Roe v. Wade is on the docket again, and everybody knows exactly what will happen.
No, we cannot predict the ruling on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Republican-appointed judges are inevitably mercurial on this issue in hearings. We would not be surprised to see Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, or even Neil Gorsuch uphold part or even all of the current deformed jurisprudence on abortion.
But we do know with certainty that the Left will use media pressure, corporate pressure, and even violent threats against the republic in a tireless lobby effort to preserve Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The abortion lobby has long been the beating heart of the Democratic Party. Defense of abortion and subsidies for Planned Parenthood are the central items of Democratic dogma. On war, taxes, spending, labor, and even guns and climate change, Democrats allow some dissent. But not on abortion. The party’s fundraising apparatus is inextricably tied with the abortion industry.
Roe and Casey are pillars of the abortion cause. These rulings are grounded not at all in the Constitution nor in science but instead clumsily crafted by dishonest activist judges to invent a right to kill unborn children. They took abortion out of the realm of representative democracy. Legal scholars across the political spectrum know the rulings are indefensible. They know that any honest judge would throw them over the side hastily like a leaky, toxic nuclear reactor from a Soviet submarine.
That’s why the Democrats need to resort to threats. With six conservative judges on the court for the first time in nearly a century, Democrats are afraid that their holy grail is in danger. They will stop at nothing to protect it.
Specifically, Democrats aided by media allies will declare that the Supreme Court becomes illegitimate if it strikes down Roe. This is absurd because, again, pro-choice legal scholars admit the ruling “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” But Democrats and liberal journalists will threaten to delegitimize the court because that’s what they’ve done in the past any time they didn’t like its ruling.
When the Obama administration was arguing in 2012 that the interstate commerce clause gave Congress the right to mandate intrastate noncommerce (that is, Obamacare’s individual mandate), reporters and liberal commentators regularly issued threats such as “Obamacare is on trial. So is the Supreme Court,” “Court’s legitimacy at stake on ACA,” and “Roberts court on trial.”
The reporters and commentators insinuated that the court would somehow become invalid if it failed to endorse the Democrats’ creative legal argument.
Democrats have made the threat very concrete by spending a year talking about court-packing. Like President Franklin Roosevelt before him, President Joe Biden knows that adding justices to the bench just to swing the ideological balance would be incredibly destructive to the nation’s political fabric. Yet the Democrats are issuing exactly this threat, usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly: Uphold Roe or we’ll pack the court.
And the Left may even threaten violence against the justices. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seemingly did just that last year when discussing abortion cases. “I want to tell you, Gorsuch,” Schumer said. “I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Supreme Court justices don’t face elections and serve lifetime terms. So, to what could Schumer have been referring except for physical violence?
Schumer almost apologized for those words last year. But in the coming months, Democrats will be unapologetic in their threats against the court. Biden should try to reel in his party. The media, rather than join the mob, should shame any Democrats who threaten our constitutional system.
There are people who value abortion more than they value the republic. Let’s hope the president and the press are not among them.
