Elizabeth Warren is pursuing two aims with her current crusade

 In the wake of the Dobbs, decision, she's zeroing in on a target that really sticks in her craw:

“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.

Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration. Warren does not seem to have considered who might do this job in a future Republican administration.

This advances two of the dearest aspects of the progressive vision.

Obviously, it puts on full display the Left's dark, nihilistic vision of the value of human life. To have women considering options other than ending their children's lives is anathema to those who harbor rage against the universe's inherent and divinely designed architecture. 

But it also furthers progressives' belief that an administrative state - that is, an executive branch of the federal government bloated with bureaucratic "experts" supplanting law with regulation - is necessary for effective governance in modern times.

The murkiness surrounding the tern "misleading" in this case is of a piece with the problematic nature of the use of the term "reasonable" as applied to gasoline prices by the likes of Joe Biden and others who speak of "price gouging." 

It also gets at the heart of what the Supreme Court struck down in West Virginia v EPA: an executive-branch agency telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs without being authorized to do so by Congress.

That this gets an airing as a reasonable public-policy position is just the latest example of how shattered, bitter and in need of prayer this society is.   

Why post-America can't have nice things - today's edition

 Well, just dandy. Not 48 hours after the Supreme Court rectifies a mistake it made 49 years ago and asserts, correctly, that no right to abortion can be found in the Constitution, this bonehead - bonehead elected to Congress, no less (what kind of constituents comprise her district?) - has to provide fodder to the enraged mob:

U.S. Rep. Mary Miller immediately drew fierce backlash on social media and elsewhere at a Saturday night rally with former President Donald Trump when she credited him for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade calling it a “victory for white life.”

“I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” Miller said, then raised her arms in an animated clap amid cheers from the crowd, which numbered in the thousands on a sweltering day in West Central Illinois.

Her campaign's attempt at a walk-back strikes me as pretty damn lame:

But Miller’s campaign said Saturday night that the congresswoman misread prepared remarks at a rally that Trump held for her in the village of Mendon.

"You can clearly see she is reading off a piece of paper, she meant to say ‘right to life,'" Miller spokesman Isaiah Wartman said.

Miller, R-Illinois, later tweeted: “I will always defend the RIGHT TO LIFE!”

Now, I'm always willing to cut anybody some slack when it's justified, slack being at a premium in this grace-starved world. But you listen to the video and see if there's any chance she was merely garbling the phrase "right to life."

It doesn't help that back in January, she said Hitler was right about one thing, namely, that a political movement that gets the youth on board will be a success. You don't ascribe correctness of viewpoint to Adolf Hitler, about anything, any time.

So now the venom-hearted hordes have just what they need to portray those who champion the rights of people who aren't born yet as racists. 

Thanks for nothin', bonehead. 

 

 

Recent battle scenes from the war on people who aren't born yet

 The head of the DoJ's civil rights division is one cold person:

The Justice Department official who investigates attacks on reproductive health care facilities has been a staunch critic of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, dozens of which have been vandalized by abortion supporters over the past month. 

Civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke criticized the centers following a Supreme Court decision issued in their favor in 2018. Clarke said the centers, which counsel pregnant women on alternatives to abortion, were "harmful" and "predatory" against women of color. She also referred to them with the hashtag, "ExposeFakeClinics." 

Clarke’s stance on the centers offers a potential explanation for the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate a string of attacks on pro-life centers since the May 2 leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) asked Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to investigate the incidents as acts of domestic terrorism. Garland has yet to open an investigation, even though he said on Sept. 6 he would investigate crimes against "reproductive health center[s]" under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act). 

Clarke oversees investigations of potential FACE Act violations. She charged nine people under the statute in March for blocking the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion provider. 

The attacks on crisis pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations have run rampant since the leak of the Roe v. Wade draft opinion last month. Twenty-four crisis centers have been vandalized or set on fire since the leak, according to a group that tracks the incidents. In the latest assaults, a facility in Buffalo was firebombed on June 7. A center in Gresham, Ore., was hit with an "incendiary device" over the weekend. 

I find it ironic that she'd talk about "prey[ing] on women of color," as if she's some kind of champion of female people who happen to be of the same race she is, given these facts:

Abortion in America has contributed to the greatest decline in black population since the first black slaves arrived in the Americas in the 1600s. According to U.S. census data, there were 18,871,831 black American citizens in 1960. Since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, abortion has killed an estimated 20 million black babies — more than the entire black population of 1960.

And this Jane's Revenge outfit is one cold organization:

Like other pregnancy care centers, our facility assists under-resourced pregnant women and families. Our clients are already struggling to make ends meet. Unlike the nearby Planned Parenthood, our center offers real choice. While Planned Parenthood offers exactly one solution for parents in this situation – abortion, and cash up front, please! – our center offers material necessities, parental education, assistance in accessing obstetric care, ultrasounds, and adoption referrals for those who don’t feel they are prepared to parent. All free, of course. And the mothers who nevertheless choose to have an abortion are always welcomed back with open arms for post-abortion grief counseling when and if they need it.

These are the works of mercy that have sparked the ire of hate groups like the one that claimed responsibility for the recent arson at a Wisconsin pregnancy care center.  The vandals scrawl a variant of the same phrase at each site: “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.” The group’s name – Jane’s Revenge – was painted across our facility’s wall. Their communique, as issued via journalist Robert Evans, reads, in part: “We have run thin on patience and mercy…we [shall] adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies.” These are the kinds of words used by ideologues and extremists who are, indeed, ready to use violence to cleanse the world of the people who disagree with them.

It's about time to revisit a basic fact. You can choose to call a zygote, embryo or fetus a clump of cells, or an unviable tissue mass. Hell, you can call it a 3/16-inch Allen wrench. (There's probably a grown adult out there somewhere identifying as such.) But the fact is, that what ever you call it (actually, him or her), you were one once.  

Abortion is a means of exterminating our species. It's ultimately suicidal.

 

 

 

 

About the best analysis of what the fallout will - and won't - be from the Alito draft leak I've come across so far

 Sarah Isgur, host of The Dispatch's Advisory Opinions podcast, makes the point at Politico that abortion has lost a fair amount of its status as a hot-potato issue due to the fact that opinions are pretty firmly formed and there's not much of an unconvinced populace to persuade.

Let me do some long excerpting here:

At its most basic level, there are two ways a political issue can affect an election. Either it causes a meaningful number of voters to switch from one candidate to another or it increases turnout by motivating people disproportionately on one side of an issue to vote who otherwise would have stayed home.

On the first point, the question is whether there are any voters left who would change their votes based on the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. After decades of abortion litmus tests for candidates, what if the vast majority of voters already changed parties at some point to align with their beliefs on abortion or aligned their beliefs with their party’s increasingly firm ideological stand on the issue?

In the 50 years since Roe was decided, the two political parties have shifted to become almost synonymous with their positions on this singular issue.

At the 1972 Democratic Convention, 59 percent of delegates voted against an abortion-rights plank for the platform. Even as recently as 2009, 64 Democrats voted for an amendment to the Affordable Care Act restricting federal funding for abortions. In 2019, Kirsten Gillibrand campaigned on the idea that the Democratic Party should “be 100 percent pro-choice, and it should be non-negotiable.” As John Murdock wrote in National Affairs, Gillibrand “eventually left the presidential race not because her abortion absolutism was too radical but because it was too common.” Today, only two Democrats in the House identify as “pro-life” and the number may well be zero by 2023.

She then goes on to make the interesting point that the GOP used to quite diverse when it came to this issue:

The Republican Party wasn’t always uniformly anti-abortion. As California governor, Reagan signed into law a liberal abortion bill. Future Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, writes Murdock, had “turned New York City into an abortion destination” as the first state in the country to legalize abortion without a residency requirement. George H.W. Bush’s father was the treasurer of Planned Parenthood, and Bush as a member of Congress “earned the nickname ‘Rubbers’ for his support for contraceptive access.” In the 90s, Republican Majority for Choice had chapters in nearly 20 states, an annual budget of a million dollars, and plenty of incumbents in both houses to support. Today, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are the last two pro-abortion rights Republicans in the Senate. Republican Majority for Choice closed down in 2018.

Dems' whole ally-of-people-of-color schtick probably won't help them here:

we do see data showing certain voting demographics within the Democratic base — young people, Latinos and Black voters — increasingly dissatisfied with President Biden, which is presumed to hurt Democratic turnout in down-ballot races in the fall. And while a reversal on Roe might motivate some younger voters, Democrats may be wary of campaigning on an issue that could further put off some Latino and Black Democratic voters, who are already more conservative than white Democrats on many social issues, including abortion.

Let us also remember that, comparatively speaking, folks ain't getting so many abortions lately:

At the same time, abortion has become less salient as a political issue. There are fewer abortions in the US than there were when Roe was decided in 1973 — at a time when abortion was illegal in the majority of states. Perhaps this explains why abortion has been steadily falling on the list of issues that voters mention as being the most important issue facing the country while other cultural issues — most notably, immigration — have ticked up. In fact, abortion didn’t even register at 1percent in any of the last four Gallup issue polls.

And outspoken lawmakers can huff and puff a lot, because they're covered by the fact that no one's presently pressing them to get into policy specifics:

The real political fight may be within the parties. Thanks to the Supreme Court, both Democrats and Republicans have been able to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to abortions, talking a big game but avoiding specifics on when abortions should be banned because Roe stood in the way of any real political accountability.

In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Elizabeth Warren refused to name “any limits on abortion” that she would support. But most Americans are unlikely to support elective abortions at 39 weeks. In the meantime, Republican state legislators have passed sloppily drafted laws that they knew wouldn’t go into effect under Roe, including laws that could criminalize the removal of an ectopic pregnancy — a tragic and common complication that will never result in a live birth and could kill the mother in the meantime.

Both parties are about to learn that legislative cosplay is all fun and games until the courts return the issue to voters and their elected representatives have to actually govern.

So placard-carrying activist types might want to consider whether their time is best spent trying to move the needle by such tactics on this. 

It's fairly clear that it's going to play out in such a way that it will come down to where one lives.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The leak of the draft in the SCOTUS Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health case - initial thoughts

 1.) At this moment, far and away the most pressing question is, who leaked it? It seems pretty damn likely it was someone, like a clerk for a progressive justice, who wanted to catalyze a firestorm. A pre-emptive strike, if you will. The Justice Department must spare no resources in finding out who it was, and meting out the severest possible punishment.

2.) Why do I state this so strongly? I'll let this paragraph from a National Review editorial this morning explain:

The legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s vital constitutional duty to pronounce authoritatively what the law is in cases where it is called to do so hinges on the integrity of its process. The Court has thus been admirably disciplined about maintaining the secrecy of its deliberations until rulings are announced. Without that discipline, the Court’s decision-making would be subjected to intense political pressure — the very antithesis of a system that insulates the judiciary from politics so that cases can be decided pursuant to law, without fear or favor. The Court’s vital constitutional role, vindicating a rule of law not men, would be destroyed. Worse, the leak could inspire violence against the Court or the justices.

3.) Here's what to remember when stare decisis is brought into the discussion/screaming match:  If we as a country had never questioned that concept's sacrosanctness, Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson would never have been overturned. 

4.) That the opinion was authored by Alito and not Roberts is noteworthy, to say the least. Roberts is an enigma; Alito is not. Let us remember that Roberts opined in 2012 that the Affordable Care Act individual mandate was a tax, thereby letting the ACA live to see another day (and still impose bureaucracy and redistribution on our health care system). On the other hand, in 2015, his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges took straight aim at the use of the substantive-due-process concept as the basis for the majority opinion:

Roberts reminded the Court that its leading substantive due process precedents require any claimed right to be “objectively, deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed.” In short, legal history matters enormously. There can be no “right” that blatantly contradicts the laws widely embraced by states at the time the Constitution or the 14th Amendment was ratified.

5.) Bravo to Alito for forthrightly stating that the Roe v. Wade decision was shoddy in the extreme and had nothing to do with relying on the U.S. Constitution, as has been acknowledged for decades:

"What is frightening about Roe," noted the eminent constitutional scholar and Yale law professor John Hart Ely (who personally supported legalized abortion), "is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. … It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

6.) The whole abortion conflagration is of a piece with the general obliteration of a historically (and biologically) grounded notion of what human nature is. I know I keep hearkening back to Carl Trueman's book, but that's because it lays out how we got here so methodically. 

I'll once again reprint the short review I wrote about it at Precipice last November:

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman examines the process over the last few centuries by which sexuality became the overriding factor in summing up an individual human being’s identity. Throughout the work, he reminds the reader that this has not always been the case.

The first major figure in his lineage of thinkers who brought us to our present juncture is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose essential contribution was the focus on the inward psychological life, as opposed to presumptions, norms and institutions developed over the course of a society’s evolution. From Rousseau we get the notion that the individual can decide for himself or herself what will best enhance well-being.

He puts together three figures from the Romantic period of English literature - Wordsworth, Shelley and Blake - as having given us the view of “feelings and instinct as lying at the heart of moral action and what it means to be truly free and truly human.” Shelley, in particular, was pretty radical in embracing this position, asserting that monogamous man-woman relations was harmful to expressions of the way people naturally are.

He puts together in one chapter another trio, this one from a few decades later. There are important distinctions to be made between Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin, but together they did much to point Western civilization in a materialistic direction. Their common basis was viewing the world as having no significance or meaning beyond that imparted by human action.

Next up, Trueman discusses Freud, with particular interest in Freud’s concept of happiness as being rooted in genital pleasure, and what that has meant for the whole field of psychoanalysis. 

He then looks at the roles played by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse in bringing together the lineage of thinkers, in particular Marx and Engels, who put the power dynamics between society’s classes front and center, and the primacy of sexuality in the search for a stable society that Freud brought to the table. 

Trueman does a great job of presenting the case that the surrealist movement in art moved the entire impetus along. Ditto his look at how Hugh Hefner’s putting the sheen of sophistication over the commercialization of erotic arousal has had ramifications up to the present day.

Trueman’s meticulous. You may find yourself going back to previous chapters to reread something that seemed arcane at the time, but that you now see as having planted the seeds of future developments. By the time you get to the chapters on how eroticism and a therapeutic framework triumphed in our culture, and, finally, how transgenderism came to be mainstreamed in an alarmingly short time, you can see the thread tying it all together with unsettling clarity. 

Along the way, I was introduced to some minds I had at best only a glancing acquaintance with who have informed Trueman’s thinking. Now I’m inspired to further investigate Philip Reiff, Augusto Del Noce, Alasdair McIntyre and Charles Taylor.

A few weeks ago, in another Precipice piece, I did acknowledge that some caution is warranted in finding the degree to which one ought to align with Trueman:

The case could be made that one ought to be wary of Trueman, given his friendship with Rod Dreher. Dreher is one of those once-admirable conservatives - reliably Christian, no less - who have undergone a dismaying and perplexing transformation. Dreher’s been spending an increasing amount of time in Hungary, because he greatly admires Viktor Orban. Orban is poised to seriously dent the European unity that has been such a support to Zelensky and Ukraine. Dreher’s also on record as claiming that Tucker Carlson is the most important - and he means that in a good sense - commentator on American television today.

Trueman has also gone after David French, falsely painting him as motivated to write for Time and The Atlantic to be accepted by secular culture elites. 

But even if one doesn’t wade into the internecine squabbles among evangelical intellectuals, there are other grounds on which to argue that we’re treading on entirely unexplored territory. 

A look at the sweep of history reveals how recent this experimentation with the basic dichotomy of human nature is. In what culture, anywhere in the world at any time prior to the last thirty years at the outside, did marriage ever mean lifetime union of two people of the same sex? Where were the men who felt that they were women and vice versa, even after Rousseau and Shelly had begun the process of eroding our civilizational foundations?

But ultimately, he has secular substantiation for his basic point on his side:

A look at the sweep of history reveals how recent this experimentation with the basic dichotomy of human nature is. In what culture, anywhere in the world at any time prior to the last thirty years at the outside, did marriage ever mean lifetime union of two people of the same sex? Where were the men who felt that they were women and vice versa, even after Rousseau and Shelly had begun the process of eroding our civilizational foundations?

But wholehearted enthusiasts of such experimentation are hot to silence and marginalize those who point this out. More saddening is the sight of those who claim to want to restore conservatism to its commonly understood foundation saying, “This stuff is a done deal. We’ve expanded the definition of what it means to be human and that’s that.”

7.) This leak, and the case to which it pertains brings to the fore once again, as these "culture wars" battles always do, the essential question of whether there is a basic architecture to the universe and, if so, if there's any cost to us flouting it. I think I'll further flesh out this point in a Precipice piece, but, for now, I want to make sure that this point is out there. 

 

 

 

 

The Texas heartbeat law is ultimately counterproductive for furthering the pro-life cause

 First, let's look at why the Supreme Court opted to let it stay in place for the time being:

In a one-paragraph, unsigned order issued just before midnight on Wednesday, the court acknowledged that the providers had “raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law.” But that was not enough to stop the law from going into effect, the court explained, because of the way the law operates. Specifically, the court observed, it wasn’t clear whether the state officials – a judge and court clerk – and the anti-abortion activist whom the abortion providers had named as defendants “can or will seek to enforce the Texas law” against the providers in a way that would allow the court to get involved in the dispute at this stage.

The dissenters, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer, based their objection on the legal system's understanding of abortion as a constitutional right, per the Roe v Wade decision of 1973. 

What ought to be remembered, but is only hazily so, is that there has been a consensus over the decades that the reasoning by which that decision was reached was itself a joke from a Constitutional standpoint:

Roe is judicially wrought social legislation pretending to the status of constitutional law. It is more adventurous than Miranda and Griswold, other watchwords of judicial activism from its era. It is as much a highhanded attempt to impose a settlement on a hotly contested political question as the abhorrent Dred Scott decision denying the rights of blacks.

It is, in short, a travesty that a constitutionalist Supreme Court should excise from its body of work with all due haste.

Roe has been commonly misunderstood since it was handed down in 1973, in part because its supporters have been so determined to obscure its radicalism. It is commonly thought that Roe only prohibits restrictions on abortion in the first trimester, when it effectively forbids them at any time, imposing a pro-abortion regime as sweeping as anywhere in the advanced world.

The confusion arises from the scheme set out in the majority opinion, written by the late Justice Harry Blackmun.

In the first trimester, the court declared, the right to abortion was absolute. In the second, states could regulate it to protect the mother’s health. In the third, states could restrict abortion in theory, but had to allow exceptions to protect the life or health of the mother, defined capaciously in the accompanying case of Doe v. Bolton to include “emotional, psychological, familial” considerations, as well as “the woman’s age.”

Roe struck down 50 state laws and has made it all but impossible to regulate abortion, except in the narrowest circumstances. More to the point, the argument that its particular set of policy preferences is mandated by the Constitution is flatly preposterous.

Over the years, the decision’s laughable constitutional inadequacy has been widely recognized. Shortly after it came down, Harvard Law School professor John Hart Ely, a supporter of legalized abortion, wrote that “Roe is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”

“Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding,” a former Blackmun clerk, Edward Lazarus, has written. “And in the almost 30 years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.”

That’s because none is possible. The court in Roe purported to find the constitutional right to abortion in the 14th Amendment, which says that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

This passage has no obvious or even subtle connection to legalized abortion (in fact, abortion laws were being tightened in the 19th century when the amendment passed). No matter. According to Blackmun, abortion is so central to liberty that no restriction on it can stand constitutional scrutiny.

He is at pains to deny that unborn children are “persons in the whole sense.” As evidence, he points to clauses in the Constitution about persons that don’t have “prenatal application,” e.g., the requirement that persons must be 35 or older to run for president.

This is too stupid for words. Just because clauses like this refer to adults doesn’t mean that minors, or unborn children, don’t have rights.

The best case that can be made for Roe is that it is a mistaken decision on the books for nearly 50 years now, so it has to be honored as a precedent. But the court is not, and shouldn’t be, in the practice of standing by fundamentally flawed decisions. Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregated education, almost 60 years later. Just last week, the court overturned a labor decision from 1977.

But the Texas heartbeat law is too clever by half in the way it tries to get around the heavy-hand-of-government-preventing-women-from-exercising-a-right argument. In a you-ought-to-read-the-whole-thing piece by Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast entitled "I'm A Conservative Who Hates Abortion; The Texas Law Is A Disaster," Lewis steers clear of side issues and puts his concern for defending fetal Americans' right to life front and center:

I’m not here to quibble with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision not to enjoin a Texas law that bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected—that was a complex legal and procedural decision over which reasonable people can disagree. Nor am I here to talk about the political backlash that may result from this, or whether Texas handed Biden “a lifeline” (although that’s entirely possible).

But I am here to suggest that the law hinders my ability to persuade others to value the dignity of life and to create a culture of life. If you care about changing minds and changing the culture, that’s a huge problem.

He says the law greatly hobbles the ability of pro-lifers to convincingly make their case by projecting the image of being vigilantes:

In defense of this law, conservatives are attempting to do something patently unfair to women and anyone who “aids or abets” them.

It also shifts the identity of someone who opposes abortion from being a devout modern-day William Wilberforce to being a glorified Dog the Bounty Hunter. 

Roger Severino of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has the entirely opposite view. In a National Review piece, he calls it a stroke of genius:

The abortion industry has stifled pro-life laws by strategically bringing “pre-enforcement challenges” before liberal judges who dutifully prevent the laws from ever going into effect. This tactic upends the normal course of litigation by asking courts to consider what parties might or might not do and to weigh harms that might or might not be experienced, instead of judging concrete facts based on actual events. But in case after case, results-oriented judges have jettisoned legal norms on this point using what Justice Scalia famously dubbed the abortion “ad hocnullification machine.”

Successful pre-enforcement challenges don’t result in laws being literally erased from the statute books. Rather, they work through a legal fiction established in the case of Ex Parte Young that allows federal courts to bar state officials from enforcing the challenged laws. But what if a state allowed private citizens to go to court to enforce violations instead? That’s exactly what Texas did. It passed a law prohibiting abortions of children with beating hearts but left enforcement exclusively to private parties who can sue in court for $10,000 in damages per illegal abortion. Lost in the media panic over this law is the fact that defendants can still prevail if they prove a damage award would pose a “substantial obstacle” to getting an abortion on women served by a clinic defendant.

The concept of private-party law enforcement is more familiar than you might think. Consider a typical small-claims court where disputes range from breach of contract, to slip-and-fall cases, to accidental damage to a neighbor’s property. Or consider someone who sues a landlord under a state fair-housing law for sexual harassment. In each of these cases, enforcement is handled by private parties through the courts, and state prosecutors need not have anything to do with securing plaintiffs any compensation.

You might be thinking that the Texas law differs because it allows private people to sue even when their own rights aren’t directly harmed or at stake. Fair point. However, third parties already sue for the benefit of (indeed on behalf of) the government with some frequency. The False Claims Act, for example, allows Joe and Jane Citizen to sue contractors who have defrauded the federal government. They need not be employed by the government or the contractor, or have anything to do with the contract, yet can receive up to 30 percent of the monies recovered if they prove fraud without any federal-government participation whatsoever.

Texas’s genius was applying these existing legal concepts and frameworks to neutralize the abortion industry’s most potent weapon, the pre-enforcement challenge. Abortion clinics are now in an impossible bind because on the one hand, there is no one to sue because no state official is allowed to enforce the law, while on the other hand, there are too many people to sue because they can’t identify who among the millions of Texas pro-lifers will step forward to enforce the law.

Texas’s giving up its extraordinary prosecutorial power while empowering private citizens is like a stunning queen sacrifice in chess that enables the weaker pawn pieces to spring a trap on an unsuspecting king. As a result of this brilliancy, for the first time since 1973, abortion clinics in Texas are now halting abortions en masse because they are unwilling to stand before a judge to justify every time they stop a child’s beating heart.

What a marvelous check.

A cogent case, but ultimately falls short in light of the considerations raised by the likes of Lewis. 

Now, regarding the two main responses we're hearing from the Left, they are old and tired, but merit a word of comment. 

The whole my-body-my-choice / keep-governmental-force-out-of-my-uterus line of rage objection,  we can begin, as has been the case for fifty years, by pointing out that, even if we are to call a fetus a pomegranate, or a 3/16-inch Allen wrench, the fact is that, dear choice advocate, you were one once, as were all of us. From there we can proceed to a position rooted in Christian doctrine. A new soul has entered the space-time realm at the moment of conception, and it only happens in the body of a female. 

And that position leads us to the second response, namely, that pro-lifers seem to care a great deal about embryos and fetuses, but not so much about unfortunate people who are already born, such as the addicted and/or homeless, or immigrants between a rock and a hard place, or domestic violence victims. That one's full of holes, too. It's such a sweeping generalization that it can't be substantiated with numerical data. "Caring" takes all kinds of forms. A truly Christian approach is based on caring for everyone. The apostolic letters and indeed the teaching of our Lord Himself make this clear. If any given person or organization is not following through on this, it's not due to an inadequacy in the teachings. All the above-mentioned dilemmas of already-born people are open to ideas for solutions that may depend, to one degree or another, on public policy. There are all kinds of variables involved not only in each type of situation, but in the case of each individual's life. There are no such variables involved in the question of whether an innocent person ought to be allowed to live. 

The pro-choice mindset just strikes me, and always has, as being rooted in a bitterness that ultimately comes down to a resentment at the basic architecture of the universe. The rush to accelerate the obliteration of specifically female and male identifying characteristics starts from the abortion question and gathers momentum until it reaches the point of "birthing persons" becoming official government lingo, and "gender options" beyond being make or female available to those applying for drivers' licenses. 

The idea that there is no higher order than the human capacity to self-invent (or at least indulge the delusion of such a capacity) notched the win with this Texas law, well-meaning pro-lifers' contrary assessments notwithstanding. 

Thus will our culture get even more grotesque. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday roundup

Hold on to your wigs, folks. Today's roundup is a thunderous Niagara Falls-level cascade of must-reads. "Doozy" and "humdinger" fall far short of being adequate depictions.

I gave some thought to breaking this into individual posts. There will be some fairly lengthy excerpting to the linked source material. But I think consolidation in one spot is going to work best.

Matt Taibbi comes at his journalism and opinion writing from a left-of-center perspective, but he's certainly not one who can be pigeonholed. The son of an NBC News reporter, he spent several years in Russia, Uzbekistan (where he played professional baseball) and Mongolia (where he played professional basketball). He's a freelance writer and podcaster, with stints along the way at Rolling Stone and The New York Press. He doesn't mince words, which is probably the source of his appeal for Bill Maher, who had him cover the 2008 presidential election cycle for Real Time.

Lately he's been less inclined to guard his lefty bona fides than ever.

His latest at his Substack site is a righteous takedown of the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Searing stuff:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility(Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. 

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. 

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.” 

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier. 

Perhaps the most irritating thing about SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts's chiming in with the court's left-leaners in the June Medical Services v. Russo case is the fact that in a nearly identical case about a similar Texas law, he dissented when the majority upheld it. He was right to do so then, of course. His flimsy excuse for voting the other way this time is that, hey, a precedent was set. Stare decisis, you know. That's the kind of logic that would have kept Dredd Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson in place. A National Review editorial today points out that this fealty to precedent is not a consistent thing with him:

He has been perfectly willing to overrule precedents in the past. Some of them were of much longer standing. Janus v. AFSCME (2018), on public-sector unions, overruled Abood v. Detroit (1977). Some of them involved cases that presented nearly identical fact patterns. Gonzales v. Carhart(2007) upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion of a type that had been struck down in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

The piece says that Roberts "has reinforced the notion that he is the most politically calculating of the justices."

A die-hard lefty activist who started his path down that road going to Nicaragua in the 1980s to show solidarity with the Sandinistas and later went to Asia to expose working conditions in Nike factories has, at least on the subject of the global climate, had a conversion experience:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. 

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” 
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s 
• Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. 

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies. 

Brace yourself, buddy. Your former associates are going to try to make your life miserable.

I really, really gave consideration to devoting an entire post to this one. We've had the book from Bolton, the letter from Mattis, the remarks from John Kelly, but there's never been anything so comprehensively indicting about what a threat to national security the Very Stable Genius is as this expose by Carl Bernstein at CNN:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. 

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

Does this surprise you?

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

Then-DNI Dan Coats expressed his worry to subordinates that the VSG was "undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe."

Big-time damage to our most important alliances:

Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters -- including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear accord. 

Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters, while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.

But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with." 

The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic." 

He thought he was sucking up to adversaries by bragging about himself. Such is his weird assumption bout he way anybody else but himself thinks:

The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state), were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of their countries.

In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.) 

The pullout of US troops from Syria can be directly traced to his phone conversations with Erdogan.

He was far more interested in how Jared and Ivanka thought his phone calls went than in the views of Fiona Hill, Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster. He never read briefing materials to prepare him for calls.

States such as Oregon, Kansas, Texas and Arizona are reversing course on their re-openings in face of COVID-19 case upticks.