June 27, 2022

That's hath wrought.

I'm trying to read "How Susan Collins can repair the damage she has wrought." It's Washington Post column by Jennifer Rubin. 

The "damage" she wrought was voting for Trump's Supreme Court nominees. By her own statement, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh conned her:
After the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was released, she asserted in a statement, “This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.” She then declared that she wanted to preserve Roe in statute, citing her support for the Reproductive Choice Act, which she introduced. (When a similar, Democratic bill came to the floor, she voted no. Her excuse: “It doesn’t protect the right of a Catholic hospital to not perform abortions.” In other words, millions of women whose rights she pledged to defend should take a back seat to … Catholic hospitals?)

Hmm. How about the damage wrought by Democrats who have refused to pass Collin's Reproductive Choice Act because they're keen on depriving Catholic hospitals of the right not to perform abortions?

ADDED: "Wrought" is archaic and it's used these days for effect, so what effect is intended? It's not jocose. Is it Biblical — a grand pronouncement? 

But I must concede that you don't have to use "hath" for "have" whenever you think "wrought" is better than "done." The OED has this quote from the Psalterium Carolinum of 1657:

The war our sins have wrought, With Peace, which Christ hath bought.

ACTUALLY: The Psalterium Carolinum had to use "have" with "sins," because "hath" is singular. That's why it's "hath" with Christ. So that quote doesn't require my concession! 

55 comments:

Temujin said...

I want Jennifer's job.

tim in vermont said...

"In other words, millions of women whose rights she pledged to defend should take a back seat to …forcing Catholic hospital to perform abortions?"

Fixed it for them.

Mike Sylwester said...

Democracy Dies in Darkness!

Enigma said...

The abortion and gun rulings might...for the first time in 50 years...bring a pause to political doublespeak and duplicity. If you want an abortion law, pass it. If you want meaningful gun control, pass it.

Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were not any more duplicitous than any other nominee post-RBG. The most recent nominee can't even define what a "woman" is, so all laws based on the notion of male and female are at risk from her.

"Men can have abortions, so it's not directed at women."

PB said...

I doubt they lied. Precedents stand until an argument is made that requires the previous ruling to be reversed. From a legal perspective, they can run circles around Collins, and Democrat-nominated SC candidates have most certainly lied in confirmation hearings. Someone should ask Jackson, "What is a lie?"

PB said...

I doubt they lied. Precedents stand until an argument is made that requires the previous ruling to be reversed. From a legal perspective, they can run circles around Collins, and Democrat-nominated SC candidates have most certainly lied in confirmation hearings. Someone should ask Jackson, "What is a lie?"

rrsafety said...

The devil is in the details and now politicians must stand for details now that SCOTUS has removed the fig leaf of Roe. How many liberal politicians will really support abortion on demand up until birth? How many conservatives will really support no early abortions in cases of rape and incest?

Kevin said...

Forgive her Washington Post, for she has sinned.

That will be three “Hail Ben Bradlees” and votes to end the filibuster and pack the Court.

Readering said...

I still remember visiting DC and discussing Clinton's healthcare plan of 1993 with a politically involved and enthusiastic friend. I dismissed it as going nowhere for not offering enough leeway to Catholic hospitals. He was incredulous at my take. No longer remember all the reasons the plan failed, but was struck by how blinkered he was on healthcare in the US at that time.

Breezy said...

What new litmus test will be all the rage for SCOTUS nominees now that Roe is gone? The stare decisis test is also gone, I believe.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Rubin is a fraud.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Ann said..
"How about the damage wrought by Democrats who have refused to pass Collin's Reproductive Choice Act because they're keen on depriving Catholic hospitals of the right not to perform abortions?"

Rubin is such a paid hack, that thought won't get thru. Not enough money in it for her.

gilbar said...

IMAGINE The HORROR!
Of a democratic society allowing elected officials to make laws! That is just WRONG!!!

Buckwheathikes said...

“This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”

So, black people count for 3/5ths of a person then, eh, Ms. Collins?

Coming from someone in Maine, this sentiment is hardly surprising.

But jokes aside, she wasn't "conned." She's a United States Senator. She knows precisely what she's doing and how she's playing the left and how the left is now playing her.

Precedent is important. It is not omnipotent and both Ms. Collins and Ms. Rubin both know that.

Bob Boyd said...

they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon

The precedent of the Court not finding individual rights that are neither enumerated nor rooted in tradition was the longer standing precedent.

It doesn’t protect the right of a Catholic hospital to not perform abortions.

IOW the Dems inserted a poison pill because they didn't want to resolve a valuable and lucrative political issue.

Gusty Winds said...

Hmm. How about the damage wrought by Democrats who have refused to pass Collin's Reproductive Choice Act because they're keen on depriving Catholic hospitals of the right not to perform abortions - Althouse

The pure HATRED for God and anything to do with God among Democrats is deep and demonic. Even the Catholic one's who admire the Jesuits. They want to shove their secular religion right up your ass.

What is strange is with the current liberal influence of the Jesuits (look what they've done to Marquette) I would think a lot of "Catholic" hospitals would be more than happy to perform abortions. And if there is a Jesuit priest hanging around in the lobby, he might just show you his penis. Consider it a bonus.

Mark said...

Repeating things over and over is not going convince people that Roe going down is a bad thing.

Especially when one keeps avoiding the central point - the killing of human beings.

If what we antiseptically call "abortion" does not involve the killing of a human being, then all of this argument might be valid. But it does, so it is all beside the point.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

I like to read Althouse’s reaction to Rubin but life is too short to spend my time actually reading Rubin. I’ve done it before. Her style is too middle-schoolish and reactionary for me to try and decode into adult English. Her long history of pro-life articles are out there waiting to refute New Jen, Broken Jen, anti-Trump Jenni.

Mark said...

The pro-abortion crowd could have avoided a lot of angst if they had only taken what pro-lifers have said for 50 years seriously. Including admitting that women make up a majority of the pro-life crowd.

cfs said...

I would be more upset if a potential Supreme Court justice testified as to how he or she would rule on any particular issue. How can they know how they will vote if they do not have the facts of the case in front of them, along with the law the parties cite to support their position? Judges are supposed to be neutral prior to hearing a case. I couldn't support a judge that could announce how he would rule prior to that point.

Also, Jennifer Rubin is an idiot.

Humperdink said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ConradBibby said...

Collins is making a fool of herself if she's claiming that Trump's nominees promised her they wouldn't overturn Roe and she relied on that in voting for them. There's no way these people made any kind of specific commitment on that. If she voted for them merely because they assured her that stare decisis is "important," she was an idiot and a dupe. For at least 30 years, Dems have been sounding the alarm that conservative nominees to the court would spell doom for Roe -- did Collins miss that?? Playing doe-eyed simpleton now that it's happened is not going to earn her any respect from the left.

BTW, "wrought" is the past participle of "work," not "do."

Sean Gleeson said...

Well obviously 'hath' would be incorrect in "The war our sins have wrought..." because 'sins' is a plural noun. You may only use 'hath' when 'has' would have been correct.

wendybar said...

She can retire. She is a Democrat in sheeps clothing.

cfs said...

The left probably could have kept abortion under RvW if they hadn't insisted on moving beyond the "safe, rare, and legal" standard they started with. The left alienated many on the issue by insisting on abortion up to and including the moment of birth.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

After the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was released, she asserted in a statement, “This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”

There is absolutely NOTHING inconsistent between the ruling in Dobbs, and the statement that stare decisis is important.

Unless you claim that Brown v Board of Education, Lawrence v Texas, and Obergefell are all wrong because they overturned settled precedent that the country relied upon, "it's important" does not mean "it's the be all and end all".
So the claim of bad faith on Gorsuch and Kavanaugh's part is entirely illegitimate

She then declared that she wanted to preserve Roe in statute, citing her support for the Reproductive Choice Act, which she introduced. (When a similar, Democratic bill came to the floor, she voted no

That is a lie. The Democrat billows in NO way a bill that "codified Roe in statute". It went far past Roe. Which is why it couldn't even get 50 votes in the Democrat controlled Senate

In other words, millions of women whose rights she pledged to defend should take a back seat to … Catholic hospitals
IOW, the writer cares nothing about individual freedom and human dignity, and cares only about forcing everyone to bow down and submit

It is helpful that they're taking the masks off

wendybar said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andy said...

Given that Sen Collins introduced the “ Reproductive Choice Act” on February 28th of this year I’m gonna call shenanigans on this I was conned bullshit. Clearly she knew something was up otherwise why introduce the act in the first place. I assume there will be some kind of ‘performative’ vote in Congress that will fail. At which point no one in Washington DC will ever have to worry about it again.

Joe Smith said...

First, they're both really good lawyers, so if you were able to parse everything they said, you wouldn't have a case that they 'lied.'

Second, did some of the shine come off RBG?

Is she no longer a saint?

Molly said...

(Eaglebeak)

"Hath" is third person singular, "have" is third person plural (and much more besides, nowadays). In general, the plural forms have replaced the singular in English (we say "you" now rather than "thou").

So whether or not we use "hath" has nothing to do with "wrought" -- which is an archaic form of "worked"; hence "wrought" iron. The person who does the working is a wright.

When looking at a Jennifer Rubin column it is perfectly appropriate to say in horror, "What hath God wrought?" Although perhaps it is unfair to blame it on God.

Ann Althouse said...

"Well obviously 'hath' would be incorrect in "The war our sins have wrought..." because 'sins' is a plural noun. You may only use 'hath' when 'has' would have been correct."

Thanks. You are right.

Will update the post.

Ann Althouse said...

Yeah, it's "hath" for "has" — easy to remember: It's a lisp!

Peggtea said...

I think it's important to remember that Sotomayer, Kagan and Brown-Jackson also made similar "settled law" noises regarding the 2A during their hearings.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

I finally realized what the false equivalence is that makes for mutual incomprehension across the Left - Right divide

There are two questions you have to answer in a "Constitutional Rights" case in order to find something protected by the US Constitution

1: Is this a right protected by the US Constitution? If not, you stop here
2: How should this right be implemented in the modern world

Do you have a right to keep the government out of your person and property absent a legitimate court order? Yes
Then the gov't putting a GPS tracker on your car w/o a warrant is a violation of the 4th Amendment

Do you have a right to freedom of speech and writing? Yes
So the gov't can't censor you on Twitter

Do you have a right to keep and bear arms? Yes
So the gov't can't stop you from owning an AR-15 or a Glock 17

Do you have a right to have an abortion? No
The right did not exist when the Constitution was ratified. It did not exist when the 14th Amendment was ratified, or when any of the earlier Amendments was ratified
It is not explicitly written into the US Constitution (unlike equal treatment, which IS explicitly written in to the Constitution. Which is why Brown was right, and Plessey was wrong, even though many of the States that ratified the 14th had legal segregation when they ratified it. "Current practice" doesn't beat "literal words in the Constitution"

So when someone says "why do you have these modern things protected, but not abortion", they're completely missing the point. They're skipping over step 1 and going straight to step 2.

And that's just not correct

Inquiry said...

The idea that Collins or anyone else thought those statements were in any way binding is specious. They are extremely open ended and made no promises about future behavior.

Further, the very idea that one chamber of the Legislature can extract binding limitations on the future power of the Judiciary is a major Separation of Powers problem.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

The heart of this post is the question of language, specifically the elliptical language adopted by all SCOTUS nominees going back to RGB. Look at the praise for KJB’s slippery and slick avoidance of questions like “what is a woman?” Was she not praised for that performance? Isn’t it obvious Collins was fed the “I respect precedents” line as a truism in order to avoid being specific about potential cases?

gspencer said...

What's the problem? Even if Collins feels having been conned, she's been conning the rest of us into thinking she's a Republican.

The left lies repeatedly, yet expects us to be honest with them. The goose rule book is being re-written by the gander.

Lance said...

"Is it Biblical — a grand pronouncement?"

Or Shakespearean, poetically comic and tragic?

Ann Althouse said...

"So whether or not we use "hath" has nothing to do with "wrought" -- which is an archaic form of "worked"; hence "wrought" iron."

True, but we no longer use "worked" that way. In modern usage, we say "done."

Look what you've done, not look what you've worked.

Yancey Ward said...

The article contains an outright lie, doesn't it? The protection of Catholic hospitals wasn't the only, or even most significant difference between Collins' proposed legislation the Democrats' bill which failed to clear filibuster. Now, Rubin lying is no surprise any longer.

Michael K said...

The real tragedy is that Jennifer Rubin's mother was denied the sacrament of abortion. Just like Chelsea Clinton's grandmother.

Gusty Winds said...

Yesterday in La Crosse WI Governor Tony Evers announced he would give clemency to any doctor in WI who performed an abortion.

Does Evers have to grant clemency to doctors for each and every abortion performed, or is it like a laminated get out jail free card?

Can Governor or President grant clemency for crimes already committed and any that may be in the future? If you receive and executive pardon or clemency for dealing heroine, does that mean you are free to deal heroine the rest of your life?

This is the absolute moronic state of our Chief Executive here in Wisconsin. The guy who burned Kenosha. Only the education establishment could produce a moron like Tony Evers.

The WI GOP should quickly pass "up to 14 weeks" quickly. But, they are morons too. Evers wouldn't be unable to sign it because of pro-infanticide late term abortion advocates in Madison would freak out. The GOP should dare him not to negotiate, and then let him start handing out clemency. Go for it!!





n.n said...

Reproductive Choices action: abstention, prevention (i.e. conception) in depth, adoption (i.e. shared/shifted responsibility), compassion (i.e. shared/personal responsibility), and an equal right to self-defense through reconciliation. The wicked solution is neither a good nor exclusive choice exercised for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes.

Kai Akker said...

---When looking at a Jennifer Rubin column it is perfectly appropriate to say in horror, "What hath God wrought?" Although perhaps it is unfair to blame it on God. [Molly]

LOL.

And look who's commenting. Cool.

Real American said...

The population of Maine is barely over a million people. She doesn't represent millions of women. She may think she represents all women, but she doesn't. She represents the citizens of her state and when she is taking actions to further the interests of Californians, then she is doing all of her constituents, including the men, a grave disservice.

And all of this is horseshit anyway. If Gorsuch and Kavanaugh promised her not to overturn Roe and Casey, then they're unfit for the court and she should have not voted to confirm them. If she did anyway, then she was derelict in her duty as a senator. Obviously, they made no such representations and this is all just a big CYA for Collins so she can pretend that she's a victim instead of acknowledging that she voted for well-qualified nominees who she thought might overrule Roe and Casey if it came up even when they did not say what they would do either way.

stutefish said...

What gets me about this claim of being "conned" is that for literally decades, progressives have been loudly proclaiming that conservative court nominees can't be trusted, and that whatever they say to the Senate, they're going to push a conservative agenda if they get confirmed.

Now that things have turned out exactly as they always said, and exactly as we all expected, it seems disingenuous to act shocked and surprised and completely unprepared. They knew this would happen. They told us this would happen. What they did: Vote to confirm anyway. What they didn't do: Push through bills to mitigate or obviate the doom they promised was coming for us all.

Yancey Ward said...

+1, Gusty Winds.

ccscientist said...

People keep saying that Congress should have or should codify abortion rights. But what the supremes said is that it is not up to congress. It is up to states. Barking up the wrong tree again.

ccscientist said...

People keep saying that Congress should have or should codify abortion rights. But what the supremes said is that it is not up to congress. It is up to states. Barking up the wrong tree again.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Gusty Winds said...
Yesterday in La Crosse WI Governor Tony Evers announced he would give clemency to any doctor in WI who performed an abortion.

Do you want to know how horrid and wretched the Democrat position is on abortion? Well, here you have it

Evers, to the best of my knowledge, has not proposed a bill legalizing abortion in WI, with specific language about what is and isn't allowed.

But he has announced that he's going to violate his job of faithfully executing the laws.

As always, Democrats do NOT want to solve a problem and make things better. They WANT an atmosphere of fear

Marc in Eugene said...

True, but we no longer use "worked" that way. In modern usage, we say "done."

There are the expressions 'to work one's magic' and '[she] worked wonders as she' etc etc. I believe one 'works' at one's embroidery or sewing. (None of which detract from the obvious, that as AA points out, we ordinarily use forms of to do rather than of to work.)

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Wrought iron = worked by a blacksmith, as opposed to cast. There is apparently not much wrought iron in the world any more (replaced by some kind of steel), but surely this is not (completely) archaic?

Molly: "The person who does the working is a wright." Millwright? any other examples? There used to be an arkwright, cartwright, glasswright and wainwright (builder or repairer of wagons) among others.

The great word: warmonger. Apparently not a war maker, but a war dealer: ginning up a war for private profit. Are activists including Senators who shape a Court courtwrights? Courtmongers? Controversy mongers? What have they wrought or mongered?

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Wrought iron = worked by a blacksmith, as opposed to cast. There is apparently not much wrought iron in the world any more (replaced by some kind of steel), but surely this is not (completely) archaic?

Molly: "The person who does the working is a wright." Millwright? any other examples? There used to be an arkwright, cartwright, glasswright and wainwright (builder or repairer of wagons) among others.

The great word: warmonger. Apparently not a war maker, but a war dealer: ginning up a war for private profit. Are activists including Senators who shape a Court courtwrights? Courtmongers? Controversy mongers? What have they wrought or mongered?

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

Why take Collins at her word? If you understand her political situation, that's exactly what you would expect her to say.

And she's a politician. You don't think she would lie? Especially a lie where she knows it would be practically impossible to get caught?!

Doug said...

Susan Collins is a stroke victim, isn't she? Isn't that why she talks the way she does?