Today marks 134 days before the next Election Day, and 500 days until the next Presidential Election Day. It seems like a very far time away, but it really isn’t. It will be here before we know it. It is also not too early to become familiar with your local elections and issues happening that will be addressed on the next two Election Days.
Our voting numbers in this country are abysmal. I know we want to represent freedom, and you should have the freedom to decide whether or not you want to vote. However, that should come with a dreading realization that with your one vote, you can change how things are done in this country. Look at Michigan. I am personally for a national day off for voting and automatic registration at 18 as well as requiring all those eligible to vote. We are still using a Presidential election system built on slavery and proportioning electoral college votes on land rather than on people.
How does this affect women’s rights, the presumptive focus of this missive?
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that gave women the right to an abortion. More specifically, and importantly, they found the right to an abortion under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that we all have a fundamental “right to privacy”. Any laws that prohibited an abortion would be subject to strict scrutiny by the Courts.
Much has been made of the plaintiff, Roe expressing her regrets for her abortion. She had gone back and forth on this issue, and honestly I feel that she was taken advantage of by both sides. She was paid by the right to recant her wish for an abortion, and stated in the 2020 documentary, AKA Jane Roe that she hadn’t ever supported the antiabortion movement.
Roe’s holding was reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992 while at the same time overruling the trimester framework established in the Roe decision and moved from “strict scrutiny” to “undue burden”.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe with their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the right to an abortion was not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history or tradition.”
This is false, and it is simply Justice Alito (and his cohorts) grasping at straws and making law whole cloth from their beliefs which violate the Constitution as well as basic human rights of women to their own bodily autonomy. In the ruling, they also included questioning rights now recognized as to contraception, interracial marriage, and marriage equality (same-sex marriage). Some on the right are suggesting we take another look at those rights already enshrined in law (and common sense, to be quite honest).
Abortions have been happening for as long as there’s been pregnancy. The real value of legal abortion is safety. When abortions are illegal, women are less safe. In addition, many, if not all of the proponents of eliminating legal abortion have no idea how pregnancy and birth works. They throw out terms that they don’t understand, pass laws, and criminalize medical care for women under the guise of stopping abortion.
Since Dobbs, women have died from miscarriages that weren’t treated; ectopic pregnancies that were left to fester. Women have lost the ability to have more children because of doctors waiting for the last minute to help women, afraid that anything they do to save the woman will create a liability for themselves and their facilities.
The right set up pregnancy centers who lie to women and scare them and do not give them all of their options as far as family planning and abortion. If their way is the right way, why do they need to lie?
This is horrifying, and it needs to end.
Women need to be able to make informed decisions on their family planning, their pregnancies, their terminating or continuing of pregnancies. My daughter has less rights than her grandmother had.
In addition to our activism and raising our voices, we need to contact our Congresspeople and especially Leader Jeffries, and have them bring a bill to the floor and pass it to make the Supreme Court more modern. The last time the Supreme Court was changed with respect to number of justices was with the Judiciary Act of 1869 during the Grant Administration. We currently have nine justices and thirteen circuit courts. We should have 13 justices to correspond to the circuits. For those saying that this is packing the Court, it is unpacking the Court that Mitch McConnell gave us by blocking President Obama’s duly chosen nominee in 2019 and then reversing his “logic” and pushing through Amy Coney Barrett while we were in the middle of an election. Literally while voting was happening.
We can’t stop speaking out.
The only way we can solve this disparity and reproductive health crisis is by reinstating Roe, expanding it, and codifying it into law.
I’m not feeling particularly inspired this month after last month’s partisan, rogue display by the Supreme Court, so I will leave you with two quotations that I listened to today on Jon Meacham’s podcast, Reflections of History, both by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall:
We must never forget that the only real source of power that we as judges can tap is the respect of the people. We will command that respect only as long as we strive for neutrality. If we are perceived as campaigning for particular policies, as joining with other branches of government in resolving questions not committed to us by the Constitution, we may gain some public acclaim in the short run. In the long run, however, we will cease to be perceived as neutral arbiters, and we will lose that public respect so vital to our function.
Thurgood Marshall, 1981
I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever ‘fixed’ at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendant of an African slave. ‘We the people’ no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them.
Thurgood Marshall, on the Bicentennial of The Constitution, 1987
I have been struggling as I know many people around the country are struggling, especially women, girls, and trans and non-binary people with uteruses. I can’t promise that my language will be consistently inclusive in this writing. I can promise to try. Not mentioning trans/NB people doesn’t mean that they are not part of the discussion or part of my thoughts and fears, but right now, I have two strong emotions at play: first, my daughter and millions like her and second, the Constitution.
For those of us who grew up with constitutional norms and the sentimentality as well as the reality of the rule of law, who grew up with William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and for the people following now in the turmoil and unease of an activist court and are looking towards Ketanji Brown Jackson for similar inspiration, the death knell of the Constitution is heart-wrenching. Not as heart-wrenching as the forced birth of pubescent children or the forced trauma of losing a wanted pregnancy as well as the derailment of dreams, but it is still something to be mourned. I’m not sure we can come back. My eternal USA-USA optimism has been shaken to its core these last several years and this term of the Supreme Court has been the nail in the ever lowering coffin.
I studied law for half my college career and that came after a hobby of reading everything law related available, studying in my own way the law, knowing legal precedents and bathing in the light of the dreams of freedom. Re-reading that sentence now, it is so clear that I am speaking from a place of extreme privilege, my whiteness showing starker than the background of the screen I type on. Everything else, my Jewishness, my womanhood, my economic status – all of that is hidden under the whiteness that wrote that beloved Constitution. When I graduated from college, I got rid of most of my textbooks, but I kept ALL of my law books. Why? Well, they were historical. They set precedent with opinions from the greats, both before and during my lifetime. These books would continued to be studied for generations and while they would be added to, they would still be the basis for many rulings to come.
Little did I know.
The year I had jury duty was the year Justice William Brennan retired. I went to Brooklyn Federal Court, after driving over an hour and a half, parking underground, and walking across a public park to the courthouse, and I bought a Time magazine with his picture on the cover. I read it during my lunch before I was assigned to a case. I was excited. Until I listened to the case and discovered the weight of my civic duty. I was a hold-out for awhile, but we sorted it out and I was dismissed with the thanks of a grateful court. I couldn’t wait to do it again.
With one term, one swoop of Russian interference, Republican obstinance and recalcitrance, Senatorial and Presidential corruption, and let’s be honest, overt racism, and those books on my shelf have become obsolete.
Miranda – not required.
Engel v Vitale – coercive prayer
Roe v Wade – no bodily autonomy if you’re a woman, no privacy
MA v EPA – overturned – enjoy your brown air and water
Griswold, Casey, Oberfell – their futures in question
But Skokie? Skokie remains. Oh, unless you’re picketing the Supreme Court justices. In that case, no first amendment rights for you. Who cares about McCullen v Coakley?
This week in Akron, Ohio, a ten year old girl was forced to go to Indiana to obtain an abortion after her rape because a judge ruled that she was three days over the legal limit to get one in Ohio. Truly, the Lord’s work, amirite? During this same week and same town, a Black man (Jayland Walker) was shot in the back sixty times (ninety rounds fired) for running away from a traffic stop.
These two incidents, traumas on families and communities are only a microcosm of what is happening across this country.
It is only a matter of time before a rapist is granted joint custody with their victim for a forced birth baby. Who thinks that this is okay?
We (with SCOTUS leading the way) are dismantling the First Amendment. The most important amendment. So important it comes first, before anything else. I remind you that we are not a Christian nation. We are multicultural, interfaith, NO faith, multidimensional, and to stay free we must act free. All of us. Violating one person’s civil rights, their human rights is a stain for us all.
The First Amendment falls as fascism rises: little by little and then all at once. You are here in the timeline.
Yesterday morning, I attended my church online. I usually attend online. As the mass ended and the congregation was dismissed to relay the Good News, the priest and deacon processed from the altar to the music and singing of America the Beautiful. I can’t say what I would have done had I been there, but at home, online, I turned it off. I thought, and continue to think it’s inappropriate. I get that people want a patriotic song, and as far as patriotic songs go, this one isn’t bad, but as a recessional to mass?
No.
No. No. No.
The song on its own wasn’t the problem. Play it after the mass is actually over, while people are still congregating, but not as part of the closing.
I have two distinct memories of my father’s patriotism. We were at a professional baseball game (The Mets, of course), and I didn’t stand for the National Anthem. It wasn’t a protest. It was a lazy elementary school child. The look he gave me. The same for a school assembly when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I had no problem with the Pledge, but my sitting wasn’t an option. This look was accompanied by a whispered admonition. And I remember those moments with my dad. He wasn’t a nationalist; he wasn’t our country can do no wrong, but he knew the importance of that respect and I do too. I don’t think he would appreciate how I feel today and how I don’t want to celebrate Independence Day. Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States took away what little freedom my daughter and I had, and I can’t celebrate that. I hear Black and brown people asking what we’re celebrating in the first place, and I hear them.
I have four books to recommend to everyone and then one more thing:
About six or seven years ago, maybe a bit longer, I was driving in the car with my daughter and she suddenly said through a tight throat and tiny tears that she didn’t want to have a baby. She hadn’t even gotten her period yet. She was under ten or was ten, I don’t remember. What I do remember was trying not to cry because she was so appalled about the idea of having a baby, not the idea of being a mom even though that was kind of foreign to her, but physically being forced to have a baby when she didn’t want one. I said to that she didn’t need to worry about that. No one was going to force her to have a baby. She wanted to know how I knew that. I told her I knew that because I would never let that happen. Never.
And I never will.
Not my daughter, and not yours, and not trans men or non-binary folks. No one.
Overturning Roe v Wade isn’t pro-life; it’s anti-women.
In addition to being an issue of the 14th Amendment, it is also a First Amendment issue as it violates religious freedom and unconstitutionally imposes what amounts to a “state sanctioned religion” on the rest of us. It violates the establishment clause and it attempts to control women’s choices and their economic independence as well as their basic human rights.
This brilliant piece by Slate writer, Dahlia Lithwick is a must read by everyone who calls themselves pro-choice and those who don’t. The idea that the people crying ‘our body, our choice’ over masks are the same ones brutally stomping on the bodies of pregnant people. Stomping is not an exaggeration.
This law is unconstitutional, but somewhat more importantly it is unconscionable. We should be protecting women, transmen, and CHILDREN who find themselves pregnant and unready, for whatever reason, and not forcing them to give birth.
We must remember these draconian laws and constant attempts at controlling our reproduction and our bodies at every election moving forward. GET OUT THE VOTE. Each and every election.
Read the entire article, but this quote from Lithwick really brought it home for me.
The inevitable answer is chilling: This isn’t about guns or speech or money or war. It’s about women, their lives and their bodies and their autonomy. That’s what allows you to do shoddy work, with careless disregard, because who’s going to stop you? You only do the thing in the dead of night, without care or effort, because you believe women are so used to being gaslit that you expect them to just tolerate it. You only do the thing in the dead of night without care or effort because you genuinely believe that they’re only women, and they deserve what they get.
I’ve already voted. I made my plan and followed through. I voted on Saturday. In a typical year, that would mean I’m done for the next twelve months. But this is not a typical year.
Even though I’ve cast my vote for Joe Biden, my work (and yours) is not finished until the end of Election Day.
At that point, others may take up the baton, but hopefully the landslide and mandate will express crystal clearly the will of the American people.
As I was working on what this post was going to be eight days before Election Day, and even as I was writing my notes late last night, things happened that need to be brought to light for prospective voters.
The first is the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. This was an illegitimate process to confirm a justice whose beliefs are so far opposite of the American people that that alone should disqualify her. Her lack of litigation experience is a second disqualification. Confirming her eight days before the end of an election after sixty million people have already voted is a despicable act by the Senate GOP and especially the evil*, hypocritical Majority Leader McConnell.
Clicking this photo will take you directly to Vote Save America’s Voting Plan. Twitter. (c)2020
The second big item was a Supreme Court ruling that while ballots in Wisconsin can be postmarked by Election Day, they cannot be counted after Election Day. What this means in the real world is that if you mail your ballot in, it may not be counted. Again, McConnell (evil hypocrite) and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have consistently kept Congress from including voter security monies for the post office and have sabotaged key sorting equipment nationwide. Because of this partisan hackery, please, either vote early or on Election Day in person or hand deliver your absentee ballot to an official ballot box, to your board of elections, or at the polls on Election Day.
To be sure your vote is counted, have a plan. The following are resources to help you from now through Election Day.
Remember – speak to your family and friends about voting. Be prepared to answer any questions. Direct them to the Biden website to read up on his policy proposals and priorities.
Make sure they’re voting.
Offer to drive people to the polls.
Volunteer – it’s not too late to help (see the links below).
*see his debate with Amy McGrath in Kentucky laughing about not bringing covid relief to the floor for a vote.
Clicking this photo will take you to volunteer opportunities at the Vote Save America website.
I think it’s important to look at this SCOTUS nomination in its totality, and not simply whether or not we like this nominee choice of Amy Coney Barrett. I also think we need to take care not to conflate our strong feelings for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and keep our biases in check when we talk about Barrett’s personal life and instead stick to her judicial record, which is scant. I also believe a little humility is necessary by those pressing for this nominee. Whatever judicial strengths she has, she cannot compare to an icon of RBG’s stature. RBG’s work for women and first head of the ACLU’s Women’s Project steered much of the equal rights we women (and men) enjoy today. Not everyone can be a Thurgood Marshall or a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that doesn’t necessarily disqualify someone, including Judge Barrett.
As a matter of course, this nomination absolutely should not go forward. Even without Mitch McConnell’s blatant hypocrisy, we aren’t too close to an election – we are in the middle of an election. Over one million voters have already spoken with millions more to vote between now and the conclusion of the election on November 3rd.
I do understand Barrett’s unwillingness to step aside somewhat; the President would only choose someone else, although stepping aside on principle would show us what principles she has, as not stepping aside has already shown us.
Very simply, my opinion is clear-eyed.
This President, who was impeached earlier this year, and has now been reported to have engaged in tax fraud should not be the person to nominate a new Supreme Court justice. There are still allegations that a deal was worked out for Justice Kennedy to retire. This President admitted on tape his malfeasance in conducting the response to the COVID-19 pandemic as it invaded its way across our country. He failed in his stewardship, and he should not be rewarded by the complicit and cowardly Senate; the same Senate and Majority Leader who refused to work with the nation’s first Black President on any legislative agenda. The same man who let his racism cloud his solemn oath to guard the Constitution.
The Election is now. People have voted. People are voting. Right now.
When the election is certified, if President Trump wins re-election, he can then nominate someone (including Amy Coney Barrett) for SCOTUS. However, if the President-Elect is Joe Biden, then we, as a country must wait until after the inauguration on January 20, 2021, and let the duly elected President follow the will of the American people, and nominate the justice who will fill Justice Ginsburg’s seat.
Although irreplaceable, someone will eventually take her place on the High Court and that someone should be nominated by the President chosen by the American electorate.
I have always been fascinated by the legal system and the law. My whole life, including reading for pleasure has included government, history, and legal issues. I have an analytical and argumentative mind and nothing comes close to both of those attributes more than the law.
In high school my favorite class senior year was Everyday Law, which would most likely be compared to a civics class – what to do if you get pulled over? What are your rights when approached by a polic officer? Your neighbor is infringing on your property, what do you do? That sort of thing. It was an elective, and I still really believe this type of class should be required for students to prepare them for the real world they are about to enter.
I have been privileged to live in a time where I have witnessed the ascension of the first African-American, the first woman, and the first Latina to the Supreme Court (Marshall, Day O’Connor, and Sotomayor, respectively).
When I served jury duty, the cover of Time magazine was Chief Justice William Brennan who was retiring. He was one of my favorite justices and his court more than any other cemented my philosophy firmly on the liberal side of things, although I would characterize my views as less liberal and more founded in civil rights and equality.
I continued reading and studying the law throughout my life, and majored in political science/pre-law for two years of college. Constitutional Law was my favorite class, and I loved my professor who I had for all three of my law classes. I still have all of those textbooks and I’ve added The Law of Writing to my collection. My enthrallment has never subsided.
Until 2010 when he retired, for as long as I can remember, Justice John Paul Stevens has been a staple on the Supreme Court. As the Bush years passed, and the liberal wing was replaced by more conservative jurists, Justice Stevens remained stalwart, continuing the tradition of upholding the Constitution through law and not political partisanship. It is essential to remember that Justice Stevens was appointed by a Republican, President Gerald Ford as was Brennan (by President Dwight D. Eisenhower).
John Paul Stevens was the third longest serving justice on the Supreme Court. When he joined the Burger Court (soon to become the Brennan Court), I had just turned nine and for my entire life since, Stevens became a member of one of the most iconic groups of justices. While all generations have heroes to look up to and all Supreme Courts make important, life changing, country-wide decisions, I was blessed with the ability to follow the Supreme Court that included John Paul Stevens as well as his iconic colleagues.
Justice Stevens read briefs, and listened to oral arguments, deciding cases such as Hamdan v Rumsfield, Massachusetts v EPA, and dissenting on Citizens United v FEC and Bush v Gore as well as DC v Heller. Related to this case, he believes the 2nd Amendment should be readdressed, whether appealed or amended is still to see. He hasn’t been on the court in nearly a decade, but his voice will be missed in our world.
Rest in peace, Justice Stevens.
As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship. “Excerpts From Ruling on Internet: ‘Statute Abridges the Freedom of Speech'”. http://www.nytimes.com. June 27, 1997.
Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy. Church & State Editorial, http://www.au.org. May 2010.
A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold. Dissenting, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. ___ (2010)
Check out This Land, and eight episode podcast from Crooked Media and Oklahoma journalist and Cherokee Nation citizen, Rebecca Nagle about this SCOTUS case that could determine who gets half the land in Oklahoma.
Griffins and Ginger Snaps 