Wednesday, June 29, 2022

We dissent

The final comments of the three dissenting justices (Kagan, Breyer, and Sotomayor) in the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood pulls no punches.
In sum, the majority can point to neither legal nor factual developments in support of its decision. Nothing that has happened in this country or the world in recent decades undermines the core insight of Roe and Casey. It continues to be true that, within the constraints those decisions established, a woman, not the government, should choose whether she will bear the burdens of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting.

[...]

Neither law nor facts nor attitudes have provided any new reasons to reach a different result than Roe and Casey did. All that has changed is this Court.

[...]

“[T]he Court,” Casey explained, “could not pretend” that overruling Roe had any “justification beyond a present doctrinal disposition to come out differently from the Court of 1973.” And to overrule for that reason? Quoting Justice Stewart, Casey explained that to do so—to reverse prior law “upon a ground no firmer than a change in [the Court’s] membership”— would invite the view that “this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government.” No view, Casey thought, could do “more lasting injury to this Court and to the system of law which it is our abiding mission to serve.” For overruling Roe, Casey concluded, the Court would pay a “terrible price.”

The Justices who wrote those words—O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter—they were judges of wisdom. They would not have won any contests for the kind of ideological purity some court watchers want Justices to deliver. But if there were awards for Justices who left this Court better than they found it? And who for that reason left this country better? And the rule of law stronger? Sign those Justices up.

They knew that “the legitimacy of the Court [is] earned over time.” They also would have recognized that it can be destroyed much more quickly. They worked hard to avert that outcome in Casey. The American public, they thought, should never conclude that its constitutional protections hung by a thread—that a new majority, adhering to a new “doctrinal school,” could “by dint of numbers” alone expunge their rights. It is hard—no, it is impossible—to conclude that anything else has happened here. One of us once said that “[i]t is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.”  [...]  For all of us, in our time on this Court, that has never been more true than today. In overruling Roe and Casey, this Court betrays its guiding principles.

With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.

  US Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
They purposefully omitted the traditionally used word "respectfully" in that last phrase. It's a good thing the Supremes now get a vacation from each other. I wonder if Ketanji Brown Jackson is having any buyer's remorse.

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