"A country can hardly claim to be a democracy if roughly half of its citizens are prevented from exercising control over their own bodies – prohibited, in some cases, from accessing lifesaving health care in service of a male supremacist political project."
"For the far right, restricting access to abortion is a major step toward constructing the kind of society they want – namely, one in which the state enforces policies that repress and disempower certain groups of people, hardening gender, racial and class hierarchies.
The anti-abortion movement is fundamentally antidemocratic."
"The shock-and-awe Republicans have in store for the country if they take power next year is hard to convey to the unsuspecting—so fanatical from issue to issue that it can strike these voters (including many Republican voters) as implausible. Alarmist."
"The court is out of control, making decisions based on specious arguments that expose — once again — what a ridiculous joke the concept of conservative 'originalism' is. Essentially, when it comes to this crackpot legal theory the device used to decide the intent of the founders is 'whatever makes Republican voters happy.'"
"The Supreme Court didn’t just become a problem for America over the last couple years. The highest court in the land has been a right-wing playground for years, despite the outlier decisions in favor of same-sex marriage and Obamacare. The conservative court has worked overtime to restrict the rights of millions of Americans, from minority college applicants to women to potential victims of gun violence and beyond."
"But the court’s problems, as revealed by the journalists at ProPublica (and NOT the New York Times or Washington Post, who are too busy canoodling with justices or actively hiding their behavior), go far beyond their right-wing interpretation of the law. The court is corrupt."
Someone needs to write a "fictional" story about a fictional justice named, oh, say, Cancel Shatmore and his fictional sugar daddy Worn Harcal.
"Republicans are trying to make the [abortion] issue more complicated, to convince voters there are layers of nuance that must be appreciated and therefore the GOP’s intentions are not quite as menacing as they appear."
"This is not a hard issue to communicate; we’re not talking about complex trade negotiations or an intricate health reform plan. All you have to say is Trump and the Republicans are trying to ban abortion. They want 12-year old rape victims to be forced to carry their rapists’ babies. They want to keep medical care from women suffering life-threatening pregnancy complications. Not only that, after they’re done they’re going to try to ban IVF and birth control."
"Everything they’re now saying is geared toward that end: to spread the belief that they aren’t trying to do what they very much are trying to do [i.e., to outlaw it nationwide], that they’re more moderate than they appear, and that you shouldn’t worry about what they’ll do with complete power in Washington should they achieve it."
"Billionaire political donor Harlan Crow provided at least three previously undisclosed private jet trips to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in recent years, an investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats has found."
~ Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
"The verdict has raised awkward epistemic problems for MAGAworld. After all, when they aren’t imagining Joe Biden to be a senile old fool, they’re picturing him as a cunning mastermind bending the whole Department of Justice to his dastardly ends. If Hunter was found guilty, then, there must have been some reason why his father wanted him to be found guilty.
"And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: 'One side or the other is going to win.'
Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3, a function that is known to right-wing activists as an opportunity to buttonhole Supreme Court justices."
"Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living 'peacefully' with ideological opponents in the face of 'fundamental' differences that 'can’t be compromised.' He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to 'return our country to a place of godliness.'"
"Behind the closed doors of a private $500 a plate dinner filled with lobbyists for Christian conservative organizations and the billionaire oligarchs who support them, Samuel Alito let his freak flag fly. For the rest of his time on the Supreme Court, this man will do everything in his power to rewrite the Constitution the Founders so carefully crafted to guard against the religious zealotry of the monarchy they had overthrown."
"If Justice Alito is making comments like this to a random person at a public dinner, what is he saying to his close confidants? What is he doing on the bench? How can he possibly deliver impartial justice when he so casually expresses these views? Judges are supposed to conduct themselves in a manner that ensures questions like these are never asked about them."
"In those brief comments, Alito eviscerated the disingenuous reasoning of Dobbs and made clear that the reactionary majority was exercising brute force in imposing their religious views on all Americans--i.e., 'returning our country to a place of (their view) of godliness.' The opinion in Dobbs was a sham."
"Many people will find [Lauren Windsor's] tactics questionable. This was the justification Windsor offered: 'Because the Supreme Court is shrouded in secrecy, and they’re refusing to submit to any accountability in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious ethics breaches, I think that it’s justified to take these types of measures.'”
"Equally disturbing were comments by Martha Alito, who railed against the fact that she was forced to look at Gay Pride flags from her beach house. She suggested that she could not wait until Justice Alito retired, at which point she would hoist a flag with yellow flames bearing the Italian word for 'shame'—presumably referring to her belief that gay Americans would be subjected to the flames of hell and should be ashamed of their lifestyle."
Interested in building a better world and standing in solidarity with others who share that goal. For biographical information, please see https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/109539508828689842 "Writing is the way I fight." ~ James Cone #solidarity #democracy #HumanRights #LGBTQ