The Real Issue Is Preserving the Republic

For John, BLUF:  I hear people, like The New Yorker's Susan B. Glasser saying:

Faced with such challenges, President Biden seemed finally ready to abandon the pretense that he could once again unite the fractured nation and heal our Trump-distorted politics with some old-fashioned bipartisan Senate dealmaking.  That comforting fiction helped him defeat Donald Trump in 2020 but has been comprehensively debunked by Biden’s subsequent struggles in governing.  In remarks to reporters on Wednesday, the President previewed his new, more partisan message for the campaign to come:  “This is about a lot more than abortion,” he said.  Republicans are radical and dangerous, not only anti-woman but anti-gay, anti-personal freedom, and anti-democracy.  The Trumpist maga movement, he said, “is the most extreme political organization that’s existed in recent American history.”

[Shouldn't MAGA be all caps?]

So, Bipartisan Biden was a pretense to get elected.  I don't think Ms Glasser respects either honesty or our system of government.  Would she destroy the Constitution to allow infanticide.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Irrational, Misguided Discourse Surrounding Supreme Court Controversies Such as Roe v. Wade

Here is the sub-headline:

The Court, like the U.S. Constitution, was designed to be a limit on the excesses of democracy.  Roe denied, not upheld, the rights of citizens to decide democratically.

From the Greenwald Substac, by Reporer Glenn Greenwald, 3 May 2022.

After several introductory paragraphs, Mr Greenwald gets to the nub of the issue:

Every time there is a controversy regarding a Supreme Court ruling, the same set of radical fallacies emerges regarding the role of the Court, the Constitution and how the American republic is designed to function.  Each time the Court invalidates a democratically elected law on the ground that it violates a constitutional guarantee — as happened in Roe — those who favor the invalidated law proclaim that something “undemocratic” has transpired, that it is a form of “judicial tyranny” for “five unelected judges” to overturn the will of the majority.  Conversely, when the Court refuses to invalidate a democratically elected law, those who regard that law as pernicious, as an attack on fundamental rights, accuse the Court of failing to protect vulnerable individuals.

This by-now-reflexive discourse about the Supreme Court ignores its core function.  Like the U.S. Constitution itself, the Court is designed to be an anti-majoritarian check against the excesses of majoritarian sentiment.  The Founders wanted to establish a democracy that empowered majorities of citizens to choose their leaders, but also feared that majorities would be inclined to coalesce around unjust laws that would deprive basic rights, and thus sought to impose limits on the power of majorities as well.

The Federalist Papers are full of discussions about the dangers of majoritarian excesses. The most famous of those is James Madison's Federalist 10, where he warns of "factions…who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”  One of the primary concerns in designing the new American republic, if not the chief concern, was how to balance the need to establish rule by the majority (democracy) with the equally compelling need to restrain majorities from veering into impassioned, self-interested attacks on the rights of minorities (republican government).  As Madison put it:  “To secure the public good, and private rights, against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our enquiries are directed.”  Indeed, the key difference between a pure democracy and a republic is that the rights of the majority are unrestricted in the former, but are limited in the latter.  The point of the Constitution, and ultimately the Supreme Court, was to establish a republic, not a pure democracy, that would place limits on the power of majorities.

Remember what Dr Benjamin Franklin replied to the woman as to what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 have given us?

A Republic, if you can keep it.

The end of Roe v Wadd will not end abortions, nor will it end abortion on demand in many parts of our Great Nation.  It will mean that in those parts of the nation where the Citizens think there should be limits to abortion, there could be such limits.

It might also mean a certain internal dignity for those women who conceived a child in difficult circumstances and carried that child to term.

Regards  —  Cliff