924 Comments

We have politicians that lie, cheat, steal, ect...this is a HUGE problem and worse yet, none are held accountable. It's absolutely disgusting. What a good example these public servants are.

I see more finger pointing and blame placing than honest open discussion and compromise. Apparently our politicians have lost the capacity to work together. I am 53 and so don't remember a time when politicians workd across party lines. The Court is set up quite well for the abortion issue, of course it is time to get'er done for the southern states...well, and a few others. I would NOT want to raise my daughter in some of these southern states unless I made a damn good living.

Expand full comment

Unless the current President of the United States steps to the mic and lambasts the fool who leaked and garauntees prosecution we might as well pack it in. Maybe I'm asking too much of Joe who on most days can't find his rear with both hands.

Expand full comment

Why should we be surprised when we let a concept like “progressivism” take hold in our country? Progressivism by definition throws out the old and replaces it with shiny, new and untested ideas. It is a fools errand.

We suffer these fools at our own peril. Call them out when they say stupid things (like men can have babies and national debt is meaningless) and never, ever vote for them.

Republicans are guilty of going along to get along with progressives and egregious overspending. They need to get back to basics. Reduce spending and for goodness sake shrink the exploding government bureaucracy!

At least we have a SCOTUS that is back to constitutional law rather than advocacy. One of the few things republicans have done right.

In the end overturning Roe will be very good for the country. We’ll get legislative solutions that the voters have a say in. It’ll become less controversial if our congresspeople can get it done. I fear though that abortion may be yet another issue that legislators would rather use as a perpetual campaign issue just like guns and immigration. Let’s hope not.

Expand full comment

Grateful for your journalism Bari. You do the world a great service

Expand full comment

While I may not agree with the author on the ethics of abortion, she is right that this leak is a huge step backwards for the integrity of the court and of the culture of our legal profession. For what it's worth, here is my take on why I believe Roe v Wade should be overturned. I take a stronger position than the current court, since I believe the unborn should be considered as a person under the Fourteenth Amendment: https://davidthunder.substack.com/p/roe-v-wade-must-be-judged-on-its?r=wlowt&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Expand full comment

Babies who aren’t born yet are innocent and want to be born. Life is a human right.

Expand full comment

Not surprising this was leaked. If you think overturning RvW would catapult women back to the 1800’s, and every conservative is a Nazi, then immoral/illegal behavior becomes not just justified, but a necessity.

Expand full comment

Not surprising this was leaked. If you think overturning RvW would catapult women back to the 1800’s, and every conservative is a Nazi, then immoral/illegal behavior becomes not just justified, but a necessity.

Expand full comment

In some countries, judges have to wear hoods over their heads during trials and their identities must be concealed from the public, lest they be assassinated should their ruling run contrary to mob justice. Is this what we want?

In these same countries, comedians are also killed- if there are any. Someone attacked Dave Chappelle onstage this weekend with a knife-gun. Is this what the left wants?

This new leftist religion is becoming every bit as vile, intolerant, joyless and backwards as the extremists in any other religion I can think of with one difference: No one thinks the Taliban warlords preventing women and girls from receiving an education in Afghanistan are "Cool".

The extremists who will disrupt Catholic mass services this weekend, the ones who harass and threaten Supreme Court Justices outside their homes, this Supreme Court leaker, are all considered cool folk heroes by the deranged extremist left- and by all the culturally significant institutions they have taken over.

They don't serve any God; they all think they are God and woe betide any who dare oppose these angry, all-knowing Gods.

Expand full comment

David Cohen

Supreme Court – American Politics as Usual

David Cohen

A nation's institutions reflect its people. Our teachers taught, and we continued to believe, that Lincoln freed the slaves; that Native American Civilizations needed to be destroyed and bleached in white Christian culture; that America, in its domestic and international policies, has been a paragon of selfless virtue, bringing truth, justice, and the American Way to the world; we were taught that the Supreme Court is insulated from the politics of the moment and the personal dispositions of the Judges.

American schools and media promoted these mythologies, most of which went relatively unchallenged, except by “eggheads” who have been historically cautious about unleashing their challenges in ways that made their ideas too accessible to the general public.

As a nation, we have made significant progress in expanding both individual human rights, and opportunities for groups, including workers, women, people of color, and LGBTQ Americans. The advances America has made were not the products of spontaneous enlightenment seizing elected officials who, seeing the error of their, or their predecessors' ways, made things right. Instead of history, we taught a flattering mythology, and this mythology is what many citizens believed.

However, that is not the true story of change in America. Our various battles for human rights are hard fought, hard won, and over time. Women, working people, African Americans, using the mechanisms of our democracy, sometimes with violence, saved themselves. To accomplish their goals they organized, marched, built alliances, and learned to use media. What were their goals? They wanted what the Constitution Declaration of Independence promised, in the beginning, to white men of substance—equal rights under the law. Those struggles for political power were brutal because those groups did not have access to existing levers of power. However, with political power came influence and, eventually, an expansion of rights.

The current battles, raging in our schools over Critical Race Theory, and banning of books, demonstrate how mightily we will struggle to preserve our crippling mythology of American perfection. The denialism and defensiveness psychologists see in their patients, exist as powerfully in the culture. Laws being passed in states around the nation are seeking to restrict teaching the parts of American history that accurately detail the struggles, perhaps because of the shamefulness of how difficult the struggles have been.

While American culture has (to many, threateningly) become more inclusive and diverse, many citizens struggle to return to the fantasy America that never existed.

The explosion of media began with the printing press, which made it possible to make thousands of copies of essays, books, and newspapers, large and small. With his printing press, Gutenberg began what, to date, has made it possible for a single person to easily communicate directly to whomever would read, hear, or watch what was offered. The development of radio and television made ideas more easily available, even to people who would or could not read. Today, computer technology has empowered every individual, from President to person in their mother’s basement, to instantaneously reach out to, and mobilize huge audiences.

Because they have gained much ground since WWII, right-wingers appear to be more effective in messaging than American left-wingers. In a few decades, we are told that Whites will be in the minority. We are also told that the demographics of the right-wing lean heavily toward older, white working people, and that this group votes. The Republican Party has been avowedly struggling for decades to repeal the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. The leaked draft of the Supreme Court's intention to overturn Roe v. Wade is another sign of the success of that party’s struggle.

America has never been “One Nation”. We have always been a work in progress, bound loosely together by belief in a common mythology and appreciative of the relatively advantageous economic opportunities in America.

As the myth becomes revealed, and we learn the actual history of our nation, it becomes more difficult to feel a kinship with half of our fellow Americans.

We are a divided nation. Both sides are powerful. Are both parties seeking to heal the wounds and finding a way for us to live together? I am not seeing both parties seeking jointly for a Kumbaya movement or even a single moment.

To gain and retain power, rather than seeking a modus vivendi to build bridges, political parties exploit this weak kinship, and cultivate the antagonisms. A divided nation is more easily exploited.

Donald Trump did not create the voters of the 2016 and 2020 elections. They were already there, existentially afraid, as their factories closed, their jobs disappeared, or were shipped overseas. But Trump did understand their concerns and spoke to them with a directness such as they had never experienced from a serious candidate for a national office. We have had racists in the Oval Office, but not as blatant as President Donald Trump. He knew his message and wanted it to be clearly understood.

The Supreme Court is as broken, and as unbroken, as the rest of our institutions because the court and other institutions reflect a nation that was created out of fresh cloth. Our Founding Fathers invented it and needed to make compromises to have one large, prosperous nation and not thirteen smaller nations.

The same institution that, in 1954, gave us Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, had, sixty years earlier, given us Plessy vs. Ferguson. What had changed? Most importantly, public opinion. The 19th Century anti-slavery movement, then the Civil Rights movement, along with allies, clearly made Plessy a goner, and sooner rather than later. Plessy did not trouble or threaten America in 1896, but the changed America of 1954 would not long tolerate an affirmation of that decision.

A nation’s institutions reflect the values of the citizens of that nation. If we are to have better, fairer, and more humane laws and institutions, we need to become a better people. Our path toward the goals identified in our Constitution have been our lodestar. The path has been difficult, often bloody, at times seemingly impossible, but we have demonstrated our will to be a better people, and may take encouragement from our successes.

Expand full comment

The process by which justices are confirmed is broken. That’s obvious to anyone Bari. But the inner workings of the Court are sacred. This is the bedrock of our society, the rule of law. When the loons on the left leak an opinion, this is an attack on our system and cannot be ignored. It must be punished. The follow on protests in front of the Justices homes is simply not acceptable.

Expand full comment

I have been pro-choice for a very long time. But recently I found that in my state, abortion is allowed through 24 weeks when babies' survival rate is 60%-70% per google.

I'm no longer pro-choice because the the other side has gone too far. I can't think of the person who delivers the baby and then kills. It's not a doctor, but a serial killer.

Therefore, overturn Roe is a good decision. Leave these to states.

Expand full comment

Continued….

It has often been said that most people who adamantly support Roe have never read it. It’s true.

As an attorney I’ve read it dozens of times. It is a tour de force in contrived argument. But at its root is something that Alito regrettably avoided. The phony Federal right to “privacy”.

Of course, there is no absolute right to privacy. The police may search your private spaces and things with a valid warrant. What you do in the street is not private, even if you seek to do it in a discrete place.

From the first time that the earliest people sought to leave a communal cave for one of their own, human beings have understood the desire for personal privacy. Unlike things like the internet, telecommunications, the ability to manipulate DNA and the like, the founders fully understood the concept of personal privacy.

Yet it was not only left out of the constitution, it was left out of the Bill of Rights. Perhaps because it is a concept that can swallow too many rules.

Think about what one can argue in the name of personal privacy….

Plural marriage

Polyamory

Bestiality (don’t tell me that you can rationalize murdering an animal for food but can’t have sex with it)

Incest and familial marriage

The free use of narcotics

Refusal to educate your children

And there’s much more that you can imagine.

Yet in the seminal case of Griswold v. CT, the court found a “marital” right of privacy to overrule a silly law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to married people. It took only 8 years for the slippery slope to expand the marital right of privacy to a general right of privacy. Why? Because since it appeared nowhere in the constitution, it needed to be construed. And the court used unfortunately broad language to find it - something that the SCOTUS normally seeks to avoid - the preference is to focus on the most focused approach to resolving a case. But here we have it - the right of privacy isn’t anywhere, but rather, it emanates like penumbras from other rights that are stated. Ladies - how do you feel about a right that you feel to be so fundamental being based upon on a foundation of sand?

Naturally, the judge created right has been used for a variety of things Including sodomy and same sex marriage.

Alito goes to great lengths to say that the word abortion exists no where in the constitution. He’s right. Neither do the words general right of privacy. That’s really the root of Roe, and Alito chickens out by not striking that down.

The jurisprudence of abortion is one of the most garbled line of cases in the Court’s history, all because the unfortunate manufacture of the general right of privacy. Here’s one of my. “favorite” inconsistencies. People who murder pregnant women (think Scott Peterson) can be charged with double homicide. How can they be, if there’s no person until the baby is officially born?

Roe supposedly relied upon “following the science”. But as science has advanced, we’ve learned that babies feel pain very early in gestation. Pre-natal surgical procedures have been able to correct terrible conditions before brith. Roe used a rough Justice scientific analysis based upon trimesters.

And then there’s the effect upon stare decisis. Casey crippled it. Apparently recognizing medical advances, the three trimester scheme was inferentially tossed (they didn’t even have the stones to come right out and say it). Instead, laws that placed an undue impediment on women obtaining abortion were impermissible. But what does the word undue mean? How do you measure it? Any law that limits behavior is intended to reduce that behavior. Apparently, under Casey, if you write a law that’s too successful, it’s undue. But a measurement tool? None were provided, and so it was left to the whim of judges to decide. Which is why there are so many disagreements between districts and circuits.

And then there is the obvious question, asked in dissent by Scalia. Who invented the brand of stare decisis where you keep the parts of a decision that you like and throw out the rest?

There is also the argument that abortion is only a woman’s concern. Of course one should never understate the physical effects of pregnancy upon a woman. It’s no small matter.

But it’s one that always wins the day. Many other arguments posed in support of abortion on demand are collateral effects upon women are the emotional effects, the disruption of education and affect upon careers, the economics of supporting a child and the forced bond with an unwanted child. All of these apply to men as well of course. Men may have their educations and careers affected by the birth of an unwanted child. They may be forced to have emotional ties to an unwanted child. They may even be called to take custody of the child.

Yet even as the man and woman walk into the bedroom as equals, they walk out with all the rights on one side of the equation. They can’t even legally “abort” their relationship to an unwanted child. A woman can sue for child support, the state may force support lest the child become dependent. There are crazy cases where spermicide donors are sued for support!!!! A man may have never wanted parenthood, but having no power to avoid it, he may be emotionally pained by having it forced upon him. He has no options. Even when he can prove deception (don’t worry, aim on the pill) he has no rights. His support duties can disrupt his education and career as well.

And why is this a FEDERAL question. The practice of the professional is regulated by states under their general police powers. I took the bar exam in several states. While there isn’t multi state portion at least half the test is based upon state law and, what’s more, the weighting of both are determined by the states and graded by the states who issue the license to practice. Ditto, the CPA exam, which I’ve also taken in multiple states. Medicine is no different. - licensure is a state matter. There is no Federal medical license.

What’s more, other than organ transplantation, there are none (Or few) surgical procedures that are permitted or banned by the Federal government. Yet one surgical procedure, performed millions of times, is regulated primarily by the Federal government based upon the thin reeds of emanating penumbras.

A sad situation.

The general right of privacy should have been stricken by Alito. That’s what is at the hear of the case. Cut out the diseased heart, and the whole thing disappears.

It’s sad that Americans have become addicted to headlines and not substance. That so many people feel opposite about what procedures they’ll tolerate and their view that Roe must be upheld is a shame, created by a biased mainstream media that controls what people read and see.

Tell a person that Roe and it’s progeny allows sticking a pair of scissors in the back of the neck of a viable baby IN THE BIRTH CANAL and then vacuuming out its brains so the skull collapses and the baby can be easily removed and see how many people support Roe and Casey.

Tell them that many people use abortion as a method of gender selection and see what they say. Or that they just changed their minds.

Abortion has, as RBG said, unnecessarily torn the nation apart. That’s the real shame.

Expand full comment

“Tell a person that Roe and its progeny allows sticking a pair of scissors in the back of the neck of a viable baby IN THE BIRTH CANAL and then vacuuming out its brains so the skull collapses and the baby can be easily removed and see how many people support Roe and Casey.”

I fear we are about to learn that, for a frightening percentage of the population, it simply doesn’t matter. Perhaps the ugliest truth in this debate: for far too many people, the baby matters not at all. Its mere existence is tantamount to “forced” motherhood, no matter who raises it (an interesting juxtaposition to the “forced” fatherhood of child support many men have lived with all this time).

In much of the commentary I see, male supporters of Roe find fault with pro-lifers who won’t agree to publicly bear the cost of raising every unwanted child, and the women assume pro-lifers want them punished for some sexual evil they have allegedly committed. Money, or control.

It’s not just that the child’s life has no inherent value for too many people. It’s that they can’t even acknowledge the good faith of those who recognize that the thing whose brains are being vacuumed out is a human being with human rights. We are absolutely in for a debate, but I fear there aren’t enough Caitlin Flanagan or Bari Weisses to keep it civil.

Expand full comment

I think that you are right, but it’s a function of the shift away from substance towards screeching headlines and harsh rhetoric from the MSM, Hollywood and media in general.

Americans these days are very superficial and distracted. They consume entertainment in huge great gobs - a baseball pitcher gets $43 million to pitch 180 innings ($50,000 per strikeout), actors get millions for a month or two of work, people flock to mindless Marvel flicks that have even given up the trouble to be well ordered (bringing back dead characters in later movies), the streaming wars are a big deal, bastardized plays like Hamilton are all the rage on Broadway with tickets being scalped $1,000 or more at the show’s peak, NBA court side tickets in NYC go for. $6,000 a game ($12,000 if you bring a date). The money follows the values of society.

When it comes to the issues of the day, they have been trained to think very superficially. Roe = a women’s right to choose. End of discussion. Micro aggressions rule the day - it’s about impact, not intent. Ask Frank Langella who just got cancelled on Netflix because he wanted to be a professional actor.

You will not get a public decision based upon a full and valuable discussion about the pros and cons of both sides.

You will get people shouting snippets, ignoring the ones that they don’t like and lots of people not interested in knowing the whole,story.

People make decisions these days on quick impressions,so they can get back to the movie, show or game

Expand full comment

Excellent points, all. But don’t overlook the demonization of childbearing by environmentalists, feminists, and even those who find it too expensive to have a large family these days because who can take the kids to see Hamilton for $1000 a seat? We’re in a bit of trouble on substance, too.

Expand full comment

The article cited in Bari’s article (from the Atlantic) and her comments thst women will continue to seek abortions are, in my opinion, archaic.

Long ago - and it was LONG ago - people used extreme methods in back alley abortions. Today? There is little reason for an unwanted pregnancy to occur in the first place. Planned Parenthood advertises 12:different methods of,contraception. They are cheap (and in many cases free) and readily available. You can get them from movie theater vending machines and supermarkets. Hell, while my daughter was not old enough to get her ears pierced, her middle school nurse had a fishbowl filled with condoms on her desk free for all young takers. No permission slip needed.

And to call abortion woman’s health care is as accurate as calling a face lift health care (in most cases). Abortion is NOT health care in almost all cases. It is a voluntary choice. Of course there are situations where a woman’s physical health is threatened by a pregnancy and in such cases, abortion is not only health care, it’s necessary health care. Similarly, a pregnancy involving severe malformation is health care.

But today, abortion is far too frequently viewed as just another form of birth control, which is why I think it happens so often. 65 MILLION times since Roe. Think about the enormity of that. 65 million people not here because of a poorly written opinion based upon even worse logic that shirt circuited the public discussion about what to do about abortion.

Expand full comment
May 5, 2022·edited May 5, 2022

I happened upon Bari Weiss by accident in an interview with the Hoover Institute and subsequently (and almost immediately) subscribed to Substack. Very fortunate and beyond impressed. Integrity, courage, morals, common sense and much more. I am optimistic about the future and you and your forum have and will have a lot to do with that. Thank you.

Expand full comment

In the Honestly conversation with Caitlin Flanagan, Bari articulated a middle position in the abortion debate. She said: "In my view, at six weeks [where Texas draws the line], the life growing inside of you is not yet a person. But it also not just a clump of cells. It's somewhere in between. It's the potential for a life."

I have a lot of questions about this middle position. I'm sure Bari is too busy to entertain them, but perhaps someone here who agrees with her would like to engage with me?

My first question: What rights, if any, does a 'potential life' pre-person have?

Expand full comment