This seems as good as any time to say something important. I want you to look at this lunatic. Look how she is apparently driving while screaming like a lunatic.

Thread cc @PolitiBunny @wjjhoge https://twitter.com/MsEBL/status/1307314855511121922

This woman filmed this behavior and posted it on the web. She believed we should all see it.

Well, I guess we should, but not for the reason she probably thought.

A lot of reasonable people have been astonished by the passing of #RuthBaderGinsburg

But we have also seen a lot of unhinged reactions. We have seen people talk about armed insurrection if the republicans do... what the Constitution allows them to do. And of course people caring a great deal who replaces her.

And all of this shows us why the Supreme Court *needs* to overturn Roe v. Wade. It is a cancer on our constitution. It is more than a bad decision. It is a decision that eats at our constitutional system

You see, the selection of a Supreme Court justice is not supposed to be this important. I’m not denying the current reality that it is important, but its not supposed to be this important.

The Supreme Court is supposed to be like a referee. It doesn’t make the rules, it is just supposed to make the calls. Justice Roberts was right to say this, and just because he can’t live up to his ideal doesn’t mean his ideal was wrong.

And the thing is before Roe v. Wade, it wasn’t that contentious. We had nothing like the Thomas hearings, let alone the Kavanaugh hearings.And we didn’t have the worship of Ginsburg or anything like it.

Roe changed that because it transformed the Court in the eyes of the people from being an institution that merely was the referee to an active lawmaker. Now who was on the Supreme Court was suddenly important because this was one of the ways we made law.

Prior to Roe, if women wanted to win the right to abortion, they appealed to politics. Now, if they wanted the right to abortion, they endeavored to put “the right people” on the Supreme Court.

Democrats these days are fond of attacking any institution isn’t strictly representative democracy. They denounce how the Senate ensures that low-population states have as much say as large-population states.

And of course they scream constantly that the Electoral College doesn’t allow the heavily populated cities to just roll over the rest of the country. And yet those institutions are far more representative and responsive to the people than the Supreme Court.

Think about it, the Court is chosen by people nominated by a president who might not have won the popular vote, and approved of by a senate that is deliberately not proportionally representative of the population.

And the result, unsurprisingly, is a court that isn’t terribly representative of the people. If memory serves, only three women have ever served on the court. Only two black people. No Asians, no Indian, Pakistani or Afghans. Pretty sure there has never been a Native American

Have we ever had a disabled justice who was disabled on the day he or she was appointed? Pretty sure we haven’t. And of course they are all disproportionately old.

And the democrats not only want to give them the power to make law, but the power to make law that overrules the laws that are passed by far more representative bodies. The cognitive dissonance on this point is nothing less than stunning.

I remember, for instance, as multiple federal courts suddenly decided there was a right to gay marriage, the Democratic Party congratulating one state after another about he ruling.

It amounted to “Congratulations, the courts have decided you are not allowed to vote on this. Signed, the party whose name implies they are supposed to be devoted to democracy.”

And it was Roe and related decisions that started us down this path. You might argue that the prior decision Griswold v. CT https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12276922145000050979&q=griswold+v+connecticut&hl=en&as_sdt=6,47 led us down this path. Griswold not only had a silly result, pretending that there was a right *in the constitution*...

...to birth control, but it had silly logic claiming that our constitutional rights have “penumbras,” which means shadows. Seriously, read the opinion, it is pure bullshit.

And no, I am not saying birth control should be banned. I am just saying that the constitution doesn’t say anything on the subject, positive or negative.

And the same can be said for abortion. Or gay marriage.

It was only as recently as the 1980’s that the Supreme Court said that there was no constitutional right to engage in gay sex. A few decades later suddenly there is not only a right to gay marriage but liberals are trying to force people to bake cakes for their ceremonies.

What changed? The Constitution wasn’t amended. No, it was just that there were enough liberals, and Justice Kennedy (another Supreme Court justice who didn’t follow the constitution) on the Supreme Court to decide to do this thing.

Again, this is not about what should be the law, but who decides what the law is: the people the constitution actually puts in charge, or our unelected “betters” in robes?

Of course, the left would say “the constitution is a living document whose meaning changes with the times.” I have a few things to say to that. First, I thought the left was against basing the law on faith but there is nothing more faith-based than the belief that...

...an inanimate object is “alive.” Second, it goes against the very idea of what a constitution is supposed to be, at least when it comes to the rights protected by the document. The idea was the founders thought these rights were so important that they wanted to make it...

...extra difficult to violate them. So if a person wanted to violate freedom of speech, you had to convince two houses of congress, either get the president to allow it, or override the veto and convince the Supreme Court not to strike the law down.

When the constitution is seen as what it is, a bunch of text that doesn’t change over time, that process is simple, ministerial. “Oh, you have locked up a man for criticizing a politician. Well, the first amendment doesn’t allow for that, so that law is struck down.”

But once you let the virus of “living constitutionalism” infect the judicial body, then suddenly what was supposed to be open and shut rights are not anymore. “Sure, the constitution says you have a right to free speech, but when you called Trump an a—hole, you violated...

“...his right to dignity, which is a new right we discovered in the shadows of other parts of the constitution.” If you value the rights that are actually there, you should have no tolerance for this bullshit.

And that’s my third point about it: its bullshit. We all know it is bullshit. Even the people saying it know it is bullshit.

And this is why the left goes to war so hard every time the Republicans try to appoint someone to the Supreme Court. And it is no coincidence that...

...they go the most nuts every time they think Roe might be threatened. They reasonably believed that Thomas might have been the deciding vote to take down Roe, so they dragged him through the mud.

And the same could be said with Kavanaugh.

Before Roe/Griswold, the most blatant example of activism was the Dred Scot decision. You can read the vile thing, here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3231372247892780026&q=dred+scott+v+sandford&hl=en&as_sdt=6,47

It ruled that congress had no right to ban slavery in the territory, even though every congress going back to the founding had done exactly that. They said that black people were not part of the founding, even though the first man to die in our revolution was...

...black and Native American (Crispus Attucks). it argued that black men were not citizens and could not be made citizens even though that had been done even before the founding. It was bullshit.

And the thing is, it pushed us closer to war. It is fair to say that but for the Dred Scott decision, the civil war might not have happened. Why? Because after that decision, the pro-slavery forces became less reasonable in their demands.

In fact it directly led to violence in Kansas, a miniature civil war, as they fought to organize it as potentially a slave state. Now, the civil war also gave us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, but i don’t think any sane person thinks that a civil war is desirable now.

And we are seeing a similar obnoxiousness on the left today, trying to force people who think abortion is murder to fund them, trying to force doctors who object to abortion to perform them, trying to force people who object to gay marriage to help with the ceremony.

They are fueled, in part, by the false claim that these things involve constitutional rights. If the Supreme Court didn’t invent these “rights,” the temperature of these debates would be reduced.

Of course, reversing Roe and generally bringing this era of judicial activism to an end won’t fix these problems overnight. The damage has been done to this country throughout most of my life and it won’t be fixed in a day. But it will be a first step and...

...if you give it a few decades, the damage will be reversed.

The constitution will go back to being a document of mainly understood and fixed meaning, changes will be made through an honest amendment process, and the rest of the decisions will be left to the people.

/end