OPINION TODAYSupreme Court goes against public opinion in rulings on abortion, guns … Voters may be a lot angrier about Roe’s repeal than the right assumes … Abortion Decision Roils Midterms … America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good … & more: https://t.co/F0SVU7rXu9 pic.twitter.com/5UR5XyVRaQ
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But then, that has been true since about 1855.
The difficulty is actually getting it changed. The only hope would be an Article 5 Convention to redraw the whole lot, and that will never happen.
Boris Johnson planned to build a £150,000 treehouse at Chequers but was forced to abandon idea after police raised security concerns
Discussions were held about Tory donor Lord Brownlow funding the project in Autumn 2020
By-election special: Is Boris heading for a 1997 moment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5-OxnaVB6E
But this is a case of 'two wrongs don't make a right.' If the ruling had not been made, the law and possibly the Constitution would have been changed a long time ago, leaving none of the wriggle room that has been so ruthlessly exploited in this new ruling.
So they are trying to second guess themselves and their predecessors, which whatever the rights and wrongs of the original ruling is just awful.
What inherent right can enshrine the pro abortion principle so that it is beyond the reach of the voters? The debate itself, however dire, shows that the issues are not easy or obvious.
This whole issue is bedeviled by all the people on all sides who think only one answer is possible or rational.
Mr Smithson is right: this issue will stir voters to do their job. Good. Perhaps they will demolish Trumpism at the same time too.
It is interesting that the Government don't want to talk about that waste of money that we're giving him and his chums to run our railways because we can't do it ourselves
It was seeking to apply a document which clearly didn't address the problem because it simply wasn't a problem in 1778. The document had nothing really to say on the matter but they pretended it did because they wanted to give everyone a federal right to an abortion. Which was really a state matter. So the Court was right to say that there was no basis for the decision. But wrong to say that a Constitution which was designed within the state of the knowledge at the time to give people some basic rights, added to by the Bill of Rights, would not have included such a right had the authors been aware of it.
The real question that any properly instructed court should have asked is do we as a society have the right to interfere with the body of a woman who has a foetus within it for the sake of the foetus. That's a complicated question on which there are a number of legitimate answers. None of which are in the document from 1778.
However, the impacts are generally rather indirect AND often take some time to percolate through the judiciary.
Famous example is SCOTUS repeal of whole slew of New Deal legislation during FDR's first term, most notably overturning the National Recovery Act (NRA). Which in turn prompted the President to attempt his (in)famous "court packing" after he was reelected by a landslide in 1936.
Irony being that, even as FDR was losing that battle - and expending much political capital in the process - the court was already shifting his way, lead by . . . wait for it . . . the Chief Justice.
Then within a few years, thanks to vacancies AND strong Dem majority in the Senate, Roosevelt was able to replace many of his SCOTUS opponent with new Justices who were his supporters.
Most of the time, anyway. Which is the best that any POTUS - with exception of 45 obviously - can hope to expect.
It would have to be a constitutional amendment and that's impossible given the threshold to amend the USC.
NADINE DORRIES: Ban transgender athletes from competing against women, exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday @NadineDorries mailplus.co.uk/edition/news/p… via @mailplus
Oh goody, more of this.
'The Supreme Court follows the Election Returns'. Discuss
2017 Conservatives did a £1bn Bung Parliament deal for DUP votes
2019 Conservatives benefited from Farage’s Brexit Party withdrawing in all Tory seats
Remind me again which party relies on pacts and deals?
Indeed, shoe is on the other foot.
My goodness, I must be being unclear today.
Don't bet on it.
The last one is inaccurate, the BXP stood aside in some seats, there was also a pact between LDs, Greens and PC and mutual stand downs
It’s old news
BTW (also FYI) US Bill of Rights (amendments I - X) ratified in 1791
Roe should have been followed by a explicit amendment. But “now wasn’t the time” and the politicians were too chicken…
That said, it is part of her remit to form policy on this.
He delivered on the judges the Religious Right wanted.
In theory, the originalist approach says you must interpret based on the understanding of the text at the time it was adopted. The Constitution did not, at the time it was adopted, intend to confer the same rights on Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett (two justices in the majority overturning Roe v Wade) as it did on John Roberts and Stephen Breyer (two in the minority - Roberts was an oddity in that he sided with the majority but NOT based on repudiating Roe v Wade). Not, I'm afraid by a long, long way.
Now it's true to say that there have been amendments since. But all the stuff at that is still in there from the original constitution as enacted, and there is a lot, was very clearly neither understood nor intended to apply equally to black people or women.
Given that you HAVE to back away from originalism, and accept the constitution is to some extent a living document where the text needs to be understood as if it isn't 1788, a fairly sensible approach is to understand and interpret it as if it is 2022, with science, morality and language as it exists in 2022. Because it is 2022.
The problem for Thomas and Coney Barrett (for instance) is that they won't accept it being 2022, and can't quite pretend it's 1788. So where does that leave us? It looks to me like a sort of fantasy where you pretend the Constitution exists at some kind of undefined point of perfection, divorced from time and space, and existing precisely where it is most convenient given your personal faith and politics. I'm not saying liberal justices are untainted by that too... but I'd rather have their explicitly pragmatic and grounded approach than the pseudo-intellectualism and utterly bogus and self-serving pretence of purity of the court's originalists.
This, I'm afraid, isn't just the death of a 50 year old legal judgment - it's the continued death of the pragmatism on which the entire era of American dominance has been based.
Perfect? Hell no. But these guys were pragmatic politicos NOT philosopher kings.
They make clear they wish to be in the rank and are vetted at various intervals for suitability each time there is a vacancy.
When a new judge is required the sitting President can choose from the next on rank - Rep or Dem and as long as since their appointment to the waiting list they haven’t done anything stupid then they are the choice without quibble.
Almost like a draft list where the top coach gets the top pick.
This would hopefully prevent more extreme presidents from either wing selecting a matching nutter as the chances are their pick would have been moving up through previous administrations.
So we would have maybe had under Trump, people who were working their way through the system under the Bushes - at the time this might have been unpalatable but now they look like moderates.
It might be a stupid or unworkable idea but would appreciate the input from our US posters especially.
Andy Burnham is fucking useless, what bandwagon will he not jump on?
I like malmesbury's summary of their methods as a court in rereading things.
- 70% support inflation-level pay rise
- 62% believe govt should intervene
- 70% against cuts to rail staff
- 84% say invest rail profits in maintaining staff
- 59% say workers right to strike if talks fail
Instead, assuming he's the 2024 GOP nominee, he can use the VP pick to achieve other goals with other sectors of the electorate.
For example, selecting a woman and/or minority. To seize the day AND scramble the Dems.
It’s not really a matter for the govt. it’s a matter for respective sporting bodies.
I suspect it is a mistake to get Labour dragged onto this territory, as it will be used as yet another culture war wedge by Tories in 2024 GE. Maybe it wont matter as by then the country will have made one of Callaghan's sea changes and nothing will save Johnson, but its a risk.
Which it ain't, going backwards or (I suspect) forwards.
Also assumes that Justices always vote in accordance with the views, wishes, interests & perspectives of them that appointed and got them confirmed in the first place.
Which again just ain't so. Perhaps most notable example being Earl Warren.
The former PM held secret meetings with Oliver Dowden in 5 Hertford Street amid talk Dowden was about to get sacked
Dowden yesterday quit the Cabinet saying 'somebody must take responsibility’
https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/news/politics/195606?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=shared_link
If he can persuade Rishi to stop doing the hokey cokey presumably
Or was it just one question raised in a wide-ranging interview, appropriately so given this week's FINA ruling and Dorries' portfolio, which the newspaper has chosen to make the headline?
As for Redundancy I’d expect them to move from trying to stop them to trying to get the best deal possible.
Like rebels forcibly crowning that bloke in the Nika riots.
Curiously it's a problem in which despite its difficulty neither religion nor humanism nor science can shed much light.
. . .
Maryland’s congressional map — passed on an overwhelming party-line vote in December — created seven safe Democratic seats and put the state’s sole Republican incumbent in Congress, Rep. Andy Harris, in jeopardy by making the 1st district competitive."
source ($): https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/25/maryland-congressional-map-thrown-out-gerrymandering/
Something similar happened in New York. So, yes, Democrats in those two states are not very good at gerrymandering. But that wasn't for lack of trying. Democrats in other states were more successful as you can see from 538's table: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-new-national-congressional-map-is-biased-toward-republicans/
Need an example of what it was like when Democrats did almost all of the gerrymandering? Try 1992, when the Democrats won 258 House seats out of 435, with 50.1 percent of the popular vote.
By the way, the attempts by Democrats to create "majority-minority" districts often concentrate Democrats, thus helping Republicans, net.
(Incidentally, when Americans say House seats, without qualification, we almost always mean national House seats not state house seats.)
,maximise the payments and minimise the numbers
But for the track safety savings you really want the replacement systems bought, implemented and confirmed as suitable before you reduce manual checks - instead every report is that the cuts will be made now and the automated systems will follow (as if). That’s just a risk
And if my auntie had balls, she would be awaiting gender reassignment surgery.
Firstly, you have to define seniority. Is a judge on the Nebraska Supreme Court equivalent to one on the California Supreme Court? I'm sure there are some excellent judges in Nebraska, and some poor ones in California. But the ones in Nebraska have risen to the top in a very small pond (to mix metaphors horribly). And what of someone who has followed the academic law route? Is a renowned and brilliant Professor of Law at Harvard equal to a highly experienced judge in Miami? I don't know.
Secondly, even if you cobble together a highly arguable order of precedence, aren't people going to be completely equal? Or does it in the end come down to who is oldest and has more years on a particular rung (which seems a massive problem in itself)?
Thirdly, judges are hard to remove for good reason to protect their independence from politicians and so on. Weaker judges, and those with failing faculties tend to be managed. You might very well have several at a particular level, but one has a reputation for being the person to allocate to the more intellectually taxing and sensitive cases.
Fourthly, it doesn't give balance on the court as a whole. There are some who say that shouldn't matter at all. But it isn't the worst thing that the most recent addition (not yet sworn in) is a black woman, and she and the one before that are notably younger than some colleagues, and that there is some regional diversity etc. You can, I think, secure diversity without compromising ability. Ketanji Brown Jackson is a highly respected judge who went through rigorous screening - she wasn't plucked off the street because she was a black woman with a law degree.
Finally, I think it's targeting the wrong issue. I vehemently disagree with Samuel Alito, but he isn't thick - he could eat me and many, many others for lunch on toast in a legal discussion. Brett Kavanaugh is morally more than dubious - he sounds like the worst kind of frat boy in his college days, and you'd be nuts to think the testimony against him wasn't substantially true. But he's very clever and he'd not be weeded out on the basis of conduct as a judge or the rigour of his judgments - it's just that in a fairer world he'd probably have done some prison time as a younger man. So the issues relate to balance, pragmatism, and polarisation. I don't think your approach addresses that.