Republicans think they have a partial-birth abortion ban that will pass Supreme Court muster.

WITH THE 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaching and Republicans in control in Washington, the 108th Congress will likely take up the partial-birth abortion ban passed by the House last July but buried by the Democratic Senate.

"It will be an issue. It will be taken up," says Douglas Johnson, top lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee. "I expect to see the Senate deal with it in the new year."

He expects the new bill to be identical to the one that passed the House last summer. That bill featured two changes from previous bills--changes that respond to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Stenberg v. Carhart, which overturned a Nebraska law banning the procedure.

The first change is the bill's definition of partial-birth abortion. The majority opinion in Stenberg found Nebraska's definition of "partial-birth abortion" was too vague and concluded it could be interpreted to cover not only abortions in which the baby is partially delivered alive before being killed, but also the "dilation and evacuation" method, in which an unborn baby is dismembered while still inside the mother. The five-justice majority in Stenberg supported this method.

To avoid any new claims of confusion, the new bill will explicitly define partial-birth abortion as follows: "The person performing the abortion deliberately and intentionally delivers a living fetus until, in the case if a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside of the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech delivery, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother."

The second change addresses the "health of the mother" issue. The Court ruled in Stenberg that an abortionist must be able to use partial-birth abortion if it is the method least likely to cause side effects for the mother. The majority reached this result by referring to the findings of late-term abortionist Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who asserted that late-term partial-birth abortion is sometimes the method least likely to cause deleterious side effects.

The new bill will tackle this issue by incorporating congressional findings that partial-birth abortion is never necessary to protect a mother's health and that it may in fact expose a woman to substantial health risks. The bill reads: "Congress finds that partial-birth abortion is never medically indicated to preserve the health of the mother; is in fact unrecognized as a valid abortion procedure by the mainstream medical community; poses additional health risks to the mother; blurs the line between abortion and infanticide in the killing of a partially born child just inches from birth; and confuses the role of the physician in childbirth and should therefore be banned."

The National Right to Life Committee is optimistic about the future of a partial-birth abortion ban. Johnson has said that an early tally shows that 62 incoming senators would support it. And a letter to members of Congress from the NRLC expresses hope that the new bill could satisfy swing-voter Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's concern that the dilation and evacuation procedure should be excluded from a ban.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of ~~Government~~ COURT(S) becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to ~~alter or to abolish it~~ .Impeaching Federal Judges:A Covenantal And Constitutional Response To Judicial Tyranny, and to ~~institute~~ APPOINT new ~~Government~~ JUDEGE(S), laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that ~~Governments~~ COURT(S) long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such ~~Government~~ COURT(S), and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of ~~Government~~ COURT(S). The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World

ROE v. WADE, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992)
NOW v. Scheidler, 510 US 249 (1994). Will Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor base a landmark opinion on false testimony? She may if she fails to consider the merit of that testimony during the high court's review of National Organization for Women (NOW) vs. Joseph Scheidler.Let the record show: Supreme Court arguments leave troubling questions unanswered ...from its inception the "pro-choice" movement has used lies to advance its cause. Why They Help Them Lie
STENBERG v. CARHART :Justice Scalia, dissenting.

I am optimistic enough to believe that, one day, Stenberg v. Carhart will be assigned its rightful place in the history of this Court's jurisprudence beside Korematsu and Dred Scott. The method of killing a human child-one cannot even accurately say an entirely unborn human child-proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion. ...The notion that the Constitution of the United States, designed, among other things, "to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," prohibits the States from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd.

...And those who believe that a 5-to-4 vote on a policy matter by unelected lawyers should not overcome the judgment of 30 state legislatures have a problem, not with the application of Casey, but with its existence. Casey must be overruled.

While I am in an I-told-you-so mood, I must recall my bemusement, in Casey, at the joint opinion's expressed belief that Roe v. Wade had "call[ed] the contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution," Casey, 505 U.S., at 867, and that the decision in Casey would ratify that happy truce. It seemed to me, quite to the contrary, that "Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has obscured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court in particular, ever since"; and that, "by keeping us in the abortion-umpiring business, it is the perpetuation of that disruption, rather than of any Pax Roeana, that the Court's new majority decrees." Id., at 995-996. Today's decision, that the Constitution of the United States prevents the prohibition of a horrible mode of abortion, will be greeted by a firestorm of criticism-as well it should. I cannot understand why those who acknowledge that, in the opening words of Justice O'Connor's concurrence, "[t]he issue of abortion is one of the most contentious and controversial in contemporary American society," ante, at 1, persist in the belief that this Court, armed with neither constitutional text nor accepted tradition, can resolve that contention and controversy rather than be consumed by it. If only for the sake of its own preservation, the Court should return this matter to the people-where the Constitution, by its silence on the subject, left it-and let them decide, State by State, whether this practice should be allowed. Casey must be overruled.

The unstated premise of those who have adopted this strategy is that the Justices do not understand the nature of abortion, and that if they are forced to confront the scientific and medical facts about the conception and development of the unborn child, they will be compelled to reconsider Roe v. Wade and hold that the unborn child is a constitutional person. To speak in spiritual terms, the critics assume that the problem lies in the intellect rather than the will. That premise is mistaken. Every member of the Court understands what an abortion is. If there was any doubt about this before, the Court's decision in Stenberg v. Carhart two years ago, striking down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law, should have laid that doubt to rest. The majority opinion's cold and clinical description of various abortion methods betrays no ignorance of the nature of abortion. The Court understands that the purpose and effect of an abortion is to kill an unborn (and, in some instances, a partially born) child. Whatever reservations some members of the Carhart majority may have about the morality of abortion in general or the partial-birth technique in particular, those reservations have not affected their collective judgment that women need abortion to be legal in order for them to be full and equal members of American society. It is that judgment, and not any misunderstanding of what happens in an abortion, that is the source of our present predicament, as even a casual perusal of the Court's opinion in Casey reaffirming Roe v. Wade would disclose. FIRST THINGS November 2002

SECTION 1. With respect to the right to life, the word `person' as used in this article and in the fifth and fourteenth articles of amendment to the Constitution of the United States applies to all human beings irrespective of age, health, function, or condition of dependency, including their unborn offspring at every stage of their biological development. H. J. RES. 20, February 14, 2001
State Homicide Laws That Recognize Unborn Victims

Missouri law bans "partial-birth abortion" even in life-or-death cases, court rules ...Missouri law defines infanticide as occurring when a person "causes the death of a living infant with the purpose to cause said death by an overt act performed when the infant is partially born or born." ...It declares such acts a felony punishable by a prison sentence from 10 years to life, the same as for second-degree murder.

On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), letter to Judge William Johnson, (from Monticello, June 12, 1823)
The Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary, as distinguished from technical meaning; where the intention is clear, there is no room for construction, and no excuse for interpolation or addition. - Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, 1 Wheat 304; Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat 419; Brown v. Maryland, 12 Wheat 419; Craig v. Missouri, 4 Pet 10; Tennessee v. Whitworth, 117 U.S. 139; Lake County v. Rollins, 130 U.S. 662; Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1; Edwards v. Cuba R. Co., 268 U.S. 628; The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U.S. 655; (Justice) Story on the Constitution, 5th ed., Sec 451; Cooley's Constitutional Limitations, 2nd ed., p. 61, 70.

Dear President Bush, With the Surpeme Court session getting ready to close, it may well be time for perhaps the most important domestic decision of your presidency: the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice(s). The main reason why I supported you in 2000 and why I wanted Daschle out of power in 02 (and 04) has to do with the courts. I want America courts to interpret law, not write law. During your presidential campaign you said Thomas and Scalia were your two model justices. Those are excellent models. The High Court needs more like them. Clarence Thomas recently said to students that the tough cases were when what he wanted to do was different from what the law said. And he goes by the law. This should be a model philosophy for our justices. Your father, President Bush lost his reelection campaign for 3 main reasosn, as far as I can see. 1. he broke the no new taxes pledge 2. David Souter 3. Clinton convinced people we were in a Bush recession (which we had already come out of by the time Clinton was getting sworn in)

I urge you to learn from all three of these: 1. on taxes, you're doing great. Awesome job on the tax cut. 2. good job so far on judicial appointments. I want to see more of a fight for Estrada, Owen, and Pickering, but I commend you on your nominations. 3. by staying engaged in the economic debate you'll serve yourself well

I have been thoroughly impressed with your handling of al Queida, Iraq, and terrorism. You have inspired confidence and have shown great leadership.

But I want to remind you that your Supreme Court pick(s) will be with us LONG after you have departed office. I urge you to avoid the tempation to find a "compromise" pick. Go for a Scalia or Thomas. Don't go for an O'Connor or Kennedy. To be specific, get someone who is pro-life. Roe v Wade is one of the worst court decisions I know of, and it's the perfect example of unrestrained judicial power.

I know the temptation will be tremendous on you to nominate a moderate. But remember who your true supporters are. I am not a important leader or politician. I am "simply" a citizen who has been an enthusiatic supporter of you. I am willing to accept compromise in many areas of government but I will watch your Court nomiantions extremely closely. What the Senate Dems are doing right now is disgusting, but as the President you have the bully pulpit to stop it. Democrats will back down if you turn up serious heat on them.

Moreover, I think public opinion is shifting towards the pro-life position. Dems will want you to nominate a moderate, but almost all will vote against you anyways. Pro-choice Repubs will likely still vote for you if you nominate a Scalia, after all, you campaigned on it. So Mr. President, I urge you to stick with your campaign statements and nominate justices who believe in judicial restraint, like Scalia and Thomas.

Happy Memorial Day and may God bless you and your family.

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