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Abortion Supreme Court

SCOTUS Conservative Leaked Draft Of Anti-Roe Opinion To Keep Roberts From Saving Abortion Rights: Report

Back in May, all of Washington was obsessed with one question: Who might have leaked the draft opinion that later became Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade that gave American women the right to abortion?

Many conservatives insisted the draft must have come from a liberal on the court or a clerk working for one of the three progressive-minded justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor.

But a report from CNN suggests that the actual leaker was a conservative who did so to box out Chief Justice John Roberts.

On Tuesday morning, reporter Joan Biskupic told hosts John Berman and Brianna Keilar:

“He (Roberts) was trying week after week after the initial vote in December after oral arguments at which five justices far on the right voted to overturn Roe, Roberts was alone in the middle wanting to uphold the ban on abortions but not go farther than Roe, but of course, you have the three liberals saying we don’t want to do any of this, we don’t want to disrupt abortion rights at all. Roberts keeps trying. And it’s interesting, not only did his work affect his efforts towards the two newest justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, but it had an effect on the others.”

Biskupic noted that conservatives on the high court soon became wary that Roberts might be able to turn the tide and get others to vote to save Roe, so they leaked the Dobbs ruling:

“The hard-right justices became concerned that he could be. And he was able to pick off justices on the far conservative side for more of a moderate conservative centrist. So they became anxious what he was up to.

And the liberals who had such a defeat this session, starting to have hopes that maybe Roe would not be overturned completely. But then on May 2nd, when the draft of the opinion was released and everything went public, it made John Roberts’ efforts all the harder because he’s a man who likes to work privately, in secret, offering some concessions himself. Seeking concessions for some sort of, as I say, cross-ideological compromise. It went down to the wire, according to my sources, but in the end, he made no headwind.”

For months, people such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) have insisted that liberal justice leaked the Dobbs opinion. But the CNN report suggests that’s simply not correct. Instead, it was one or more conservatives (perhaps Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion), gave the draft to Politico and set off the firestorm that soon swept over the nation.

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Abortion Congress GOP LGBT Issues WTF?!

Lauren Boebert: Roe v. Wade Doesn’t Affect The LGBTQ Community Because They ‘Can’t Get Pregnant’

Every time you read about Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), you probably wonder, “She cannot possibly get any dumber, can she?”

But as we’ve all learned since Boebert arrived in Congress two years ago, she does indeed get dumber, less informed, and clownish.

Today Lauren is weighing in on the issue of abortion and LGBTQ rights, two subjects she is wildly ignorant about.

After the House voted yesterday to codify same-sex marriage into federal law (with 47 Republicans crossing the aisle and voting with Democrats), Boebert went on television and said she couldn’t understand how the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court affected LGBTQ Americans because they can’t even get pregnant:

“I’m sorry, but if you’re not able to have a child, how does [the repeal of Roe vs. Wade] actually impact you?”

Clearly, Boebert didn’t bother to read (assuming she can actually read and comprehend) the concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas in the SCOTUS decision that struck down Roe. If she had, she would have seen this:

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents … After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”

Obergefell was the decision which made same-sex marriage in the United States, and yet Thomas wants it overturned, too.

So how does Roe affect LGBTQ Americans? It’s all a matter of privacy, which the current conservative majority on the high court seems to think none of us have a right to privacy.

Twitter quickly took over and gave Boebert the mockery and humiliation she so richly deserved.

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Abortion Congress GOP Viral Video

WATCH: Jim Jordan Hems And Haws When Asked If A 10-Year-Old Should Have To Give Birth To Her Rapist’s Baby

There are many things that can be said about Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), and most of them aren’t charitable because he simply doesn’t deserve to have nice things said about him and also because there’s virtually nothing about him that mertis any sort of praise.

The Ohio Republican is still trying to extricate himself from a controversy of his own making, suggesting on Twitter earlier this week he didn’t believe a 10-year-old Ohio girl had been raped and forced to travel to Indiana in order to obtain an abortion so she wouldn’t have to give birth to the child of her rapist.

Here’s the tweet Jordan posted and later deleted:

So objectionable was Jordan’s tweet that even when he showed up on right-wing Newsmax Friday, he got grilled by the host, according to Mediaite:

“Should they be forced to carry out this child? Should they have this option? In the state of Ohio, sir, where do you fall on that?” Jordan was asked.

To call Jordan’s reply gobbledygook would be an enormous understatement:

“Well, this is a question. This is straight on this Supreme Court, Supreme Court’s decision.

“This is the question that the legislatures in the respective states will answer. I am as pro-life as you can be, we want to protect the unborn children as life. But in this situation you’re talking about you’re talking about a ten-year-old. But that’s a question for legislatures in the respective states.”

Jordan added:

“That’s exactly what the Dobbs decision said. And that’s where the people’s representative should make that decision in our state legislature.”

Jordan and his colleagues in the Republican Party are hypocrites. They say they want to end abortion in the United States, but they have no solutions when children are raped or women’s lives are in danger if they give birth. They want to try and have it both ways, but that’s simply not possible when it comes to an issue of fundamental privacy and reproductive choice.

Republicans have long dreamed of a day when the Supreme Court would make abortion illegal. But now that the court has done so, the GOP is like the proverbial dog who caught the car: They don’t know what in the hell to do next.

Categories
Abortion Ivanka Trump

Former Friend Says Ivanka Trump Had An Abortion In High School

The majority of Americans think a woman should have the legal right to end a pregnancy if she chooses to, and the numbers are pretty overwhelming.

NPR recently reported that fully three-quarters of those surveyed wanted to keep Roe v. Wade in place, and yet the Supreme Court overturned the precedent which had been set by the high court almost five decades ago in 1973:

A total of 77% say the Supreme Court should uphold Roe, but within that there’s a lot of nuance — 26% say they would like to see it remain in place, but with more restrictions added; 21% want to see Roe expanded to establish the right to abortion under any circumstance; 16% want to keep it the way it is; and 14% want to see some of the restrictions allowed under Roe reduced. Just 13% overall say it should be overturned.

Be sure and read that last line carefully: Only 13% said Roe should be overturned. 77% percent wanted it upheld. That’s about as overwhelming as it gets when it comes to public opinion polls in a nation as divided as the United States.

Who else thought abortion was just fine? Based on what a former friend is saying, Ivanka Trump had no problem with abortion when she became pregnant in high school, according to a startling report from News.com:

A former friend of Ivanka Trump has taken to social media to claim that she supported her in getting an abortion when she was younger.

In the since-deleted tweet, Lauren Santo Domingo, a high school friend of Ivanka’s, claimed to have taken Ivanka, first daughter of former President Donald Trump and former senior White House Adviser, to get the alleged abortion.

The 46-year-old businesswoman and socialite also called out Ivanka for staying silent on abortion rights.

“Ivanka Trump you are noticeably quiet today,” Domingo’s tweet read.

“The high school friends who took you to get an abortion are not.”

It’s perfectly fine that Ivanka saw herself in need of an abortion and was able to do so legally and safely. What’s galling is the hypocrisy of her and others in the Trump family who try to act holier-than-thou even though more than a few of them (i.e. her father and her oldest brother, Don Jr.) have cheated on their wives and probably paid for dozens of abortions over the years.

The hypocrisy is what ticked off most people who commented on the revelation about Ivanka.

Categories
Abortion Supreme Court

Samuel L. Jackson Shreds ‘Uncle Clarence’ Thomas For His Ruling To Overturn Roe v. Wade

Actor Samuel L. Jackson has had quite enough of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and he’s making it clear that Thomas has jeopardized his own interracial marriage with his ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.

HuffPost reports that Jackson vented his feelings on Twitter:

The same rationale the conservative court employed to reverse the 1973 decision on abortion rights could now be used to eliminate the right to same-sex marriage, contraception and interracial marriage, which was protected in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling, lawmakers and scholars fear.

Jackson bashed Thomas as “Uncle Clarence” in a Friday night tweet, referring to the excessively servile Black character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pre-Civil War novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!”

Loving v. Virginia was also based on the right of privacy, but conservatives on the high court have now decided that none of us have any privacy since that right isn’t specifically laid out in regard to abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, or even interracial marriage:

In a solo concurring opinion Friday, Thomas suggested that the court should “correct the error” by withdrawing granted rights now protected under the “substantive due process clause” of the 14th Amendment.

Thomas, however, didn’t bother to mention marriage between adults of different races, probably because he’s married to a white woman and overturning Loving would make his marriage null and void, as many others pointed out as they discussed the blatant hypocrisy in what Thomas wrote in his opinion to overturn Roe, which has stood for nearly 50 years:

Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff behind the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, said Friday that Thomas omitted Loving v. Virginia on his list of top court decisions to “reconsider” because it “affects him personally.”

That “affects him personally, but he doesn’t care about the LGBTQ+ community,” Obergefell said on MSNBC’s “The Reid Out.”

Jackson got plenty of support from others on Twitter, too: