She said many abortion opponents, including the sponsors of the Mississippi abortion law at issue, hoped her three new colleagues would allow for the reversal or reduction of Roe v. Wade. With Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett listening, she asked, “Will this institution survive the stench” created from such political machinations — and then answered: “I don’t see how it is possible."
Of course, when justices begin to declare their disgust at the very thought of overturning precedent, there is another detectable scent in the courtroom. Indeed, it felt like a scene from Tennessee Williams's play, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The only thing missing was the play’s central character, “Big Daddy” Pollitt, asking: “What's that smell in this room? … Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity.”
Of course, when people detect bad odors, there's another famous line that comes to mind: "He who smelt it dealt it."
If we're going to detect lies, and characterize lies as smells, there are lies all around, possibly lies all the way down. If you think the other side's lies — however you define lies, perhaps broadly — smell bad, what about your own lies? Does your shit not stink?
Here's a famous dead baby joke from the 1960s:
What's harder to unload, a truck full of bowling balls or a truck full of dead babies?
A truck full of bowling balls because you can't use a pitchfork.
That's quoted in the scholarly article "The Dead Baby Joke Cycle" by Alan Dundes (Western Folklore). One of the follow-on jokes to that one is:
What's worse to be buried under: bowling balls or dead babies?
Bowling balls — you can't eat your way out.
Why were we telling jokes like that in the 1960s and into the 1970s? Why was this overt callousness attractive, and why did it fade out? Jokes play off of anxiety, but maybe after you've laughed enough, you've overcome the anxiety, so there's nothing to cause laughter. What's that smell in this room? If you've been in that room long enough, you can't smell it at all.
Sotomayor predicted a stench that would arise from the new decision — the overruling of Roe. Sotomayor seems to be saying that her new colleagues are disgusting — deplorable — they stink. Or they will stink, if they use their current majority to rewrite the work of an earlier majority that she doesn't find disgusting.
Another clue about what's that smell came from Justice Breyer, who said:
"[T]he problem with a super case like this, the rare case, the watershed case, where people are really opposed on both sides and they really fight each other, is they're going to be ready to say, no, you're just political, you're just politicians. And that's what kills us as an American institution.... and that they say is a reason why... when you get a case like that, you better be damn sure that the normal stare considerations, stare decisis overrulings are really there in spades, double, triple, quadruple, and then they go through and show they're not."
That is, by the way, the only point in the transcript where anyone uses the verb "to kill." There's no truckload of dead babies on the premises. It's all about the reputation of the Supreme Court as an institution. If it's ever discovered that it's "just political" — key word, "just" — then it is killed! And the stench is the rotting corpse of the dead Supreme Court. Dead, presumably, because even though everyone already knew that the Court was political — is there an older accusation against it? — it had some element that was not political, making it not just political.
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Sotomayer is not the wise Latina she thinks she is. She is a disgusting pig, who is biased and should NEVER have been confirmed for this job. What a fool. She is one of the reasons America is being laughed at by the world.
Why were we telling jokes like that in the 1960s and into the 1970s?
that's Easy! back then, there Weren't truckloads of baby parts traveling the country
abortion was dangerous illegal and RARE
Just the idea of a pile of baby parts was inconceivable.... Thus the topic of stupid jokes
Now a days, Millions (and MILLIONS) of babies are torn up and thrown out... Every year
a Truckload of dead babies is something that Happens... ALL THE TIME
things that happen all the time aren't funny... they are just sad
no, you're just political, you're just politicians.
serious questions
does Anyone think that Roe, or Casey; weren't 'just political'???
when was the last time a liberal justice made a decision that wasn't 'just political'???
The words, or concept, "stare decisis," do not appear in the Constitution. It is a concept made up entirely by the USSC, for the USSC. The USSC can follow it, ignore it, or modify it, at its will. Elections have consequence, O Wise Latinx.
To go a step further, we all agree the that USSC can declare a law "Unconstitutional," and therefore void. Where is that in the Constitution? We all learned about Marberry v. Madison, and that since then "everyone" has agreed that the USSC has this power, but it is only by common agreement. What will happen when the USSC declares "Thus!" and the Texas or Florida Supreme court states "Not Thus!"? Just a matter of time. How many Divisions has the USSC? It depends on who is president.
“If the republicans ever want to win again, they better not do this or that” - Every Sunday Morning News show pundit.
The rhetorical point of disgust is that it can't be accomodated into a theory.
It would be particularly mendacious to be wrapped up in the animus of a political movement, the personalized activism surrounding it, when your job is merely to be a Supreme Court Justice.
Why tip your hat?
I was reading through Molly Jong-Fast, and following reply gals on Twitter (nearly all women), to find the best reasons for maintaining what we’ve got now.
I was reminded how deep the issue is and how strident it makes people, What’s at stake makes for lifelong commitment, serious risk-taking, and even murder by activists all round.
"What is shocking is that those lefty justices and the attorneys pleading their case are so ignorant of the advances in medical science and technology that disprove every argument they present." https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/sotomayors_intellectual_limitations_on_display_in_the_oral_arguments_over_emdobbs_v_jackson_womens_healthem.html
New tag - Just political bullshit.
Roe was the beginning of the decline of the USSC. There is no way in hell the Constitution grants the right to an abortion. It is a matter for the state legislatures, always has been, and it needs to go back to the state legislatures. If the USSC wants it's reputation back, it can start by overturning Roe and Casey and sending it back to the states. And then staying out of everything except the actual Constitution. Start enforcing the Constitution against the Federal Government every time they step outside the explicitly granted powers, and leave the rest to the state. Otherwise, the country in going to balkanize. We are too different in too many regions on too many issues to have the Federal Government in charge of anything not explicitly spelled out. Leave the rest to the states.
I am not the first to say it, but the greatest service Donald John Trump did for America was to rip the bullshit fabric of false legitimacy off our our corrupted to the core political Institutions. It was barnyard burlap that they promised us was of the finest linen.
- Supreme Court? It's about the votes, not the law, there is no "right to abortion" in the Constitution, but as long as we had the votes...
- Is this an impeachable offense? It is if you have the votes.
- Can you raid a guy's lawyer's office and seize his files and privileged communications then 'leak' them to the press? You can if The Party says its ok.
- Can you spy on a political candidate using the awesome surveillance powers of the CIA, NSA, and even our foreign allies in what they refer to as the "intelligence community"? You can if it is in service of The Party.
It's The Party über alles, enforced by the Just Us Department and their vast police powers.
Trump was the little boy in the story The Emperor's New Clothes, and it infuriated The Party to the point where it threw out all pretense of rule of law, constitutional protections of individual rights, and objectivity of journalism, and now, of course, if Roe is overturned, The Party will call out to pack the court.
She is right about one thing, there is an awful stench.
The statements from Sotomayor and Breuer are designed to try and peel some one off the same way they peeled Roberts off. What Roberts and the new justices should see, however, is that trying to remove the controversy by letting the court decide only makes more controversy. Obamacare hasn't become less controversial since Roberts decided his tax and neither will Roe. Give the decisions back to the states.
I was reading somewhere this week that there are states with trigger bans that ban abortion if Roe is overturned. Smart States: TX, ID, AR, Ky, LA, MO, ND, SD, OK, TN, UT. And Mississippi also has a trigger law that sounds even stricter than the fifteen week ban. I don't know which one would prevail in a broad reversal of Roe.
Didn't it used to be stare decisis that States had the right to say men marrying men and women marrying women was not possible? Gay activists just waited for a majority that supported them. But God Forbid anyone else do that.
Sotomayor already set herself apart when she conflated dead bodies reacting to stimuli with the innocents reacting to the pain inflicted during abortion.
Enough judges felt so strongly that abortion should be legal that they concocted bogus legal justifications to make abortion legal.
Supposedly, that abuse by those judges of their own judicial positions never can be corrected.
That is the situation here.
My father was a veteran of Infantry fighting in Europe in WW II. Like Paul Fussell, he was too beaten up for immediate reassignment to the Pacific--but would have been if the fog-a-mirror requirement had hd to be instituted due to the presumed casualties involved in an invasion of the Home Islands.
Instead, he stayed in Europe for about ten months after VE Day, cleaning things up, metaphorically speaking.
I can tell you where the dead-baby issue came from.
The Supreme court is a political institution and we all know that. It's why the confirmation fights are so dirty - we all know we're fighting over policy, not legal theories. If the court's reputation is dead, it's because the court itself killed it when 50 years ago it chose to become The Abortion Decider.
Can't you smell that smell?
no incest ,no rape clause in the Mississippi deal,,what about the 12 year old raped by her father,full term for her?
I suppose we may someday see a wise Latina on the Court, but I think we can stipulate that Sotomayor isn’t it.
We can always count on the Wide Latina to come through.
Psst, WL, the court will survive. The document to which you took an oath (and which you and other Democrats routinely ignore) states, "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."
I don't terribly like Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, or Ruth Bader-Meinhoff Ginsburg because I see them as a cancer on modern America. Their promotion of abortion in particular and anti-Christian values in general is an attack against the American nation and would have provoked the Founders to take up arms against them. Though their outsized influence on American law is exactly what Justice McReynolds and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge warned us about, I always at least understood that they had considerable intelligence and legal ability.
Sonia Sotomayor would be an embarrassment as a McDonald's fry cook, mainly due to her disregard for "never get high on your own supply." Only Harriet Miers is comparable as a mediocrity, and her failed nomination was a major blight upon the Bush Administration.
to West TX Intermediate Crude at the early hours of 0547am,
Yo b right on, bro.
Take a look at the Supremacy Clause. You know what's NOT there among the listed high echelons of authority?
That's right, Supreme Court opinions!
“Nice SC you’ve got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.”
I wonder if extortion will have the opposite effect on her colleagues than she intends. If they have a backbone they will call out her threat and hypocrisy. (Not counting on that from Roberts. Ha!)
She’s a snake in the grass poisoning the well. How do we let such small and destructive people into control.
The whole "this case will make the Court political" concern was raised extensively by Justice Scalia in Casey and many other cases. As any follower of the Court knows.
Acting as if this is the first time these things were raised, without any acknowledgement or discussion of that past, is misleading.
Gee I don't remember any dead baby jokes but yeah the people in my world (socal) were pretty callous back in the 60s. Only the local monseigneur and various other nuts cared about abortion. It was available everywhere. You just had to ask around.
Hmmm...what was Roe if not a judgment by SCOTUS on the political processes in the USA? And their judgment was that the court should take over the entire decision-making process om the abortion question and leave those hacks in the state legislatures in the primeval swamps of the state capitals where they feel most comfortable in playing their small-minded games. (See today's post on the Illinois redistricting).
There was insufficient belief by the justices that the people of the 50 states, acting through their elected representatives, could get to acceptable political solutions to the question of the availability and legality of abortions. Instead, citing Griswold v. CT, they applied a "right to privacy" they found in a case involving the sale of condoms in Connecticut.
Well, whatever...sounds more political than principled to me in a sort of elitist, totalitarian way. But it also embodied the zeitgiest of the 1960s and 1970s. Women's liberation! Make love, not war! We can change the world! And the carnage of back-alley abortions was real and awful.
A cynic might note that the unborn have no votes, and never will, so the battle in the state legislatures had a probable outcome similar to Roe in many states...but SCOTUS brought the issue forward and, importantly, took ownership of it.
The fact that so many abortions occur in the USA indicates that there is a market for it with high demand. If you look at the numbers, the black population of America has been most affected by Roe. A policy adopted by liberal elites by ukase from SCOTUS to enhance women's autonomy has had its biggest impact on the black population. Is that more structural racism? Let's see what that 1619 lady does with that argument.
I'm done with the Wise Latina jokes. They write themselves. They don't need my help.
You can avoid the stench of politics by not making political decisions, such as those regarding abortion and gay marriage, where the court simply made stuff up, stuff which was holy absent from the constitution.
Justice Sotomayor fears the demise of the United States Supreme Court? Fear not, Madam Justice. The evidence from Colorado is overwhelmingly in favor of “political” decision-making by Justices.
Colorado’s constitution permits citizen initiatives on our ballot to alter both our law and state constitution. One such initiative resulted in the Colorado Chief Justice being given the power to name some members to the “redistricting commission” that draws lines for legislative and congressional districts.
The first such commission was in the wake of the 1980 US Census. Here’s what happened: the Chief Justice, who had been appointed by a Republican Governor, named Republican Party stalwarts to the commission. The resulting state legislative district ended up giving Republicans a lock on legislative control.
By 1990 Democratic governors had named a new Chief Justice. Surprise! The commission gave Democrats pretty substantial control for elections from 1992 onward to the present day. The most recent Chief Justice named, as a “nonpartisan” pick for the Commission, a woman who’d been a Co-Chair of the Colorado protest demonstration against the inauguration of Donald Trump.
By the next decennial census Colorado will have experienced HALF A CENTURY of partisan shenanigans thanks to the rich aroma of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” between partisan governors and equally partisan Chief Justices. Justice Sotomayor can rest assured that the courts will survive.
Colorado Dude
Breyer and others are delusional of they think public acceptance of a decision depends on whether or not the court has met all of its technical, self - imposed criteria for not following stare decisis. Stuff like that is the most inside of inside baseball. If he really wants to earn public acceptance for the court's decisions, he should become an originalist and a textualist. It's only because of the "living constitution" and results-driven jurisprudence that people have come to view the court as a political institution. The court needs to stop viewing itself as a super - legislature that's generally empowered to solve the inequities that Congress or that states have left unremedied, and instead confine itself to the boring task of deciding cases based solely on what the relevant Constitutional provision or statute actually says.
"The Wide Latina" . . . I like that.
Isn't it past time to replace "Wise Latina" with "Wise Latinx"?
I constantly hear from those who say "what about incest or rape victims"? I've been hearing that for decades. Now we're at abortion till the point of birth. Where are the records kept on the number of "rape and incest" abortions? Yeah, I knew the answer to that one. Forced vaccinations opens a door itching for stare decisis. Wise Latina?
Roe was the beginning of the decline of the USSC.
You are more than 100 years off. Let's start instead with Dred Scott.
This history of the U.S. Supreme Court is one more of shame than glory.
The only way for SCOTUS to avoid being viewed as political is to avoid wading into politics as they did in Roe. It is hilarious to call any vote to extricate the Court from a political intrusion as political. Defenders of Roe are using stare decisions as a stalking horse for their own political motivations. Let’s remember the context of Roe which was pushed so hard because abortion activists could not get state legislatures to give them what they wanted. So they pushed through a political decision in the Court. It’s time to return to American democracy on the issue of abortion.
Sotomayor is not exactly pounding the law here, is she?
When we do politics, it's law. When you do law, it's politics.
DINKY DAU 45 said...
no incest ,no rape clause in the Mississippi deal,,what about the 12 year old raped by her father,full term for her?
You obviously have put a lot of thought into this. Why not reflect now upon the 10,000 other times that tact has been taken and the responses to it?
I think we can all agree the Supreme Court is illegitimately political when its rulings fail to conform with my preferences.
To cut and paste Scalia's dissent in Casey (in which in the last part he smashes the arguments Sotomayor tried to make) would be too long.
I recommend you all read it for yourself -
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/833/#tab-opinion-1959105
"... with a super case like this, the rare case, the watershed case, where people are really opposed on both sides and they really fight each other, is they're going to be ready to say, no, you're just political, you're just politicians. And that's what kills us as an American institution.."
If you are afraid to DO YOUR JOB you are already dead as an American institution.
I'm pro-life but realize not everyone agrees with me. We need a political answer to the rape/incest abortion question, which I have heard about for years. My proposed solution is, since the dead baby would give us the DNA of the father, that the rapist/incestor(sp?) also be executed. If an innocent is going to die for the crime, I think the actual perpetrator should, too. When I suggest this, most people tend to agree.
Dead baby jokes correlate with the Vietnam War pretty well (and who doesn't recall the jokes about napalm and crispy critters?) but I don't see any connection between that misadventure and the Ricky Retardo jokes that also abounded.
Hell, us pot-smoking, hard-partying hippy and semi-hippy college students shared jokes about the new Volkswagen model, which seated six million . . .
Good times.
Implicit in your take is the simultaneous desensitization to “dead babies” through gross-out jokes and a change in the law in ‘73. If dead babies are funny then abortion is the punchline. I’ll note here that the early ’70s were also the peak of “dumb Pollack” joke books and biting ethnic humor of all types.
some clueless dude said...
what about the 12 year old raped by her father,full term for her?
So, let me see, if i've got this straight?
IF the dad pays for the abortion... No rape occurred....
BUT! if the dad doesn't pay for the abortion... Then it's Rape Rape???
is that it? I'm not sure i get your point
Well, I'm happy to see that Sotomayor considers Lawrence v. Texas an invalid decision and will be working to restore Bowers v. Hardwick in the name of Burger Court stare decisis and defending the apolitical legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
If an innocent is going to die for the crime, I think the actual perpetrator should, too.
Death penalty for rapists. They have already had that in the past, but it was held to be unconstitutional. Besides, how does that help the baby that was intentionally killed?
Furthermore, the rapist isn't the actual perpetrator of the killing. That would be the abortionist.
About those incest of 12 year olds cases -- the FIRST person to drive the girl to the abortion facility to DEMAND that the girl abort is going to the be incest-raping dad. The the facility personnel are going to usher the girl in no questions asked and never report it to the police.
When the abortion industry starts following mandatory reporting laws for underage sexual assault, then we will know that the pro-aborts are serious about this rape-incest exception.
Sotomayor got the 15 seconds on the news shows, but her quote is meaningless and disappears into the vacuum of space with the next case up for review.
I counter with Supreme Court Justice Walter Matthau in "First Monday in October" who says, "Every day is different. You're different. I'm different. Every morning, a fresh beginning. Fresh start. First Monday in October. Always."
I like Louise B's proposal.
This Person: '“Nice SC you’ve got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.
I wonder if extortion will have the opposite effect on her colleagues than she intends. If they have a backbone they will call out her threat and hypocrisy. (Not counting on that from Roberts. Ha!)"
I suspect the open threats against the court conservatives and non-leftists is a prelude to getting the Stasi-FBI and DOJ involved to get a couple of these non-leftists removed from the court.
Narr said...
I like Louise B's proposal.
12/4/21, 2:34 PM
I'd vote for it. Plus, as Bender suggested, mandatory reporting of criminal activity. In fact, the fact abortionists want to hide these crimes suggest feminism takes a back seat to the wishes of rapist cabals that prey on teenaged girls. Like the Epstein types.
Sotomayor argues like any modern Democrat...insulting her opponents while sneering at them. Why they think this method will persuade anyone is a mystery.
The stench emanating from the penumbra of this wide Latina is what is suffocating this institution.
A stench will come off the court if it rules against abortion to match the one that came off it when it ruled for abortion. That's called an equitable outcome. You know, no matter how many times you've seen it happen, it's still amazing to hear a famous, reputable person, a Supreme Court justice, who is completely unaware of how half the country views the present situation created by the Supreme Court. Their decision has been for abortion on demand till birth. Babies are coming down the birth canal and having their necks broken just before they breathe. No stench from that? Baby parts from late term abortions are being sold. No stench from that? Babies are being burned with medical waste and the smoke is coming down on everyone near a clinic and on their food when they eat outside. No stench from that? Minority women are having their wombs scarred by abortion butchers licensed by the state so when they try to have children they can't. No stench from that? None for her. Not until someone seems to be about to prevent the death of fully-formed human beings able to breathe on their own. Omigod. What a smell. Can the US survive if the babies do?
Dead babies can't take care of themselves
Dead babies can't take things off the shelf
Well, we didn't want you anyway
Lalala-lalalalalala-la
That is, by the way, the only point in the transcript where anyone uses the verb "to kill."
The Mississippi attorney was a wimpy pro-lifer but he did say that Roe was quite different from the gay rights cases because...
Also, I -- I'd add none of them involve the purposeful termination of a human life. So those two -- those two features, stare decisis and termination of a human life, Your
Honor, puts all of those safely out of reach if the Court overrules here.
What he's suggesting (I think) is that you can easily overrule Roe by acknowledging babies have died under the opinion. So it's like he's saying stare decisis + infanticide = weak stare decisis.
Elsewhere in his argument...
They -- they adopt a right that purposefully leads to the termination of now millions of human lives.
So he's not using the "kill" word, he's using the pro-choice euphemism of "termination," but instead of terminating a "pregnancy" he's talking specifically about terminating babies.
Sotomayor, by the way, was clearly thinking about the life-or-death issue when she said,
Virtually every state defines a brain death as death.
But then she went on to make the ghastly point that dead people can still make movements. But it's interesting that she was thinking about death (and is aware of our death statutes). So when she said "stench" I thought she was talking about the stench of dead babies if the Court recognizes those homicides as homicides. I thought it was kind of a morbid joke.
Thomas says this, early in the oral argument...
You say that this is the only constitutional right that involves the taking of a life. What difference does that make in your analysis?
Mississippi's attorney's response:
One is it -- it really does mark out the unbelievably profound ramifications of this area, which, in many other areas, assisted suicide, a whole host of important areas that are important to dignity, autonomy, freedom, and important to matters of conscience, it -- it marks it out as one of the unique areas where this Court has taken that important issue to the people, and it's -- it's something that implicates life and it just, I think, marks off, Justice Thomas, how problematic and unusual and how much of a break the Court's abortion jurisprudence is from those other cases.
In the context of stare decisis, then, what he's suggesting is that this isn't just "another substantive due process case." I think what he's struggling to say (and failed to say) is that defining the baby as a non-person was the profound fuck up, and what marks this case as different from all the other substantive due process cases.
It's really ridiculous to compare stabbing a baby to "the right to marry" or the "right to sodomy" or the "right to live with your grandmother." It's the baby-killing aspect that is giving the Supreme Court the shits. Do they know this?
How do you make a dead baby float?
Two scoops of vanilla ice cream and some dead baby.
How do you keep a turkey in suspense?
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'The words, or concept, "stare decisis," do not appear in the Constitution.'
They dress is up in Latin so it sounds official and lawyerly.
If they said instead, 'Stuff we thought made sense back in the day' it wouldn't work as well.
One of the things a lot of folks said about Roe v. Wade was that, Well, now THAT issue is settled! Didn't work out that way, did it? Instead, it became a National issue, indeed a Presidential issue.
If the Supremes allow States some reasonable latitude in regulating abortion, it will become again what it used to be: a State issue. A lot of States will allow abortion without any significant restrictions. Other States will prohibit most abortions. And others will fall somewhere in the middle. Only a fanatic would think that this outcome would undermine the status of the Supreme Court.
And by the way, I'm only a liitle older than Althouse, and I don't remember any dead baby jokes. I think perhaps you hung out with a bad crowd.
Sotomayor predicted a stench that would arise from the new decision — the overruling of Roe. Sotomayor seems to be saying that her new colleagues are disgusting — deplorable — they stink. Or they will stink, if they use their current majority to rewrite the work of an earlier majority that she doesn't find disgusting.
"[T]he problem with a super case like this, the rare case, the watershed case, where people are really opposed on both sides and they really fight each other, is they're going to be ready to say, no, you're just political, you're just politicians. And that's what kills us as an American institution.... and that they say is a reason why... when you get a case like that, you better be damn sure that the normal stare considerations, stare decisis overrulings are really there in spades, double, triple, quadruple, and then they go through and show they're not."
are they really that stupid? Or is it just that they know there's absolutely no legitimate justification for Roe and Casey, so they're lashing out in desperation with any idiocy they can dream up?
The stench of politics is from the scumbag, oath violating left wing p-ice of shit "justices" who substitute their personal political beliefs for the writers US Constitution. Which is to say, it's Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan who stink the most
Next week can we do Little Willie limericks to accompany Pelosi doing something for publicity?
“If the republicans ever want to win again, they better not do this or that” - Every Sunday Morning News show pundit.
The advice of liberal Sunday news show pundits is invaluable. Listen to it - and do the exact opposite for best results.
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