skews13
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- Mar 18, 2017
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ustice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization would overrule Roe v. Wade, permit states to enact the most draconian bans on abortion, and provide a roadmap for taking away fundamental rights the Supreme Court has protected for nearly a century. At its core is one of the most crabbed conceptions of liberty ever penned by a Supreme Court justice. To Alito, liberty is essentially an empty idea. From this follows Alito’s prescription: devise a legal test that stops courts from safeguarding unenumerated fundamental rights and then use it to scrap Roe.
Alito’s opinion suggests that liberty is to be feared, not celebrated as a core feature of our constitutional heritage. “Liberty,” he insists, is a “capacious term” that could have hundreds of possible meanings, and he worries that the judiciary will engage in “freewheeling judicial policymaking” in the guise of protecting liberty. He insists that the Supreme Court should be extremely loath “to recognize rights not mentioned in the Constitution” for fear that the Supreme Court will “usurp authority that the Constitution entrusts to the people’s elected representatives.” Because liberty could mean anything, in his view, it means almost nothing.
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According to Alito, only the most overwhelming, centuries-old historical evidence—essentially the sort of historical grounding that rights in the Bill of Rights can point to—could possibly justify the protection of an unenumerated fundamental right. The right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade, he argues, spectacularly fails this test; extending his reasoning, so might the right of people of different races, or of the same sex, to marry—protected in Loving v. Virginia and Obergefell v. Hodges—and the right to use contraceptives protected by Griswold v. Connecticut, as others have pointed out. Alito’s opinion bulldozes a century of case law protecting fundamental rights to bodily integrity and marriage, and the right to decide for one’s own self whether, when, and with whom to form a family.
What fundamental rights have the kind of historical backing Alito seems to demand? What other fundamental rights can claim a historical lineage equivalent to rights in the Bill of Rights? Few, if any, would seem to measure up to the strict standard Alito lays out. That is not a bug, but a feature, of Alito’s approach. To Alito’s way of thinking, many of the rights we cherish as part of our heritage of liberty are not rights at all.
slate.com
Alito’s opinion suggests that liberty is to be feared, not celebrated as a core feature of our constitutional heritage. “Liberty,” he insists, is a “capacious term” that could have hundreds of possible meanings, and he worries that the judiciary will engage in “freewheeling judicial policymaking” in the guise of protecting liberty. He insists that the Supreme Court should be extremely loath “to recognize rights not mentioned in the Constitution” for fear that the Supreme Court will “usurp authority that the Constitution entrusts to the people’s elected representatives.” Because liberty could mean anything, in his view, it means almost nothing.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to Alito, only the most overwhelming, centuries-old historical evidence—essentially the sort of historical grounding that rights in the Bill of Rights can point to—could possibly justify the protection of an unenumerated fundamental right. The right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade, he argues, spectacularly fails this test; extending his reasoning, so might the right of people of different races, or of the same sex, to marry—protected in Loving v. Virginia and Obergefell v. Hodges—and the right to use contraceptives protected by Griswold v. Connecticut, as others have pointed out. Alito’s opinion bulldozes a century of case law protecting fundamental rights to bodily integrity and marriage, and the right to decide for one’s own self whether, when, and with whom to form a family.
What fundamental rights have the kind of historical backing Alito seems to demand? What other fundamental rights can claim a historical lineage equivalent to rights in the Bill of Rights? Few, if any, would seem to measure up to the strict standard Alito lays out. That is not a bug, but a feature, of Alito’s approach. To Alito’s way of thinking, many of the rights we cherish as part of our heritage of liberty are not rights at all.
The Framers Were Big Fans of Liberty, Unlike Samuel Alito
Reducing one of the most powerful constitutional concepts to an empty idea would represent one of the lowest points in the history of the Supreme Court.
