#The Fall Of Roe

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

In June 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned more than a half-century of Supreme Court precedent. Five justices voted to deny constitutional protection for a woman’s right to choose and gutted privacy as a fundamental right. Texas and 13 other states now bar abortions in almost all circumstances. Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina have enacted six-week bans.

Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, explicitly compared the death of Roe to the end of state-enforced racial segregation, 68 years before. Back in 1954, in a landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous court overruled the doctrine of “separate but equal.” These days, Brown is under attack from Alito’s allies on and off the bench.

In their new book The Fall of Roe, named for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that previously safeguarded federal abortion rights, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer masterfully lay out how the cultural right and pro-life movement refused to take “no” for an answer, played the long game, and attained the victory for which they had yearned. Dias and Lerer also capture the somnolence of the left and how “intersectionality” came to divide old allies.

Dias is the New York Times religion reporter. A graduate of Wheaton College, the late Rev. Billy Graham’s alma mater, she holds a master’s degree in divinity from Princeton Theological seminary. Lerer, a veteran of five presidential campaigns, covers politics for the Times. The two of them got Hillary Clinton to speak for the record.

The Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 acknowledges that her party underestimated its adversaries, but doesn’t point the finger at herself.

“We didn’t take it seriously, and we didn’t understand the threat,” Clinton said. “We could have done more to fight.”

“I just think that most of us who support the rights of women and privacy and the right to make these difficult decisions yourself, you know, we just couldn’t believe what was happening.”

“Our side was complacent and kind of taking it for granted and thinking it would never go away.”

Even as polls show that abortion rights have widening public acceptance, the mechanics of federalism have left legislatures in red states to act as a counterforce to the more liberal national ethos, a point stressed in The Fall of Roe.

“Republicans had the state legislatures,” Dias and Lerer write. “They had a top-to-bottom network. They had the court. They had the power to change American life.”

The Fall of Roe also sheds light on the infrastructure that undergirded opposition to Roe. Libertarian-minded donors didn’t particularly care about curbing abortion access and David Koch personally supported abortion rights. That having been said, Freedom Partners, a Koch-driven industry group, donated almost $1 million to anti-abortion efforts, which could be paired on election day with tax cuts and lower regulation.

Said differently, fetuses weren’t the only reasons large checks were being cut to the Federalist Society, or that constitutional originalism had become the civic religion of the right. FDR’s legacy has to be gutted. Social security may no longer be so secure.

Leonard Leo, the driving force behind the Federalist Society, receives particular attention.

“Who’s this little fucking midget?” Donald Trump once said of Leo, a close friend of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Short answer: Leo helped get each of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees across the finish line. Think of him as the straw that stirs the drink.

“After Alito was confirmed to the court, Leo connected him with ideologically aligned businessmen, some of whom had cases before the court,” Dias and Lerer write.

They add that Leo “spent time with Thomas at… a private lakeside resort owned by a major Republican donor, Harlan Crow. Their visits were memorialized in a painting, hanging inside the lodge.”

Thanks to ProPublica’s Pulitzer-winning reporting, the painting is now well known. The group is shown thoughtfully smoking cigars.

Leo’s connections also helped found a nonprofit, the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), “on the same hallway in a downtown office building as the Federalist Society.”

Which all brings us back to Brown v. Board of Education and where the right goes next.

In Justice on Trial, an examination of Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court, conservative talking heads Carrie Severino, of JCN, and Mollie Hemingway, of the Federalist, trashed Brown.

According to Severino and Hemingway, social science wrongly played a role in the court’s calculus. They declared that such decisions “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles.”

Notice the word “may.”

Fast forward to May 2024, when Thomas—who joined Alito’s opinion in Dobbs—turned his fire on Brown.

“Such extravagant uses of judicial power are at odds with the history and tradition of the equity power and the Framers’ design,” he wrote in a concurrence, sustaining a South Carolina congressional map in the face of voting rights challenge.

As another election looms, abortion and contraception have emerged as campaign issues, to the horror of Trump. On the stump, the presumptive Republican nominee has vacillated over possible restrictions on contraception. Then again, Stormy Daniels testified that Trump did not wear a condom during an encounter Trump still denies, notwithstanding 34 guilty verdicts in the case arising.

As for meting out punishment to women who have abortions, Trump would leave that to the states.

“The states are going to make that decision,” he told Time. “The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.”

He also declined to say “no” to states monitoring women, to identify those who terminate pregnancies. Think The Handmaid’s Tale.

In the 2022 midterms, Dobbs cost the Republicans their “red wave.” In 2024, it may lead to another Trump loss and Democrats retaking the House. Right now, things are that close.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alanna Vagianos at HuffPost:

Some people may believe that the end of Roe v. Wade was simply a matter of luck: Following the then-black swan event of Donald Trump winning the 2016 election, Trump got to appoint two Supreme Court Justices in his first two years and a third after an octogenarian passed away weeks before the 2020 election.

The court then had a 6-3 conservative supermajority, and that was that. But the project to overturn the federal right to abortion was much more calculated, involving an alliance of Republican groups aiming to reshape Congress, the courts and American life. And while conservatives may have won a huge battle, it’s not the end of their unholy war. That’s the story New York Times reporters Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer tell in their new book, “The Fall of Roe,” a deeply reported accounting of the machinations of anti-abortion activists and lawmakers to reverse the 1973 ruling that reshaped both society and women’s lives. The book recounts the conservative network’s past victories, yes, but is also a window into the future, highlighting just how crucial November’s elections are for our rights and freedoms. That’s because if Trump wins a second term, this conservative coalition will bring even more litigation to strip away people’s rights — and would likely face a Supreme Court that’s even more untouchable than it is now.

The group most connected to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, is Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right Christian advocacy group. But ADF certainly didn’t do it alone, per Dias and Lerer — correspondents on religion and politics, respectively. In many ways, two other organizations laid the groundwork for this victory: The Federalist Society, a judicial group that drafted a list of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, judges Trump said were all opposed to Roe; and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion political group with an affiliated PAC.

And they’re all funded with massive amounts of dark money, including from billionaires like the Koch brothers. The 30,000-foot view is that these groups worked together to draft and pass unpopular state laws and have conservative lawyers defend them in front of friendly judges who had been confirmed to lifetime appointments by Republican senators. The network could use this playbook on any number of issues in the future. ADF wrote Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban at issue in the Dobbs litigation. Dias and Lerer report that a conservative Wisconsin lawyer suggested crafting a ban at exactly 15 weeks basically as a dare for abortion rights proponents to challenge it, believing the Supreme Court would find the ban reasonable and gut Roe without fully overturning it.

The lawyer, Misha Tseytlin, allegedly floated the idea at a Trump victory party hosted by Federalist Society Chair Leonard Leo, and then someone connected to ADF heard it, and the organization had Tseytlin present his theory at a July 2017 ADF summit. (This story shows that conservatives picked 15 weeks not because of emerging medical research, but because abortion rights advocates had chosen not to sue over previous 20-week bans designed to challenge Roe.) ADF drafted a model bill, identified states that might pass it and that had anti-abortion attorneys general who would defend it, and started talking to lobbyists. Then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) signed the 15-week ban into law in 2018, and litigation began. By the time the Supreme Court was considering taking the case, it was early September 2020. Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, giving a 5-4 court a 6-3 conservative supermajority, with three Justices appointed by Trump — a president who lost the popular vote. The court agreed to hear the case in May 2021, and the rest is history.

That playbook worked for striking down Roe, but the coalition is not done. Dias and Lerer write that ADF, in particular, will “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality that reflects God’s creative order.” First, abortion opponents think Dobbs is not enough; they want a nationwide ban starting at egg fertilization.

[...] ADF also has its sights set on reversing the 2015 ruling establishing marriage equality, but Waggoner also seems to resent when journalists ask her about Obergefell v. Hodges. (That ruling was 5-4, and two of the Justices in the majority are no longer on the court — you only need four votes out of nine to take a case.) “I’m worried you’re gonna just use a choice little quote, and anybody that reads the article is going to think I’m abandoning Obergefell, and I am not,” she told The New Yorker. “I think it is wrong and it should be reversed, but I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about how to do that.” The group wants to roll back transgender rights in employment (Bostock v. Clayton County, 2020) and expand parental rights (Troxel v. Granville, 2000) so that parents can override the medical needs of their children with gender dysphoria, The New Yorker reports. ADF is also behind the rash of state laws banning gender-affirming care for minors and trans kids’ participation in sports — the group wrote model legislation. We’re watching a redux of the anti-abortion battle plan in real time. “It’s not that the Court is going to say, ‘Gender ideology is bad,’” Waggoner told The New Yorker. “But I do think the Court could say, ‘Parental rights are fundamental rights.’”

The Fall of Roe book by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, a pair of New York Times reporters, takes a vital look at how anti-abortion activists delivered a win for their cause by overturning Roe in Dobbs and that they want more.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America

By Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer.

[wanderlandjournal]

magical forest meeting | get this print on Etsy

[castielsprostate]

us-ians try not to fuck up this election and vote blue challenge (impossible) (they don't care about anyone but themselves) (they're unable to see the devastating consequences if that orange buffoon is re-elected) (they don't understand how their own government works) (voting blue is literally the only option you have if you want to survive past 2030. like there is literally no other fucking option. if you do not vote blue this year, so much blood will be on your hands you can't even imagine it i don't think) (us-ians are too shortsighted to see what will happen to the rest of the fucking world if their little orange dictator gets reelected and they. don't. care.)

[003soy]

Unrelated Frye Picture

[angeloftheodd]

Cuteness has no size limits. 🎀❤️

🍒 My Instagram (angel0fthe0dd) 🍒

🫐 My Xitter (GhiaWasHere) 🫐

🍓 My TikTok (angeloftheodd) 🍓

[disarmluna]

Bella Thorne, Orville Peck, Teyana Taylor, Lil Nas X & Sam SMith front row @ Christian Cowan Fall 2023 NYFW

[qserasera]

i kno that *waves hands vaguely* mirai was the closest one to write fic ft nanase's pov on the whole horrible exorcists relationship debacle but

we really really really Need more of it ; w ;

[hellfire--cult]

The way I didn't sleep at all. How am I supposed to endure work?

[elfdyke]

i NEEEEEED to draw those dungeon meshi bitches ive fallen so far off my fanart shit. all i ever draw anymore are bitches from me or my friends brains. I WANT TO DRAW FALIN AND MARCILLE SUCKING FACE!!!!!!!. and also pattadol. and cithis.. kissing. as well.

[ailendolin]

Given that Roe is my favourite character from BoB and Bastogne my favourite episode, it's really no surprise Lemmons ended up becoming my favourite in MotA (even though I absolutely adored Rosie when I read the MotA book and Crosby made me very fond of Blakely with his book).

Just like Roe, Lemmons is part of the guys but not really. And just like Roe, he offers a different perspective on what's happening.

I'm grateful MotA devotes time to his story and shows us his journey, even just a little (and Raff Law does a fantastic job of portraying it given how little screentime he's had so far). The term unsung hero comes to mind here, and if there's one thing I love about the HBO war shows it's that they've always been great at shining the spotlight on people* that other WW2 media rarely focuses on.

*The Pacific took that to a whole new level by devoting three episodes to the Peleliu arc - a battle deemed unnecessary in hindsight and mostly forgotten about by history. It might not be about one specific character but it gives those who fought there a voice, especially those who lost their lives like Ack-Ack and Hillbilly.

[paceypeternathanslawyer]

One Tree Hill Meme (19/24) Favorite Episodes Favorite Episode Per Episode Number

Season 1 Episode 19: How Can You Be Sure

Season 2 Episode 19: I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

Season 3 Episode 19: I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me

Season 4 Episode 19: Ashes Of Dreams You Let Die

Season 6 Episode 19: Letting Go

Season 7 Episode 19: Every Picture Tells A Story

Season 8 Episode 19: Where Not To Look For Freedom

[bisexualalienss]

the american electorate is very misinformed and disengaged most of the time. we are too online

[terrainofheartfelt]

*shaking voters and pundits by the shoulders* abortion access IS an economic issue!!!! don’t you understand!!!! any healthcare access is an economic issue!!! especially healthcare about creating more people!!!!!!