The fact that the Supreme Court’s ruling against buffer zones around abortion clinics in Massachusetts was unanimous makes it more difficult for people to make a political argument against it. Obviously, many people are outraged or at least frustrated by the decision, but unanimity confers credibility on Supreme Court decisions.
I think it damages the standing of the Supreme Court every single time they issue 5-4 decisions that split along party lines. Unanimous decisions don’t really enhance they Court’s reputation but they take the steam out of debates about their rulings.
In this case, I don’t like the way the Court ruled, although I haven’t had a chance to read their decision. I think it’s very important to protect people’s safety and I’m doubtful that the Justices took that consideration into sufficient account.
If even Ginsburg signed onto the decision I think it has to have some merit. I trust her on these issues especially. And a lone dissent from her would have carried a lot of political weight, but she didn’t do it.
Although according to the Times article the four liberal justices signed onto Roberts narrow decision. The other cons wanted something more sweeping. So maybe it was a move by Ginsburg and the libs to limit the holding.
To quote an asshole: “You’re dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights.”
If Massachusetts changes the law from “abortion clinic” to “medical facility” that changes it to “neutral” zone and therefore ok. That’s just how we view abortion providers. They don’t provide medical care; it’s too targeted. In my mind, that’s bullshit, and it’s why people hate lawyers.
That’s not neutral; it expands the reduction in free speech rights for no public policy purpose because there aren’t protestors harassing people entering any medical clinic except those that provide abortion services. Seems even less Constitutional than the 35 foot buffer zone for women’s health clinics.
I didn’t say it made sense. But from what I’m reading, broadening the scope of the buildings would make it ok.
Perhaps we should start protesting outside of doctor offices that provide boner pills to impotent white men.
As soon as Scalia and Thomas go to buy theirs, you will be three miles away.
/
I didn’t read the majority opinion that way. The majority is, I believe, arguing the opposite: that singling out abortion providers for protection is content neutral, but even under the lesser scrutiny applied to content neutral restrictions on speech, it the law prohibits too much.
I don’t understand how Hill v Colorado would stand then. My reading is that Roberts believes there’s not enough opportunity for the pro lifers, and therefore not neutral.
And that’s inconsistent with the ruling on the Westboro Baptist free speech case. Note that one had to do with the emotional distress/harm inflicted on a bereaving father by the protestors at the funeral of his son and not specifically the constitutionality statutory buffer zones. However,
How soon before Westboro files suit that 100 feet is not constitutional? Nor is 35 feet. There’s a “Goldilocks number” somewhere between zero and thirty-five feet but it remains to be found.
The majority opinion also doesn’t bar other restrictions designed to preserve clinic access, even ones with buffer zones of 35 feet or more. It’s just this MA law, because the MA legislature didn’t try enough other things first to preserve access, or show that less intrusive measures do the job.
To engage in a bit of SCOTUS Kremlinology, I suspect that there was a bit of quid pro quo where Roberts got the liberals to write a very narrow majority opinion with him in exchange for the stuff about how engaging (or attempting to engage) in close personal counseling is a FIrst Amendment right.
The decision is pretty weird, unanimity aside. I don’t think it will provide much guidance for the MA legislature, or any other legislature, if they want to write new laws to protect clinic access.
If there was a quid pro quo in this case to give Roberts a majority decision (his legacy is very important to him), it better outweigh less legal protection from harassment for women seeking medical attention from a clinic that also provides abortion services.
See for example this from SCOTUSBlog, which appears to be as confused as I am about the contradictions:
“The Chief Justice’s approving remarks about the First Amendment right to engage in counseling in public arenas appeared to contradict some of the reasoning of the 2000 decision.”
Pro-tip:
The justices (err, the clerks) who write the opinions reason backwards from what they want.
Every. Single. Time.
Contradictions in USSC rulings is the rule, rather than the exception.
See: USSC, entire case history.
There are plenty of examples in daily life where state or federal governments enforce a minimum distance limit between citizens and people or places, and those instances aren’t considered as infringing on personal rights.
If the president, or my state governor, or Paris Hilton happen to stroll down the street, I’m generally not at liberty to walk right up to them and start haranguing them. The police or their personal security detail will tell me to go stand over yonder. They’re able to enforce their wishes through physical compulsion and I’d be hard pressed to win redress for an infringement of my rights.
Why the hell is this any different?
With Paris Hilton you certainly are, within the limits of the statute on assault.
If the president, or my state governor, or Paris Hilton happen to stroll down the street, I’m generally not at liberty to walk right up to them and start haranguing them.
Don’t forget the buffer zone about the Supreme Court itself.
The right to do so probably exists. Exercising the right, not so much. Paparazzi may know better than most where that right ends.
This is correct. You can verbally harass any politician in DC you see. You can even stand right outside of the Pentagon and beat drums while hurling insults at the people going inside, close enough to touch them.
It happens all the damn time… it’s just people laugh at them and view them as crazies.
The President, state governor, and Paris Hilton all belong to a club you’ll never belong to. Also, they’re all rich and they just happen to be more equal than we are, is all.
basically it will cause abortion provider to buy more land around their clinics or rent extra space to provide a buffer on their own which isn’t good given they struggle to finance their operations in most cases anyway.
Picture a gang of those open-carry nuts somewhere making common cause with the virulent anti-abortion contingent outside abortion clinics.
Just the kind of combination any right-wing extremist would be hoping for.
that’s an good argument for open carry and stand your ground.
I’d love to see some anti-abortion fuckface get shot by an angry boyfriend/husband/woman going to get an abortion.
“I felt threatened, your honor, so I stood my ground and shot the motherfucker.”
Tipped because you surely meant the “love to see” as a fantasy and not a reality.
You don’t me very well. Absolutely sincere. I don’t like bullies.
And yet during the political conventions the police will round up the protestors and put them behind fences 5 blocks away. The SCOTUS will be fine with that.
So screaming and gesturing is fine when it’s against what they think are sluts, but when the screaming is done by what they think are hippies, then you cannot have enough distance.
OK, then. Nothing political here, move along.
/
Time for some lawsuits challenging the legality of those huge buffer zones for political conventions.
Never happen. Not under this this PermaGov it won’t. I mean…there are controllers in there. A national fix is being ratcheted into place!!! Lookit what happened in Chicago in 1968!!! Why…McCarthy or McGovern might have won if them anti-war hooligans had their way!!! Good thing got rid of RFK a coupla months before, eh? The fix woulda been out the window!!!
Naaahhh…round ’em up and put behind fences fer the duration.
AG
Arthur, do you care about the threat to women’s rights that is contained in the Court’s decision today re. Massachusetts?
I care about the system that allows these kinds of decisions to be made by creatures who work for the .01%. Fix the system and you fix the problem. This problem is just a symptom of the real sickness. We are playing whack-a-mole with all of this “The Supreme Court said this!!!” and “The Republicans did that!!!”
Change the system itself. As long as we continue to squabble amongst ourselves while continuing to elect RatPublicans and DemocRats who are all owned by that .01% nothing is really going to change.
Nothing except the screaming headlines.
As we lurch along headed straight down the toilet of history.
Sit on it.
AG
Thought so. You don’t care about women’s rights in this area. You’re a Paul movement guy, so that comes as absolutely no surprise. Ron and Rand want to force women to give birth against their will, and they’re opposed to women’s right to equal access to contraception, and you have no problem with that.
Also outs him as neither a libertarian nor cool.
Correct.
I am not a “libertarian”…yet another false collective established by the media to keep people at loggerheads with one another…nor do I aspire in any way to be “cool.”
I am hot, Marie.
Hot in every sense of the word.
At the boiling point regarding what is going on here.
Bet on it.
Marshall McLuhan identified television…and by extension all electronic media…as “cool.” He was right, up to a point. However, he put a positive valuation on that “cool.” As we all know, too much cool rapidly turns to cold, and that is what has happened now. The winter of our decontent.
The electronic media have now been almost totally decontented. There is no there there, and Gertrude Stein so famously said about the city of Oakland. Decontented, it has turned to ice along with the people who believe in its pronouncements.
I am bringing the heat.
Deal wid it.
AG
blah, blah, blah.
You’re singing an old tune but less defined. Suffragettes in the mid-nineteenth century stood down and agreed to align themselves with the abolitionists that promised the “little ladies” the right to vote as soon as slavery was ended. That “as soon as” ended up being defined as fifty plus years and not even then bestowed on women but they had to fight for it during those fifty plus years.
And how did those freed slaves fare in those fifty plus years? Absent the voices of women that would have been a natural ally in preventing Jim Crow, not well.
So you can just can your “all humanity” claptrap when the autonomy of real women in this country are of less than no interest to you. “Less than” is too polite because you’ve aligned yourself with the Pauls that would deny women autonomy over their own bodies. In addition to that their opposition to minimum wage is both racist and misogynist because it’s women and people of color that work in the lowest paying and hardest labor jobs.
place you.
You didn’t by any chance ever post as “Cicero” or “Hauteur” (etc.) on Slate’s now-defunct Fray, did you?
You are right. I do not care about women’s rights. I also don’t care about men’s rights, Jews’ rights, homosexuals’ rights, African Americans’ rights, Latinos’ rights, Mayflower descendants’ rights or the “rights” of any of the thousand other false groups into which the controllers have split us in a tactical effort to maintain their own strategic goal…the control of populations for their own profit. Pit say potential Tea Party members against minorities and vice versa…both of which are groups of people that are basically living at the lower end of the American feed trough…and the two groups will waste all of their energy fighting each other. Unite them…and other false collectives… and things will start to happen. Good things.
Here is what I do care about. I care about human rights, including the rights of people who do not live in the U.S. Establish human rights as a baseline for all government and every one of these other problems will get sorted out. Do not do so at your own peril.
AG
Yes, yes, yes. So, what about the human right for a woman to determine their own family planning? What about Ron and Rand Paul’s desire to force women to give birth against their will, and their desire to deny them equal access to contraception?
It is very noticeable that, time after time, you spill thousands of words while avoid engaging this simple violation of human rights which the Paul movement would impose on Americans.
I repeat:
“Establish human rights as a baseline for all government and every one of these other problems will get sorted out. Do not do so at your own peril.”
The further away government exists from the governed the less focused it can be on the rights of individuals. Hand this problem back to the states and see what happens. Maybe all the women in Mississippi who disagree with fundamentalist practices would pack up and move to Vermont. I certainly hope so. Eventually things would sort themselves out. What is going on now simply isn’t working. Do you think that the courts speak for all Americans? Of course not. As the great labor leader Mike Quill said when he was told that a state court had ruled that a transit strike he was leading in NYC was illegal and had to be shut down immediately:
Civil disobedience is an option as well. Maybe even not so civil. Seeing as how the opposition to the reproductive rights of women…and by extension, those of men as well, at least until we eliminate all sexual congress in favor of more mechanistic means…seems to center in pro-gun, right-to-carry states, why not simply set up an armed guard around women’s clinics?
It’s been done before with other causes.
Why not?
You want reproductive rights?
Fight for them!!!
AG
I’ll give you this- you’re a Paul movement guy through and through, and quite the troll as well.
It is edifying to learn, over and over, that YOU do not defend the right for a woman to have agency over their own body. YOU will not use your rhetorical and voting powers to defend human rights. YOU agree with Ron and Rand Paul’s positions on abortion rights and denial of equal access to contraception.
“Eventually things would sort themselves out.” Your passive voice here is horrifying. You abandon women and cowardly attempt to disguise your brutality.
You tell women and those who support their agency to go to the few local clinics which provide abortion and other services and get into armed shootouts with the police if necessary? It is hard to adequately describe how foolish your recommendation is here.
And what of the denial of equal access to contraception? What are defenders of equal rights to do if the Supreme Court finds for Hobby Lobby on Monday? What are they to do with the dozens of State Legislatures which are choking off women’s access to health care, in complete ideological agreement with Rand Paul and you?
New drinking game. Everyone takes a slug every time Arthur writes “permagov.” Last one to pass out cold wins.
Anybody who thinks this idea is somehow funny is already passed out, Parrallax. Eyes wide shut and fast asleep.
Nighty night…
AG
There have been multiple legal actions. As far as I know, none have been successful.
I guess holding a protest sign at a political party convention isn’t as much of a free speech issue as yelling at women about their medical decisions.
Well, everybody knows that politicians are delicate flowers in need of huge amounts of personal space. Individual women just have to learn better not to be intimidated by those engaging in such vile and threatening speech. It’s only like a supercharged catcall that women are forced to endure all the time. Not that members of the Supreme Court are likely to have experienced being the victim of a catcall to appreciate how distressing they can be.
In the future, PP may need to organize and recruit along these lines.
Excellent point. I would rate this, but I don’t understand the rating system between the parens. Would someone explain it to me, please.
Thanks.
you must have an account here, and be logged in.
So you should see below the post you replied to, right next to “Reply to this”, a window that says “none” by default. Just click the down arrow on the right side of that box and the available ratings should appear: click your choice.
It’s not so much credibility as creating powerlessness.
If a decision goes 5-4 you think okay, almost there. Get rid of a justice or 2 and the problem’s solved. But if it’s unanimous the mountain to fix the decision is so incredibly high that functionally that avenue to order the world properly is closed to you unless you want to use force.
In the meantime, this ruling will empower the anti-abortionists to engage in more force.
I hope one of their daughters needs to have an abortion and it winds up on TV.
Elites have discreet private clinics/medical centers where they obtain all legally protected medical services. Probably some that aren’t.
It’s only women that must use lower cost clinics that are subjected to this anti-abortion intimidation and harassment. Always easier to go after the poors.
And if it were Vegans using similar intimidation practices against people with their small and vulnerable children in tow entering McDonalds would the ruling have been the same? (Assume either a state legislature enacted a 35 foot buffer zone and vegans filed suit or the state failed to enact a buffer zone and McDonalds sued for failure to do so because it increased their security costs. Or a citizen sued because the required security added fifty cents to the cost of a Big Mac.)
Vegans do this already though. It’s one of the reasons the moment people hear you’re a vegan they start getting annoyed. There are very aggressive, loud, caustic, foul tempered, and vicious vegans.
It’s still legal and they are allowed to do it. Vegans only get in trouble when they graduate to assaulting people and destroying property… which does happen and then they get arrested.
You are either joking, or delusional. I’m rooting for the former.
Vegans can be/are prosecuted as terrorists under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act if they cause economic harm. 18 USC section 43,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Enterprise_Terrorism_Act
Show me a case where vegans engaged in violence/assassination/murder like the abortion clinic protesters.
As shown in your post the following is the usual reaction to pro vegan expression.
http://pdxintelligencer.com/asshole-vegan-orders-meatless-meal-right-front-people/
At the metro station at work, we have Jehovah’s Witnesses standing next to the entrance with a shelf full of fliers. They just stand there smiling, and the tops of the shelves have headlines like “What does God say about smoking?” or “The truth about Hallloween…” But they’re just standing, with their free literature sitting there if you want it.
Contrast that with the abortion people who sometimes protest there, with their giant poster on the ground so you’re forced to step on it to get to the metro entrance. They usually block your way on the sidewalk, harass you and get in your face. They’re still not as bad as the clinic protestors, but equally annoying.
If these people did what these Jehovah’s Witnesses did, I don’t think anyone would give a shit. But that’s not what happens.
Here off K Street we get all the crazies from all sides. The leftiest of the left, and the rightest of the right. They range from just carrying signs, all the way up to physical harassment, and yes both sides.
Though the only people we’ve had break into our building were Keystone XL types, and they laughably got the wrong building because the people they wanted have a tiny sub office there… so they ended up just ruining the day for a bunch of global health workers and other NGOs.
The best part was the dueling Obama as Hitler posters from those on the right pissed about Obamacare going too far… and those on the left pissed that it didn’t go far enough. That happens over the finance people as well.
Protesters are mostly good for a “look at those fucking freaks” moment.
When I was at the Pentagon there was always a gaggle of idiots right above ground of the METRO stop causing a scene while we walked through security to get in. We mostly just laughed at them, that or put in some quality IEMs (shure or etymotic for me) and crank the music.
Also tons of HRC, Greenpeace, around K Street and other types around there but they don’t cause a scene. But they can be pesteringly obnoxious and they deliberately choose young attractive women. They mostly want money though and for you to sign moronic petitions. And everyone knows they’re just college coeds from Georgetown or GW who get shit faced drunk after. So if you donate some money you can usually figure out where you can go to… further the conversation in person š
Time to behave like 19th century unions. When these creeps show up at clinics, OUR goons show up and beat them to a pulp with baseball bats. When the law fails to provide for decency, take to violence for revenge. I’m generally peaceable, but I have no problem separating these assholes from their teeth.
Do you feel the same way regarding the Court’s decision to rule the President’s recess appointments unconstitutional?
Haven’t seen a blog on that.
From a Progressive viewpoint, it is imperative that we are intellectually honest.
That was a technical decision as to when a recess exists. My understanding is the court ruled that when the Senate is in a “pro-forma session,” it is not in recess and therefore, the President can’t make appointments. As majority leader Harry Reid made use of the “pro-forma session” to prevent GWB from making recess appointments and GWB didn’t. Not sure how the minority leader can put the Senate in a “pro-forma session,” but McConnell did and Obama didn’t respect that.
Recess appointments remain constitutional.