and hospitals, can opt out of paying for contraception coverage for their employees by instructing the third-party insurer to absorb the cost of the coverage and provide it directly to women. For-profit companies, such as Hobby Lobby, are not exempt from covering contraception and face large fines if they refuse to do so.

So far, 21 companies have petitioned for preliminary injunctions against the mandate so as to avoid the fines. Of those cases, 16 have been granted injunctions and five have been denied.

The Becket Fund is arguing in court that the religious exemption is too narrow because it excludes people like the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby, who morally object to contraception. Reproductive rights groups, including the National Women’s Law Center, contend that “religious freedom” should be interpreted to allow women to decide for themselves whether to take contraception, rather than to allow their employers to decide for them.

Duncan said he thinks the Christian-owned Hobby Lobby is a perfect example of the dilemma that for-profit companies across the country face now that the government is requiring them to include birth control coverage in their insurance plans. “We think Hobby Lobby is an excellent vehicle for all these issues,” he said. “It’s the largest, most prominent business to have sued, and it’s got a lot on the line.”

h/t: Huffington Post

Militarism is the belief that a group should maintain strong military capabilities and be prepared to use them aggressively to promote their interests, and it may imply the justification of conflict to administer a group’s policy on its enemies. Over the course of the past few years, conservatives have threatened various levels of conflict to impose their particular agenda on the government and American people whether it was opposition to healthcare reform when teabaggers attended protests claiming “we came unarmed this time,” or threats of race, civil, or revolutionary war over gun safety laws and the election of an African American president. Whatever various conservative groups’ causes, their reason for threatening conflict is always their opposition to the government’s right to enact laws within the tenets of the U.S. Constitution. During the Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Prop 8 that banned same-sex marriage, conservative Christians became the latest group to use combative language to express their outrage at the prospect the Constitution forbids them from imposing their religious morality on the entire nation.

A little reported exchange during arguments in favor of perpetuating inequality in America was Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s reading a line from the House Report justifying DOMA’s passage in 1996 that defined the law’s entire legal underpinning. It said, “Congress decided to reflect and honor a moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.” That one line is all the reason the High Court needs to strike down the law on two counts; it is rank, government-sanctioned discrimination, and it is straight out of the Christian bible making it a direct violation of the 1^st Amendment’s prohibition on establishment of a state religion. Conservative Christians, meanwhile, fearing the prospect the Court may strike down the law, immediately took up a militaristic posture leading one influential conservative Iowa talk radio host to say, “It’s going to raise the issue to Orange Threat Level, it’ll be DEFCON 6,” and his warning was repeated across the country.

In Texas, about 250 opponents of same-sex marriage assembled at the Capitol to hear the state’s Republican leadership promise that Texas will remain a bastion of “freedom, family and faith,” and that “the hope of America is Texas” according to state Sen. Ken Paxton. The state’s lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst, kept up the battle-field rhetoric and inflamed rally-goers claiming that conservative values were under steady assault from President Barack Obama and his administration,  and that “Over our dead bodies are we going to let this state turn blue.” Another Texas Republican, state Senator Donna Campbell said “Our core values are being attacked on a daily basis … by government fiat in our courts and in our schools. They want to redefine the Constitution and it’s just not going to stand with me” and promised that Christian values would be defended here “because there is no other Texas to move to.” Steve Deace, who warned the threat level was elevating to DEFCON6 said “these people have invested decades in this fight and they are not going to throw up their hands, they’re going to double down, it’s going to be even nastier.”

The freedom, faith, and values crowd, conservative Christians, did not limit their threats to President Obama and the Supreme Court, and set their sights squarely on the Republican Party. An anti-gay activist, Gary Bauer, threatened Republicans and promised mass defections if they dared stand on the side of Constitutional equality, and promised to “leave the party and take as many people with me as I possibly can.” Bauer’s speech was for a “March for Marriage” event organized by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) at the National Mall, and he told the American Values crowd “shame on the politicians and the judges that are trying to undermine the institution of marriage,” and then dismissed reports of increasing support for marriage equality by claiming “the polls are skewed.” Poll results aside, the simple fact is that no-one is undermining the institution of marriage, redefining the Constitution, or attacking Christian values, but that was never the point. The point is many conservative Christians are up in arms at the prospect of losing their government-sanctioned ability to force their religion’s “moral disapproval of homosexuality” on the nation and they are fully prepared to “double down” and “get even nastier.”

An evangelical anti-gay operative, Ralph Reed, leader of the Faith and Freedom Coalition predicted a protracted battle and said “If the court were to go to the most extreme case and strike down laws defining marriage, it will undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and spark a movement that will spend decades trying to reverse the decision.” However, the mood among hardline bigots in the conservative Christian movement is at a heightened level of an existential threat and it is unlikely the people threatening to get nastier and defend their bastion of freedom, faith, and family values are going to stand by and lose their legal right to impose the bible’s morality on all Americans for very long. It is not necessarily that conservative Christians are going militaristic over marriage equality in the near future, but they are the same crowd that threatened civil war over gun safety proposals, election monitoring, President Obama’s re-election, implementation of the ACA, and various issues they deemed worthy of nullification and 2^nd Amendment remedies. It is not even a stretch to imagine that a Supreme Court ruling striking down DOMA and Prop 8 will be the final straw because it involves religion, and history is replete with violence precipitated by the belief that someone’s religion is under assault, and to millions of conservative Christians, marriage equality is an attack on their faith, freedom, and families.

H/T: Rmuse at PoliticusUSA

Fred Luter, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, appeared Wednesday onTruNews with Rick Wiles, the Religious Right talk show host who is convinced President Obama is literally a demon.

After Wiles shared with Luter his theory that gay rights activists are to blame for North Korea’s threats to launch a nuclear strike against the US, Luter explained that while he is “not that strong in prophecy” he would not be surprised that there might be a connection.

“I would not be surprised that at the time when we are debating same-sex marriage, at a time when we are debating whether or not we should have gays leading the Boy Scout movement, I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that we have a mad man in Asia who is saying some of the things that he’s saying,” Luter said.

Listen:

Wiles: You know at precisely the same time the Supreme Court is hearing these arguments on same-sex marriage in Asia a crazy man in possession of nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-un, is openly saying: I have ordered our military to position our rockets on US targets in Hawaii, Japan, Guam and the mainland of the United States. He has gone into a full state of war this week. I don’t know, Pastor Luter, I don’t know if anybody is — I know they’re not — they’re just not putting this together. You got this happening over here and you got this happening over here: could the two be connected? Could our slide into immorality be what is unleashing this mad man over here in Asia to punish us?

Luter: It could be a possibility, I’m not that strong in prophecy but I would not be surprised that there’s not a connection there simply because of the fact we’ve seen it happen in scripture before. I would not be surprised that at the time when we are debating same-sex marriage, at a time when we are debating whether or not we should have gays leading the Boy Scout movement, I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that we have a mad man in Asia who is saying some of the things that he’s saying.

Indeed, Wiles started the program by warning that the US is being “transformed into a socialist, homosexual, anti-God, anti-biblical morality cesspool” and will commit “national suicide” if the Supreme Court rules “that homosexuals can marry.”

h/t: Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch

Some social conservatives are ready to disown Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts if he votes in favor of same-sex marriage.

The conservatives were angered by Roberts’s surprise backing of President Obama’s healthcare law last year, and they don’t want to see a similar surprise in the two marriage cases the court considered this week.

“I certainly think his credentials were tarnished with the ObamaCare decision,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Does he care about his standing with conservatives? I don’t know.”

Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a former president of the Family Research Council, said Roberts shouldn’t be considered a conservative if he sides with the proponents of same-sex marriage after casting the deciding vote on healthcare.

If Roberts breaks with conservatives “on another major issue … then I think the whole understanding of the current makeup of the Supreme Court would be in question,” Bauer said.

He said the court would have to be seen as having a liberal majority, at least on hot-button political and social issues.

Conservatives don’t necessarily think Roberts owes them a debt because of healthcare, but they’re still not convinced the ruling was a one-off event, Bauer said.

Roberts did not indicate during oral arguments this week that he’s leaning toward supporting same-sex marriage in either case. But he also didn’t look likely to support the healthcare law when those arguments wrapped up last year.

If conservatives are ready to ditch Roberts, they are already finished with Ted Olson, the attorney who argued against California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage this week.

Olson — a conservative legal superstar — argued marriage equality for gays is a conservative position and said the Constitutional ensures a right for same-sex couples to marry.

Perkins and Bauer both reject those ideas.

“Any Republican that argues, from a Republican standpoint, this is the proper conservative or Republican position is smoking medical marijuana or something,” Bauer said.

If Olson truly believes same-sex marriage is a constitutional imperative, Bauer said that “raises serious questions about whether he is the conservative litigator people think he was.”

Perkins has also soured on Olson, who represented George W. Bush in the case that decided the 2000 presidential election and went on to be the Bush administration’s top litigator.

“Well, he was,” Perkins said when a reporter described Olson as a conservative litigator.

The Proposition 8 fight was one of two gay marriage cases heard by the High Court this week. The second case challenged the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents same-sex couples from getting some federal benefits granted to married couples.

Olson might have burned his bridges with social conservatives, but he isn’t alone before the Supreme Court.

he libertarian Cato Institute filed a brief urging the court to back marriage equality, and there is a significant libertarian argument against the Defense of Marriage Act — the federal law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which had historically been up to the states to decide.

The conservative divide over same-sex marriage grew wider when Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) announced his support for marriage equality.

Some GOP strategists said this week that the marriage debate will eventually disappear, because young Republicans don’t oppose same-sex marriage and don’t see why it’s an issue.

The social conservatives who dominate early Republican primaries, though, aren’t about to change their minds
.

The question, he said, is whether Roberts will be able to narrow the scope of a ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, even if he is in the minority.

Could Dumbya-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts tick off conservatives (especially the SoCons) even further over DOMA and Prop 8? Remember that Roberts is NOWHERE close to being a “liberal ‘activist judge,’” as he is seen as generally right/corporatist-leaning. Also, many of the wingnuts are already mad at him for preserving PPACA.

H/T: Sam Baker at The Hill

During oral arguments this morning, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to at least entertain the argument by House Republicans that gays and lesbians are too politically powerful for constitutional protection.

Roberts suggested that gays and lesbians must be “politically powerful” because politicians are “falling all over themselves” to endorse gay marriage, according to a tweet by Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer. The brief by Paul Clement, who represented the House of Representatives in defending DOMA, had reasoned that gays and lesbians are winning political battles and “have the attention of lawmakers,” an absurd claim since the “power” assertion is factually inaccurate, and because such an argument would also cancel out protections for racial minorities and women.

Roberts and his fellow conservatives also expressed concern over the White House’s decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, with Kennedy calling it “very troubling” and Justice Antonin Scalia criticizing the Justice Department’s “new regime.”

By contrast, several of the court’s liberal justices expressed alarm over the impact of DOMA’s actual deprivation of federal marriage benefits on gays and lesbians, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg calling the rights left for married couples after DOMA “skim milk” and questioning, “What kind of marriage is this?” Justice Elena Kagan, meanwhile, pointed to evidence from a House of Representatives report that lawmakers passed DOMA with improper motives. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the likely swing vote, repeatedly expressed a different concern with DOMA — that it impinged on state definitions of marriage.

H/T: Think Progress

The Religious Right group Government Is Not God PAC in a message to members this week warning that if the Supreme Court strikes down Proposition 8 and DOMA then “religious freedom, freedom of speech and the First Amendment will die.”

“If homosexuals win, the Bill of Rights dies and religious liberty/free speech will die with it,” GING PAC argued. “We either fight this evil or see our children and grandchildren brainwashed and/or coerced into accepting homosexuality as the new normal in our society.”

The group went on to say that “no institution will be safe from being homosexualized” and that society will soon “see our children and grandchildren brainwashed and/or coerced into accepting homosexuality as the new normal in our society,” as anti-gay activism “will be punishable by suppression, fines, or even jail sentences.”

h/t: Right Wing Watch