Roberts’ personal decisions under attack?
As a woman, I’m shocked and dismayed that in this day and age, a man’s right to control millions of women’s rights to make their own personal medical and moral decisions is apparently being examined during the process designed to examine a candidate’s worthiness for that office.
White House Won’t Show All Roberts Papers By Douglass K. Daniel AP 07/25/05
WASHINGTON — John Roberts worked for two Republican administrations, offering private legal assessments that have yet to be opened to historians or the public. Now that Roberts is President Bush’s choice to join the Supreme Court, some Senate Democrats want to see the documents he produced _ all of them.
No, responded one White House representative. We’ll see, said another.(07/25/05 WaPo Daniel)
cont’d
Some records already are available to the public at the presidential libraries of Ronald Reagan, in Simi Valley, Calif., and George H.W. Bush, in College Station, Texas. Others have yet to be cleared for security and personal privacy by archivists and, under law, by representatives of the former administrations and the current president.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has yet to ask for such material for its hearings. But some Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have urged the White House to release “in their entirety” any documents written by Roberts.
Citing privacy and precedent, Fred D. Thompson, the former Tennessee senator guiding Roberts through the process on behalf of the White House, said Sunday the Bush administration does not intend to release everything. (07/25/05 WaPo Daniel)
Seriously, shouldn’t the awesome responsibility of controlling millions of women’s rights to make their own personal medical and moral decisions be a private one, between a branch of government and her judge?
You’d think so. And you’d be wrong.
Apparently, there’s no end to the fanaticism, selfishness and downright muleheadishness of women proceeding on the notion that they not only have a right to decide their own lives, but a say in who represents them in government.
It’s ugly, folks. And at least a few members of the Democratic party who don’t hold women responsible for the party’s failings appear willing to endorse this dangerous two-centuries old trend.
MR. RUSSERT: Democrats are saying they need to know more about John Roberts, and are suggesting that he worked as–in the solicitor general’s office, he worked as a–in the White House counsel’s office. They’d like to see his memo, some of his paperwork. Will that be provided by the Bush administration? .
MR. THOMPSON: […] It’s the client’s privilege to waive; it’s basically up to the White House. But the White House has gone along with what all living solicitors general have taken a position on, and that is this is a bad idea. […]
MR. RUSSERT: Has anyone on the White House staff, anyone involved in the vetting or interviewing process asked him about his views on Roe vs. Wade?
MR. THOMPSON: No. .
MR. RUSSERT: Nobody?
MR. THOMPSON: No. I mean, you know, I’m not privy to every conversation, but I’d be shocked and amazed, and I’ve been assured that they have not. […] (Meet the Press, July 24, 2005)
Despite Mr. Thompson’s assurances that the reproductive rights of half the population didn’t even come up, the appointed President’s appointee was questioned by — hang on to your hats — the woman judge retiring from the SCOTUS.
Despite a shift in law schools and the legal professions towards women outnumbering men, the unwritten law that holds the highest court in the land belonging, by right, to men is being questioned during the process for questioning it.
MR. RUSSERT: Sandra Day O’Connor, who is leaving the court, had this to say. “He’s good in every way, except he’s not a woman. I am disappointed, in a sense, to see the percentage of women on our court drop by 50 percent.” Will that be an issue?
MR. THOMPSON: Oh, I doubt it. I mean, the question is whether or not this nominee is qualified. And those issues that you mentioned are decisions that the president will make. And he, in this instance, his–I think chosen someone not based on any criteria, other than someone who he feels like is extremely well-qualified and is a guy who’s excelled academically, he’s excelled professionally. He got letters signed by 150 lawyers, Democrat, Republican, and otherwise, saying that he is one of the most highly respected public advocates in the nation; that kind of a person who will apply the law and the Constitution, as it’s supposed to be applied. And that’s all you can really ask, I think, of a nominee.
Well, call me contentious, but I can think of way more questions to ask of such a candidate. For example, in the absence of a trail of written opinions, the question: Why don’t you answer the fucking question? is one question that comes to mind.
And it appears my radical stance that the process of representative, responsible government be transparent to the public it purports to represent has at least one subversive proponent already holding office.
SEN. DURBIN: […] [John Roberts] needs to prove that he is worthy of a lifetime appointment to the highest court of the land, the court that really stands as the last refuge for the rights and freedoms of the American people and that he will serve there most likely, if approved, 20 or 30 years. […]
SEN. DURBIN: I would like to hear from him as to whether or not he has at least thought through or struggled with this decision on the future of reproductive rights in this country. I’d like to hear from him that even if he might disagree on a variance of Roe vs. Wade, that when it comes down to the basics, when it comes down to right of privacy, he will acknowledge that is part of our right and our legacy as Americans and that he would acknowledge, as well, that this is an issue of personal freedom. So it isn’t that I want to pin him down on this so much as understanding the thinking that would go behind the next decision.
. MR. RUSSERT: But as he said, Senator, “I believe it should be a decision made by the states,” which is what you said in 1983. Would that disqualify him?
SEN. DURBIN: […] Just a few months ago in Congress, we were embroiled in a controversy over the tragedy of Terri Schiavo. Here was a family making a decision that hundreds of families across America have made today about a loved one and whether she would continue to receive certain medical support. The decision of some–in fact, many on the same side politically as the president–was that the government should step in, the federal court should step in, into that hospital room to make that decision for the Schiavo family. So what I’m saying to you is this is an issue of privacy and freedom that will continue to come back to us. I need to know, most importantly, from Judge Roberts, what drives him on these decisions? Where are his values? […]
MR. RUSSERT: If he said he did not see a right of privacy in the Constitution, would that…
SEN. DURBIN: I couldn’t vote for him. .
MR. RUSSERT: That would disqualify him?
SEN. DURBIN: It would disqualify him in my mind.
MR. RUSSERT: And how specific will you get on your questions about Roe vs. Wade?
SEN. DURBIN: Oh, I might get very specific, but I’ve had an experience with him before. He wasn’t that specific in his answers when he was up for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. But I’m going to try, as best I can, to stay in that acceptable area where we do ask questions that he can answer. And I think if we stick to questions of constitutional values and traditional philosophy, we can find out whether he is truly going to be balanced. (Meet the Press, July 24, 2005)
I know that a group of men deciding women’s rights and abilities to decide their own lives is a vulnerable time for men. Men’s right to control women can often be beset with complexities and difficulties I can’t begin to imagine.
Indeed, I have often been waved away from meddling in the public debate, the apparent prevailing attitude being that in the heirarchy of political priorities today, men’s discussions about women’s bodies deserves more respect than women’s rights to control their own bodies.
I admit I’ve been slow on the uptake that this needs to change. Fellas, any advice on how I can be more sensitive about this important issue?
(crossposted at dKOS)
that we are going to take your advice and hammer on exactly your theme here. We have a right to know whether this guy will overturn Roe. It’s too important to leave us guessing. And if he won’t tell us, if he stonewalls, then we’ll stonewall his confirmation.
I will be lobbying for that outcome.
… is remarkable.
I also think back to Scalia’s offense when that Columbia law student’s question about whether Scalia ever sodomized the missus.
Yet Nino wonders why people would take offense at his insistence that he has a right to know that about them.
Two Americas.
Superb diary. Thanks. I hope this one, along with moiv’s diary on the abortion clinic run by her friend, gets up on the rec list and stays there for a long time.
I know that a group of men deciding women’s rights and abilities to decide their own lives is a vulnerable time for men. Men’s right to control women can often be beset with complexities and difficulties I can’t begin to imagine. Indeed, I have often been waved away from meddling in the public debate, the apparent prevailing attitude being that in the heirarchy of political priorities today, men’s discussions about women’s bodies deserves more respect than women’s rights to control their own bodies.
This is the snark that all future snarks will strive in vain to surpass. Beautiful.
They say Salesmen are the easiest to sell crap to.
Can you appreciate the humor of politicians beleiving that they can determine how this man will behave from his Rhetoric?
Past behavior is the only descent indicator of future behavior.
We need to repeatedly frame this as a right to privacy…no matter what the wingnuts try.
A woman’s right to choose is a right to privacy…looks like Senator Durbin is on track right out of the gate.
Sen. Schumer, Howard Dean and Harry Reid are also on the record, within hours of the Roberts announcement, of expressing that principle.
The burden of proof is on the candidate to prove his or her worthiness for the office — not on the Senate to disprove it. The “innocent until proven guilty” frame the RW keeps airing begs the question — why are you instinctively acting like crooks rather than job applicants?
I would prefer it was framed for what it is…a right to freedom. Personally I think the Privacy frame sounds trite.
I have to agree with you DoP. Opponents will probably always claim that a fetus’s “right to life” trumps a woman’s right to privacy. They may also say it trumps her “right to freedom,” but in terms of public perception, it seems to me that’s a harder argument to make and still get people to agree with it. Especially when we can follow it up with the logical outcome of denying an American woman her freedom–which is women and doctors in handcuffs and jail.
It all comes back to artemisia’s “father and the blood transfusion” example. What ever Constitutional Right protects him from being forced to give a transfusion…that is the Constitutional right that should protect the mother.
Simple math for simple minds (like mine).
Roberts needs to answer why the female entity at that awkward stage of existence between fetushood and the fourteen years she might spend hooked up to machines and fed by tube against her wishes — like Teri Schiavo — should be assumed to be alienated from her inalienable rights.
I fully agree.
The Right to Privacy, to lawyers, MEANS a right to liberty.
as a frame in which to discuss abortion the “right to privacy” evokes the wrong sort of liberty, the right to do thing in private… and this, most certainly, is the right to do something in public or private, as a matter of liberty.
Lawyers tend not to get this, because it’s their technical language and means whatever they learn or like it to mean.
In my opinion, it’s really about a right to liberty, and the auto-sovereignty of personal medical decisions.
Perhaps the issue of abortion would have been better decided on the basis of the right to freedom, but I have disagree that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. It may not be enumerated, but it’s inherent, or the government has far to much power. It would mean there are no decisions so personal that the government can’t involve itself.
I also disagree for a more practical reason. Abortion was decided based on privacy, for reasons that made sense (that was how the precedent for birth control was decided for one thing). Backing down now and saying that decision was wrong because there is no right to privacy is like disarming ourselves because our weapons don’t match our uniforms.
And what does it buy us? I know quite a few conservatives say that they disagree with Roe v. Wade because of the legal reasoning, but frankly I think they are lying. They would disagree with abortion no matter what the legal reasoning was. There is also this claim that if we had just let the states decide the issue, it wouldn’t be so rancorous. I also don’t buy that for a minute. These people see absolutely nothing wrong with lying for advantage (sine they are on the Side of Right) and we’d be fools to take them at their word.
a little bit, I think it was, yesterday.
The problem is not that Roe was decided on privacy per se. The problem is that the privacy is conditional. After 3 months, it no longer applies absolutely, and after 6 months it no longer applies at all.
Whereas, with Griswold, privacy was absolute.
That has always been the weakness of Roe. You have a conditional right to privacy that is balanced on a sliding scale of state interest in protecting potential life and the health of the mother.
As a moral principle, this is not very satisfying.
It would seem that you either have a right to privacy or you do not. But Roe says you have an ever diminishing right to privacy.
But, as I also said yesterday, Roe is what we’ve got, so we have to defend it as though it were the right to choose itself.
…is that in the more recent cases, such as Planned Parenthood, women’s rights were upheld not over privacy but over liberty and due process. I wrote this a few weeks ago:
Actually, one needn’t even go so far as to find a Constitutional bar to the prohibition of Abortion in the 14th Amendment.
The alternative source of Constitutional authority for such a bar to state regulation of Abortion can be found in the 13th Amendment:
<bold>Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.</bold>
However, it is a bit creepy as one would have to rely on the 14th Amendment grounds of Lawrence to avoid fornication being made a felony in order to compel the involuntary bearing of unborn children to term.
This is excellent, Peant. May many more representatives follow Durbin’s lead on privacy. We need to hammer this home…if we don’t have a guaranteed right to privacy, neither does he…
allow women to decide the fate of their penis or body?
No, I didn’t think so, either.
That is one steep slippery slope we start down.
Bring on the questions about Viagra, abstinence and child suppport for men who are not intending to participate in procreation and parenting.
It’s only rational, after all.
Roberts is a Catholic middle aged adoptive co-parent of two young children. Will he grant to others the reproductive rights he enjoys?
Will he deny single parents and same-sex couples those rights and why?
Buck v. Bell (1927) upheld the involuntary sterilization of a retarded woman.
Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel William(son?) overruled a OK S.Ct. decision allowing the sterilization of a habitual male felon.
Interestingly enough Roe cites Buck as supporting authority. (Nice essay topic for you law students out there.)
Also, if you would like to be creeped out, there has been only one neutral cite of Buck since 1980 or so- Rehnquist, C.J cites it as follows in Garrett v. Alabama:
“n6 The record does show that some States, adopting the tenets of the eugenics movement of the early part of this century, required extreme measures such as sterilization of persons suffering from hereditary mental disease. These laws were upheld against constitutional attack 70 years ago in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 71 L. Ed. 1000, 47 S. Ct. 584 (1927). But there is no indication that any State had persisted in requiring such harsh measures as of 1990 when the ADA was adopted.”
The frustration being expressed by the right here parallels the GOTV:STFU discussion going on among right-leaning Democrats poised to assume leadership, and also balking at the notion of being judged on their credentials and past actions.
Why won’t all those pesky groups in the big tent stop embarrassing us and ruining our chances at success — you know, the groups that comprise 75% of the voting public?
I agree with the posts upthread that it’s ultimately a discussion about freedom. However, privacy and salesmanship play a big role in selling back to people what is inalienable — and people aren’t prepared to buy again what they already own. Thievery, GBW might say, is hard work.
Regardless of the words describing the aspects of freedom, it continues to come down to simple math and the failure of the right to make it work out in their favor.
They need people to fight their reckless, optional wars. Those people aren’t volunteering.
They need people to scrub their toilet bowls in English and with a tolerable familiarity with the “dominant” culture. Those people aren’t turning up in droves and showing sufficient enthusiasm for the task.
They need people to conceive and raise their children. Those people are being empowered more rapidly by means that bypass the conventional obstacles to progress (cultural, technological and legal) can be put in place.
More women are entering and succeeding in professions that speak to, influence and empower other women. Even women within the conservative movement lead feminist lives, though they don’t like to use the F-word.
The same goes for other groups that the RW assume will voluntarily accept subservience.
The First Samurai in <u>The Seven Samurai</u> said that defense is harder than offense. I’m looking forward to seeing Roberts defend his “right” to control my life.
Great snark at the end there! Those poor vulnerable guys trying to decide what women get to do with our bodies.
Hey, I wanna decree that all men have to get vasectomies. After all, they can get them reversed if they want children, no harm done. It is only an hour or so at the doc’s office – in a few days you won’t even know it was done. Nothing like 9 months of pregnancy and the pushing out a watermelon birthing. Not to mention taking care of a child for at least 18 years after that, the possible roids, breast sagging, and other really gross side effects of child bearing. What’s a little snip snip to ya?
No, I don’t mean that really, I wouldn’t presume to tell you to do that. It’s your own danged business.
But it is just about as arrogant a way to think as being told what to do with my body. Actually, it’s not as arrogant since it is a lot less dangerous, painful, and long term as forced birth.
Good ideas bear repeating. I just posted the same thing!
People seem all to eager to give up their right to privacy these days. Privacy is not valued like it once was.
The more compelling argument, I feel, is that people who argument for government control are advocating the designation of all women of childbearing years as breeder slaves of the state.
That is why this is about liberty (the very word used by O’Connor in Planned Parenthood (1992)), due process and equal protection under the law.
There’s also the matter of magical thinking that somehow all the woman’s uterus does is heat up the dough. “A bun in the oven” is a common but really quite ridiculous phrase. The embryo is more like the seed for the grain that enables making flour which can be mixed with yeast and water to make dough. All that work is done by the woman’s body. To assert otherwise is to dismiss the realities of pregancy in order to enjoy an enhanced sense of nostalgia for the man’s part in it all.
Privacy? This is about total motherfucking interference in the woman’s body.
You know, the best way to prevent abortions is to give all men vassectomies. When they have confirmed consent from a woman that she wants to bear his child, then he can get the jewels reconnected.
Unreasonable? Well, guys, this is the very kind of governmental interference of the human body that is being advocated by anti-choice people, but with the men having to deal with the “inconvenience.” How do you like them apples?
Now we can have our resident scolds come in and tell us all to shut up about Roberts, that it’s just not all that important.
I demand that anti abortion-rights men donate organs to be sold to wealthy recipients, with the proceeds used to fund pre- and post-natal care up to when all babies have placement in loving homes.
That’s bloody fucken brilliant. All boy babies at a certain age be given vasectomies only to be undone when they with their partner decide they want a child. That scenario should make for some lively conversations with men. More hopefully make some men think about how ridiculous and awful that sounds and how women feel the same way about being denied their right to decide for themselves what to do with their bodies.
Hey, that makes as much sense as serving up women on the chopping block of embryo rights.
And why don’t we just throw in some requirement that the men need to receive approval from the court system prior to the doctor performing the reversal procedure? You know, sort of an updated version of waiting periods and parental consent laws?
I can see the fellas protesting now…”Not on my ‘nads!”
Absolutely!
This fella thinks that would be a damn good idea. Given the examples set by the rest of my sex, that is. Both the irresponsible segment and the pro-criminalization segment.
I tried to cover this long ago but was overwhelmed.
The right to privacy really means the right to liberty… as in “private affiars” or “private business”… e.g. a public company is still a “private” business.
It’s essentially a technical legal term, as such, it’s a terrible frame.
I made this point a few times at dkos and in the real world and the lawyers of the crowd don’t get the problem, because they have learned the technical meaning.
The fact is you can derive a right to personal liberty from the notion of privacy, the idea people can get into your “private affairs”… but of course this DOES invoke the idea of privacy, of keeping information private… which is a mess.
The lawyers can call it what they like, but politically we should only call it the Right to Liberty or the Right to Make Your Own Medical Decisions, or ??? Anything but Right to Privacy.
As for “right to privacy” all we can do is educate people that it’s a technical term that relates to “private affairs”, not secrecy.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear, but it’s a messy rhetorical thicket around a key issue which shouldn’t have to be messy at all…