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Democracy is Doing OK
It was the July 4 holiday which brought out the worst of it, those claiming our democracy is in danger, failing, or in some cases, failed. But the holiday was just an excuse for our daily dose of doom. The blight of articles followed a familiar path, starting with some event (January 6 was the clear leader) and explaining how it was the start of fascism, comparing it one of the few historical examples allowed quotable by progressives, usually something to do with the Reichstag, and then growing that image to say, Trump standing over Lady Liberty, that kinda grin on his face.
Actually, our democracy is doing just fine. Things are working more or less exactly as they are supposed to.
The runner up to January 6 as the last gasp of democracy is the recent set of Supreme Court decisions. Centerpiece is the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a sign of democratic failing because it fully strips women of their rights and shows the Court has no respect of precedent and could overturn anything. Usually this means the end of same-sex marriage as another Democratic emote-o-point, but in some screeds reaches as far as banning inter-racial marriages and contraception. Any day now!
Slow down, kids. If you go too fast you’ll miss the scenery, in this case things working about normal. Perhaps it is necessary to remind our “democracy” is sort of like sharing crayons in kindergarten, sometimes you have to use the yucky brown one and let the other kids use the preferred red and orange. Progressives, with a lock hold on the Supreme Court for many decades, never mind the media, advertising, entertainment, and academia, grew too used to getting their way, too used to defining democracy as “expansion of rights that I favor and shrinking of those you favor.” So expanding the Bill of Rights automatically meant ignoring the Second Amendment and dilating the 14th to loop in abortions. It was easy to see it all as progress when for the most part it was just you always getting more of what you wanted.
But a real democracy shares nicely, and as voting patterns (remember when Ohio used to be a well-contested purple state? Florida always up for grabs? John King zooming the CNN Magic Map practically into voters’ backyards?) and national moods change so does the makeup and decisions of the Court. Remember back in 1896 when the Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson separate rail cars for whites and blacks were equal enough as required by the 14th Amendment, that race was constitutionally a way to judge people? The upshot was constitutional sanction to laws known as Jim Crow (the name comes from a popular minstrel character of the time) designed to maintain racial segregation by means of separate public facilities and services.
Then in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education the Court ignored a whopper of stare decisis and ended separate but equal as an unjust albeit long-held societal standard. Race was not constitutionally a way to judge people. Nobody is keeping score but it was 59 years of separate but equal, and 49 of Roe. People said a lot of things in 1954 when the Brown decision was handed down, but it is hard to find a genre of “end of democracy.” Indeed, enforcing Brown, even to the point of deploying Federal troops to do so under the Insurrection Act everyone was afraid of on January 6, is often cited as a high point of democracy. WHen tested, the system worked.
January 6 should be a semi-holiday, like 9/11, something worth noting every year as an example of democracy working exactly as intended. Let’s look for the undemocratic element: 1) American holds an election and not everyone agrees who won (nothing new, where do you think all those complex presidential election rules came from but past instances of disagreement?) 2) Lawful protests take place at the Capitol; 3) When a minority of protestors start trespassing, law enforcement steps in and after one terrible fatality on the ground in Ashli Babbitt, the crowd disassembles. 4) Delayed a bit, the Vice President ignores any background noise and simply carries out his Constitutional duty in the ceremonial certification of electors selected earlier. With the possible exception of the cops gunning down the unarmed Babbit, everyone did their duty, and another peaceful transfer of power took place. No tanks on the White House lawn.
To create the same climate of fear progressives more or less successful maintained during the four years of the Trump administration without blaming Joe Biden for some of the highest inflation and gas prices, and lowest stock vitality in years takes some clever word play. It exists in abundance. The Supreme Court judges (the bad ones!) become right wing extremists, not jurists. Their decision on Dobbs is based somehow on only rights that existed in 1868, and so forth. Taking away the EPA’s unilateral power to make climate change rules without full and open debate and returning that authority to Congress is somehow twisted to be both undemocratic and a sign of the apocalypse. Even Left Wing Extremist Sotomayor (exaggeration is fun!) wrote of Dobbs that the majority decision “undermines the court’s legitimacy” as if such a thing happening in a democracy — the majority carrying the day — was something extraordinary and particularly rare in its evil. But just saying things are true does not make them so.
Of course George Soros had to weigh in since we’re talking about the threat to our democracy. “There is only one way to rein in the Supreme Court: throw the Republican Party out of office in a landslide. That would allow Congress to protect through legislation the rights that had been entrusted to the protection of the Supreme Court. It is now clear that doing so was a big mistake. Congress must act.”
Now we’ll leave aside the part about Congress not acting on abortion, same sex marriage, inter-racial marriage, contraception, the EPA, and a lot of other supposed threats to democracy for decades, including when Democrats held majority power in both houses, the Court, and the Executive.
But Soros still sees a problem: “When it comes to organizing a landslide victory against the radicalized Republicans, opponents face almost insuperable obstacles. Republicans have not only stacked the Supreme Court and many lower courts with extremist judges. In states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas, they have enacted a raft of laws that make voting very difficult.”
We’ll take Texas as an example. You can register to vote there online, which does not seem too hard given anyone who can borrow a cell phone and do it from a parking lot. You do have to present one of seven forms of ID to register and to vote, including a drivers license, a handgun permit, military ID, or others. You can’t have a decent adult night out without one of those, and several are issued by the Federal government well outside the hands of racist old Texas. In certain circumstances a utility bill or a cashed check can suffice. Not clear what’s so hard; 17 million people in Texas are registered so far, which sounds like alotta democracy is working just fine. Now, showing the same photo ID (and a vax card) just to sit down and eat a burger, that has some undemocratic overtones to it…
Soros aside, no one clings to the “democracy is dying” meme like a convert named Max Boot. Covering the gloom beat for WaPo, Boot warns “we’re in danger of losing our democracy.” He is stirred by Americans coming together to support Ukraine’s “fight for freedom” (better there then on the beaches of Santa Monica, eh Max?) “But it is dismaying,” he writes, “to see that there is no similar consensus on defending democracy at home.” The solution is simple, vote for Democratic candidates only, even if you don’t agree with them, because what could be more democratic then being told who to vote for and asked to not think about your choice. “Panic,” Max writes, “…is sometimes warranted.”
Boot supports one of the most undemocratic things possible, to demand the end of democratic institutions when their call has not gone your way. Don’t like Dobbs? Support packing the Supreme Court (what happens when Republicans regain power and re-pack it?) Don’t care for the electoral system? Demand the Constitution be damned and the popular vote given precedence. Max Boot, again, declares with the straight face of someone who must have failed eight grade civics class “There is no justice in a political system that gives Republicans six of nine Supreme Court seats even though a Republican has won the popular vote for president only once in the past 30 years. So, too, there is something deeply amiss with a Senate that gives California (population 39.3 million) the same number of seats as Wyoming (population 581,348).” “The Founders never envisioned such an imbalance between power and population,” wrote Boot in a multi-Pulitzer-winning newspaper.
Um, they actually did. It was the Founders who created our proportional representation system precisely to balance the power of big states and small ones.
Keep in mind there is a reason progressives are trying to keep people in a state of fear. Fearful people are easy to manipulate; you need only scare them to the point where they demand relief, and then provide them the way out as the final solution. A standard trick of any demagogue. “Democrats need to lean into the politics of fear,” says the NYT. So it is a natural extension of “Trump is Putin’s boy” to “let’s have a war against Putin.” Or from “some states ban abortion” to “next is a national abortion ban enacted by a Republican Congress.” Historically fear has driven any number of crusades and Crusades. The solution of course is not to be drawn in, to stop and ask yourself if something is true (“it’s hard to vote in Texas”) and react out of intellect and not emotion. Heck, if half of Germany would have thought through the Reichstag fire and not bought into fear mongering, George Soros, et al, would need a whole new go-to bad guy as they try and pre-defeat Trump in 2024.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Five Important Things About the Abortion Decision
— Abortion rights are guaranteed by the Constitution.
In 1973 the Supreme Court handed down a judicially creative interpretation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in the case Roe v. Wade to claim abortion was like other privacy-based rights (such as the right to contraception, right to same-sex marriage, right to adult sexual acts with consenting partner, and right to interracial marriage); that is, unenumerated rights, rights inherent in the Constitution but not listed by name like the right to free speech and the right to bear arms.
— So that’s it. The current decision is illegitimate. Abortion is constitutional!
The Supreme Court in its decisions creates precedents, meaning judgement they’re supposed to follow in the future. That’s the doctrine of stare decisis. But the Court is also allowed to revisit itself and overturn what it felt was a bad decision. Some of these are famous, for example, Plessy v. Ferguson, which said separate but equal was the law of the land, leading to black kids going to one school and white kids going to another supposedly equal school. Plessy held stare decisis for nearly 60 years, until the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1953 overturned it. Like Roe, society was structured around Plessy and decisions were made keeping with it, until it was no longer the law of the land. Today almost everyone sees Plessy as something that discriminated against blacks, but that does not change the principle, just how we feel. Bottom line: respect for precedent does not preclude the Supreme Court from overturning its past rulings, even if that means big changes like societal desegregation.
— I’m still stuck on how the 14th Amendment could say something to one group of justices, but not to another group of justices.
Because the Constitution was written mostly in the 18th century, a lot could not be anticipated by the Founders. So the Supreme Court exists to interpret the meaning as one of its jobs. The 14A was ratified in 1868 and extended civil and legal rights to everyone, specifically formerly enslaved blacks, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, ensured rights to those in states where discriminatory laws were in place, and said the right to due process of law and equal protection of the law applied at both the federal and state levels of government. The 14A says “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Court found in 1965 in that text the right to privacy, specifically the right of married couples to get contraceptive advice from their doctor. The Court said that even though the Constitution did not explicitly lay out a right to privacy, “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights, older than our political parties, older than our school system,” so it there without needing to be written out like with free speech or bearing arms. This is where the 2022 Dobbs decision draws its line “the inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
Then in 1973 amid a national debate over abortion, the Court found a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy. At the same time it also acknowledged the state’s interest in protecting the “potential of human life” and so Roe’s trimester-based system for abortion restriction was created. As with same-sex marriage, since the right was in the Constitution, America needed a Federal-level decision on how that would be broadly carried out, with a compromise of leaving room for states’ interpretation.
In 1992, the trimester system was reviewed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The justices reaffirmed a woman’s right to abortion but gave states more leeway in regulating it as long as the states did not create an “undue burden.” For example, some states legally implemented a 72-hour waiting period and mandatory counseling
In 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson the Court changed its mind. It said abortion was not a Constitutional right, and thus the Constitution does not prevent state legislatures from banning abortion. Since abortion is not a Constitutional issue, they concluded, and because the issue is contentious, it requires states’ debate and create their own laws.
— So can’t the Court now go back and do away with our rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, deciding variously that those are not unenumerated rights?
Technically yes, in reality hardly likely. While Justice Thomas wrote separately that other “substantive precedents” decided by the Court should be re-examined, no other justice agreed. More importantly, Justice Alito, who wrote the 2022 opinion, specifically cited those rights and said the instant decision had nothing to do with them. Among other reasons, abortion stands alone in that the government has an interest in protecting the “potential of human life.” And even Justice Thomas did not place interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia) on the chopping block, even though it has many of the same judicial roots as the other unenumerated rights. Justice Alito wrote plainly “None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They are therefore inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.” That would make citing Dobbs as precedent to overturn say same-sex marriage nearly impossible.
— So blah-blah, bottom line is the Supreme Court says women cannot have abortions.
The Court did not make abortion illegal. Instead, the Court said abortion (already regulated by Roe’s trimester system) would instead be regulated by each state individually. This is to acknowledge the lack of consensus in America on what is morally right. Seven states, for example, have no plans to change their laws and allow for up to third trimester abortions, among the most liberal globally. These include populous states like California and New York with huge metro areas, so that a majority of women will live in states where surgical abortion is accessible (the majority of abortions even pre-Dobbs took place in Blue states.) Other states, such as Mississippi, which pre-Dobbs had only one abortion clinic, have made the procedure illegal though at little overall change. Some 13 states will make abortion illegal, and the change to women in those areas who cannot travel may be more significant. The point is for each state to consider what is right for itself.
Potential harm to women will be mitigated by “abortion pills,” which did not exist in 1973 and will help eliminate so-called coat hanger abortions (there is no case in America of a woman being prosecuted for seeking an abortion since 1922.) Even before the recent decision, over 42 percent of abortions were “medical abortions,” by pill. While there is no way to downplay the significance of Dobbs, it does not create a black or white landscape for reproductive rights its critics try and paint.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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