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Additional Thoughts on Roe… The Constitutional Argument

I said earlier today that Roe v Wade was a bad Supreme Court ruling. Here, I will explain why…

Understand this going in…. I’m not talking about the politics, and for the moment I’m not going to talk about the value of the lives that have been wasted in the last 50 years, either.

I’m going to start this discussion with a quote from Larry Kudlow: [1]

Fortunately, while the majority of Americans regard themselves as pro-choice, 55% according to the Gallup poll, inside that number, 67% support first trimester abortions, but only 36% second trimester and only 20% third trimester.

That is why the far-left position of unrestricted abortions represented by Mr. Biden and his allies will never be popular throughout the country. Biden is trying to scare people that the world is coming to an end. It’s a familiar tactic of his, but it won’t work. When the dust clears, folks will see this court decision changes very little, if anything.

Except, it upholds the originalist constitutional view and re-empowers state legislatures and the voters who elected them. This is how it should be.

Precisely so.

Note the phrase, “the originalist constitutional view”. A loose translation would be looking at the Constitution and reading it precisely as it is written.

You see there is a portion of the Constitution called The Bill of Rights. Within that Bill of Rights is the 10th amendment, which runs like this:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

A loose translation of that would be if it doesn’t say it explicitly in the Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from meddling with it. Those questions are left specifically to the individual state governments, or to the people.

Now, nowhere within the Federal Constitution is there any mention of abortion. Therefore if the subject is going to come up in government at all, it starts at the state governments, and not in the federal government. By the very definition listed here, the 73 Supreme Court exceeded its constitutional authority.

Understand this, too. The overturning of Roe v Wade does not prohibit abortion. The states may individually do that, but I suspect that around half of them will not. All this ruling does is return that question to the individual states which is the original view of the constitution.

What the justices have done collectively is uphold the Constitution as written. That’s their job. A job that the court back in 73 should have done, and didn’t.

The pro-abortion people back in 73 decided that they didn’t want to take the time to go through all of the states individually and try to make their case. Moreover they didn’t want to go through all the states trying to amend the constitution. Much easier to in effect amend the Constitution by Supreme Court ruling by people who do not respect the originalist view.

Trouble is it will eventually be overturned, because in reality the ruling in Roe exceeded the Court’s constitutional authority.

You will notice almost immediately that I have not made any political arguments here, nor have I made any arguments about the idea of abortion. I haven’t even made any comments about Biden’s comments today because it’s not needed for this discussion.

This post is about the Constitution and the mechanizations that the 73 court was supposed to follow, and didn’t.

These other topics may or may not come up in these spaces going forward, though I suspect that some of them will.

The point I’m trying to make here is that even when viewed strictly as a constitutional matter, Roe v Wade was a bad ruling. That ground alone was all that was necessary to reverse it.

In short, the Supreme Court finally did its job…that is, it made its ruling here based solely on the wording and intent in the Constitution itself.