Free Republic

These same considerations that Casey relied upon nearly 30 years ago to justify affirming Roe v. Wade provide the precise basis to overturn Casey today.Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case considering the constitutionality of Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act which, with some exceptions, bans abortions after 15 weeks. While in granting certiorari the Supreme Court limited the question on appeal to “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional,” Wednesday’s arguments focused more broadly on whether the high court should overrule Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Even...

The Senate's number two Democrat said Sunday that if Judge John Roberts doesn't recognize that the Constitution's right to privacy covers the Roe vs Wade abortion decision, it would "disqualify" him from serving on the Supreme Court. Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" if President Bush had "the same right" to appoint pro-life justices that President Clinton had to appoint pro-choice justices, Durbin at first insisted, "I'm not looking for a litmus test." "As important as reproductive rights and women's rights are, I just basically want to know that if the next case involving privacy and personal freedom came up,...

INDULGE me in a momentary historical fantasy. Suppose that Roger Brooke Taney had not gone down in American history as the principal author of what is now almost universally acknowledged as the worst decision in the history of American jurisprudence, Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1857. Suppose the country had been shaped in the image of Chief Justice Taney's decision, which decreed that slaves could be carried anywhere in the union, and that Negroes could not be citizens under the Constitution, for they were ""regarded as being of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race...