Supreme Court strikes down Louisiana abortion restrictions, with Roberts joining libs

[MMC]

Yes, because the plain text of the Constitution has so much to say about abortion.

Roberts had been on the dissenting side of the 2016 case Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. While the law in contention in the case June v. Gee was nearly identical to the Texas law, Roberts based his decision on court precedent rather than his own opinion of the law.....snip~

It was enough to get him to flip now, wasn't it?

[MMC]

RvW is safe from the right wing.

With hope on Roberts, Right? Without him.....its not safe, huh?

[MMC]

'The Kagan Court': Anti-abortion leaders rip Roberts for ruling against Louisiana restrictions


If They Weren't Before, Conservatives are Officially Done With Justice John Roberts

[Chris]

Maybe we should rethink Robert's opinion.

Why conservative Chief Justice Roberts just struck down an anti-abortion law

Roberts ultimately concludes that he cannot uphold a law that is nearly word-for-word identical to another law that the Court struck down four years ago. But his opinion is laden with hints that, in a future case, he is likely to vote to restrict — or even eliminate — the constitutional right to an abortion.

Roberts opens his opinion by declaring that he still believes that Whole Woman’s Health was “wrongly decided.” He notes that “neither party has asked us to reassess the constitutional validity” of the Court’s seminal abortion rights decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) — a hint that, if future litigants directly attack Casey, Roberts will welcome such a challenge. And he spends as much of his opinion attacking Breyer’s approach to this case as he does explaining why he reluctantly voted to honor stare decisis.

Whole Woman’s Health, Roberts notes, states that “the rule announced in Casey ... requires that courts consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits those laws confer.” But balancing these burdens against these benefits, Roberts suggests, is entirely beyond the capacity of the judiciary.

In this context, courts applying a balancing test would be asked in essence to weigh the State’s interests in “protecting the potentiality of human life” and the health of the woman, on the one hand, against the woman’s liberty interest in defining her “own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” on the other. There is no plausible sense in which anyone, let alone this Court, could objectively assign weight to such imponderable values and no meaningful way to compare them if there were. . . Pretending that we could pull that off would require us to act as legislators, not judges, and would result in nothing other than an “unanalyzed exercise of judicial will” in the guise of a “neutral utilitarian calculus.”

In this sense, Roberts’s opinion harks back to Justice Bryon White’s dissenting opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) itself, which similarly argued that courts are not competent to weigh the difficult moral questions presented by the abortion debate. “In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ,” White wrote in that dissent, courts should leave the question of abortion rights “with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.”

[CenterField]

According to my son who is a lawyer, Roberts explicitly decided due to res judicata only because the law was verbatim the same as the Texas law struck down in Whole Woman's Health 4 years ago, but he also explicitly invited a challenge to Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He said he thinks Whole Woman's Health is wrongly decided but nothing has changed since then, and the law is exactly the same so he reluctantly struck down the law. On the other hand he laid out a blueprint for what type of challenge he would prefer, to strike down abortion rights.

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On the other hand, we've seen a few times already, Chief Roberts siding with the liberal wing of the SCOTUS. So people counting on a 5-4 decision in favor of Trump if the 2020 election becomes the mess that hit the country in Bush v. Gore, may be in for a surprise. I heard rumors that Chief Roberts is upset at Trump (although he wouldn't say it publicly) because in his opinion Trump is a man who doesn't uphold the Rule of Law.

[JakeStarkey]

With hope on Roberts, Right? Without him.....its not safe, huh?

It's safe. And when six new seats are added next year, it will become impregnable (heh).

[Peter1469]

Roberts dissented in the Texas case.

According to my son who is a lawyer, Roberts explicitly decided due to res judicata only because the law was verbatim the same as the Texas law struck down in Whole Woman's Health 4 years ago, but he also explicitly invited a challenge to Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He said he thinks Whole Woman's Health is wrongly decided but nothing has changed since then, and the law is exactly the same so he reluctantly struck down the law. On the other hand he laid out a blueprint for what type of challenge he would prefer, to strike down abortion rights.

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On the other hand, we've seen a few times already, Chief Roberts siding with the liberal wing of the SCOTUS. So people counting on a 5-4 decision in favor of Trump if the 2020 election becomes the mess that hit the country in Bush v. Gore, may be in for a surprise. I heard rumors that Chief Roberts is upset at Trump (although he wouldn't say it publicly) because in his opinion Trump is a man who doesn't uphold the Rule of Law.

[MMC]

It's safe. And when six new seats are added next year, it will become impregnable (heh).

6 new seats huh? Cmon back from the twilight zone. You do know that the infinity stones is a made up story Right?

[Peter1469]

6 new seats huh? Cmon back from the twilight zone. You do know that the infinity stones is a made up story Right?

He is speaking of the Hard Left Loon plan to stack the Court.

[CenterField]

Roberts dissented in the Texas case.

I know that. And he still thinks that it was decided wrongly. But he went along this time with that decision out of respect for that decision's majority, although he individually opposed it. His reasoning was something like "despite my individual objection, the majority decided that way; the parameters and facts haven't changed; so there is no reason to change the decision now because this law is identical to that law."

Which, I actually think (in my humble opinion; not a way of speaking; I am hereby acknowledging that I do not possess the knowledge to be authoritative in legal matters), makes sense. Aren't the courts supposed to rely on jurisprudence to examine decisions on previous laws in order to inform a decision about a current law that is being considered? Should the courts be inconsistent and keep alternatively finding one way then the opposite way, when the parameters and facts haven't changed? How would that work for the stability of a country? If there is a novelty, then by all means let's reconsider the issue, but if things remain the same, in the name of consistency I think the previous decision should remain.

Again, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a legal scholar, so I'm asking you: what do you think of this argument?