The Supreme Court has never been about the law, it's been about doing the right thing

[elias7]

Certain SC decisions are about ideology; using the law to conform to that ideology. The ideology that is required on the Supreme Court is one which respects the Constitution and tradition while respecting changing social and physical realities.

Just as every decision has a dissenting opinion, intelligent minds can disagree and reason to a different conclusion.

The right decision in citizens United should have been rooted in the realization that big money would destroy politics. Free speech being tied to corporate expenditures was not an issue when the constitution was written, and tying free speech to independent expenditures as the majority did, is arbitrary, a legal judgment, not a fact.

W/ regard to gun control, the right decision, is to realize that guns are killing our country and our culture and to find a way to uphold legislation that restricts guns. When the constitution was written, and specifically the 2nd amendment, there were single shot shotguns, rifles and handguns. There were militias to defend if needed against centralized power. There were not AR-15s, AK-47s, 9 mm high magazine handguns, etc. There was no national guard. The Supreme Court has to balance the reality of 1776 with the reality of 2022.

That’s how it is with abortion. The right decision would recognized that in a pluralistic society, a minority and essentially religious viewpoint cannot dictate the behavior for all. The right decision would acknowledge the reality that abortion has been legal for 50 years in this country and will occur whether abortion is legal or not, so it is in fact a healthcare issue, not a religious issue. Regardless of the fact that most Americans favor abortion, it is not popular opinion that should guide good judgment on the part of the court. It is doing the right thing, and using the law to protect a woman’s right to abortion, defending our individual freedoms, and not letting religious evangelicals define when life begins, when or whether an abortion should happen.

History, should our country survive, will bear witness to the wrongness of these decisions. Or stated another way, a healthy 21st-century society cannot have big money in politics, cannot have citizens having free rein to assault weapons, and cannot outlaw abortion, let alone intrude on the rights of over 50% of our population.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. What? NT

[Frasier Balzov]

2. Solomon might settle it this way.

A state cannot have more gun stores than it has abortion clinics.

[Ocelot II]

3. That makes no sense at all. The Court routinely ignores the law

and does what a majority of the justices think is "the right thing." In Dobbs, they ignored the so-called sacred legal principle of stare decisis and, without admitting it, did exactly what the right thing according to their religion dictated, even though they twisted the law to get there. It's true that law is always subject to interpretation, but what you and I think is the right thing might be the wrong thing to someone else. Unless you are a follower of Thomas Aquinas and believe there is such a thing as immutable natural law, trying to find agreement on what, exactly, is the right thing in any given situation is going to be impossible.

There is a pretty much universal consensus that murder is wrong, but what is murder? Killing in self-defense is considered allowable, but self-defense has to be clearly defined. Killing in war is allowable as long as you aren't killing non-combatants, but how do you tell non-combatants from guerillas? And some people believe abortion is murder, mostly (but not always) for reasons based on religion. They are entitled to believe that, of course; but when is it OK to impose a religious belief on an entire population, many of whom don't share that belief? Dobbs got around that underlying motive with a whole steaming pile of the legal sophistry they call originalism. They couldn't come out and say they think abortion is wrong, so they invoked something they called the law.

I guess my point is that the law doesn't distinguish between the right thing and the wrong thing, because people don't ever agree on what are right and wrong things. The law is supposed to set rules and definitions for making those determinations, but laws are written and interpreted by whoever controls legislatures and courts.