Wizardspride wrote:?t=FpQVorcFBK6Ol5l4xKJ2lA&s=19
What a peek behind the curtain, and coming form Thomas of all people.
The reason why conservatives have such a boner for textualism and originalism is that it's the easiest way to justify the deprivation of rights acquired by the American people over the years via SCOTUS: worker's rights, black rights, women's rights, lgbtq+ rights, etc.
Turning back the clock and saying whatever rights were in place in 1788 are what we get now allows conservatives to market it as "what the framers intended" instead of saying the quite part out loud as "this is what white landowning men declared"
Conservatives are also in love with the idea of "natural right" derived from a higher power; those that are universal, fundamental, inalienable, and patently obvious. Their justification of these "natural rights" is that they are historically embedded in human history that it has to be fundamental. This allows them to draw a distinction between natural rights and legal rights, the latter of which are "only" provided for by a legal system, or some other manmade construct.
This is BS because there is no such thing as a natural right. All rights are derived from social contracts, necessary for the establishment of civilization. We don't lie, steal, kill, or covet our neighbors' wives because as a society we agreed not to, not because God told us from on high. But again, this allows Conservatives to hide behind the skirt of a higher being, and say "well, these Natural Rights that we see in history say nothing about LGBTQ+, or race, or women, so they must not be important."
We are the society that we choose to be. Clarence Thomas telling the American People that despite them agreeing that a right to abortion should exist, the legal system (the exact system that establishes rights) cannot be "bullied" into giving them the rights they want? That's a direct slap to the face of the concept of a social contract.
It's a perversion of the constitution.
The perverse logic flows as such: constitution guarantees the rights of the citizens -> whatever is not in the constitution must be unconstitutional (incorrect*) -> if you want to amend the constitution, you have to go through the proper channels -> oh shucks, looks like a certain political party has exploited and corrupted those proper channels so that such amendments are practically impossible.
The United States' longest drought in between Amendments was between 1804 and 1865, shortly after the Bill of Rights through the reconstruction amendments that abolished slavery. Should be obvious why securing sufficient bipartisanship during this period for amendments was impossible during this period.
There was a 43 year gap between the 15th amendment (right to vote for AA) and 16th amendments (income tax) and a 21 year gap between the 26th and 27th amendment (voting age set at 18; congressional salaries).
We're currently sitting at a 30 year gap without an amendment, and there have been some really interesting amendments that are still on the table that are still sitting outstanding, including a "abolish the Senate" amendment from 1911, a "maximum wage" amendment capping wealth at $1M from 1933 after the wall street crash, a "Balanced budget" amendment that's been sitting from also the early 1930's, a "Single Subject Amendment" that would prevent Congress from adding pork riders to bills, judicial term limit amendments, and a host of election security amendments. The Equal Rights Amendment has been pending since 1923. Environmentalists have been pushing for a "Green" Amendment since the 90's that would list the individual right to clean air and water as an enumerated right.
Election security amendments include an amendment to overturn Citizens United (declaring the Corporations are people, and are capable of free speech and that money = speech that has exploded dark money spending in elections), anti-gerrymandering amendment, declaring Election day a national holiday to increase voter access, etc.
Seeing as how we can't even pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, I'd bet money that we'll break the 43 year drought and possibly even the 61 year drought, which would indicate that the nation is actually more partisan now than during slavery.
*Roe was clearly decided on the right to privacy, which has been the legal platform on which countless other rights, such as the right to interracial marriage, gay marriage, contraception, school choice. Conservatives hate this because it's a grey area where liberals can point to that supports unenumerated rights in the Constitution. Conservatives love privacy but hate that there are cases that they oppose that stem out of privacy. Stand your ground, school choice, and briefly anti-maskers all invoked "the right to privacy" in supporting their points, but now dance gleefully at the death of Roe.
**it's also important to note that Dobbs, when passed, will be a rare instance where SCOTUS overturns a case so as to take rights away from citizens. When Brown v. Board overturned Plessy, it got rid of "Separate but Equal" and granted rights. Lawrence v. Texas overturned Bowers v. Hardwick re: sodomy, in granting rights to citizens to make love how they so choose (on the basis of privacy). Loving v. Virginia overturned Pace v. Alabama re: interracial marriage, granting rights to citizens to marry the race they so choose (on the basis of privacy). Obergefell overturned Baker v. Nelson re: gay marriage, granting rights to citizens to marry any person they so choose (on the basis of privacy). West Virginia BOE v. Barnette overruled Minersville School District v. Gobitis and held that a student had the freedom to not salute the american flag if the student so chose.
I say rare, but not unique. Cases like West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish overturned the infamous Lochner case, where in Lochner, it was found that a maximum hour law in NY (60 hrs a week) was unconstitutional due to a citizen's freedom to enter into contracts for however many hours the citizen chose. This obviously led to business owners exploiting the heck out of their workers. Parrish reversed and took away the "freedom to contract" argument "to promote worker safety" and paved the way for labor-protection laws to be put in place at the cost of workers' right to "contract" (allowing for child labor laws, OSHA regulations, etc.)
EDIT: TL;DR
Thomas is a doofus and said the quiet part out loud: Republicans don't care about democracy. He freely admits that the majority of Americans don't want this, but they don't get to have it their way because Republicans control the halls of power. The will of the people want it, there's a 50 year old SCOTUS precedent set in place, and the second that FedSoc got enough bootlickers onto the bench, BING ZAM. reversed. Will of the people don't matter. Precedent doesn't matter. All that matters is their agenda, which they don't even care about, but for the fact that they've indoctrinated a hyperloyal base into thinking it's important.
