Assorted reactions to Dobbs/Roe v. Wade

 1.  I would like a final ruling that the attitudinal model* is the law of the land.

2.  Stop letting conservatives pretend to be libertarians.

3.  Yes, the conservative Justices perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings.  What are you going to do about it?  Appeal to... um... oh, yeah.

4.  Please keep your protests peaceful.  Remember the basic, ironclad rule of morality.  Ask yourself, what would Donald Trump do?  Do the opposite.  Works literally every time, and I detest misuse of the word, "literally."

5.  What you are actually going to do is lose in November, and then... well, I'm getting to that.

6.  Understand that the Supreme Court does not set policy.  It is what we call a "veto player."  In the absence of a law prohibiting X, you have the "negative liberty," in the terminology of Isaiah Berlin**, to do X.  State governments, which are elected, pass laws to prohibit X.  The Supreme Court is a veto player.  Those laws stand unless "vetoed," in political science rather than schoolhouse-rock jargon, by the Supreme Court, via judicial review, blah blah, Marbury v. Madison.  When the Supreme Court allows those laws to stand, they are declining to veto, declining to protect "negative liberty."  (See 1 & 2.)

7.  Following from 6, the infringement on negative liberty is made by the state government which passed the laws, not the Supreme Court.  You are not being ruled by five unelected judges.  Infringements on negative liberty, when not vetoed by SCOTUS, are made by the state governments, or the federal government which passed the laws that are not struck down.  When the Supreme Court declines to strike down laws, they are being passive, declining to protect negative liberty.  "Should" the Supreme Court have struck down the law?  Constitutionally, legally, morally?  That will vary by law, but in all cases, it is the legislature which infringed on liberty.  Also, see 2.  Again.

8.  The basic point is that right now, the left cannot count on the Supreme Court to act as a veto player in favor of the liberties that they like, and that the right doesn't.  Why?  Attitudinal model, in full effect.

9.  While I'm on the topic, Susan Collins is the dumbest person in the history of the Senate.  Just sayin'.  Why did I make this Number 9?  Because I repeat it like a broken record.  Yes, I did that intentionally.  There's a legend that Sonny Rollins was once playing a late concert, and as soon as the clock struck midnight, he played the main theme from Monk's "Round Midnight."

10.  What now?  In two years, Donald Trump will be installed as Dictator For Life.  I'm not exaggerating for dramatic effect.  No matter how you vote, or how I vote, or how anyone votes, the Republicans who take over Congress this November-- a mathematical inevitability-- will declare Donald Trump the winner.  Either Trump wins outright because of a shitty economy, or they declare the whole thing fraud, and do what they refused to do last time.  Either way, Trump will be Dictator For Life, and they will never give power back.

11.  However angry you may be about this, it's somewhere between prelude and sideshow.

Music.

Galactic, "Start from Scratch," from Crazyhorse Mongoose.

*The attitudinal model, for those who have forgotten, is the political science model rejecting the predictive power of philosophies of constitutional interpretation.  Instead, the model asserts that judges and Justices are ideologically motivated politicians in stupid costumes.  Whenever they claim that they are ruling based on a non-ideological philosophy of how to interpret the law or the Constitution, they are lying.  Which they are.  All the time.  The entire discipline of law is bullshit.

**Berlin, Isaiah (1958).  Two Concepts of Liberty.  Clarendon:  Oxford University Press.