A Delightful Dissent

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about whom a marvelous movies has just been released, has a reputation for being quiet and low-key, so much so that he has said when he and his wife travel in their RV, he often goes unrecognized.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Highlights

By Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life
7/1/2020 (4 years ago)

Published in Marriage & Family

Keywords: Abortion, Supreme Court, dissent, Thomas, Pavone

But Justice Thomas's dissents from controversial Supreme Court rulings are anything but low-key and they have become a recognizable trademark of his legal philosophy, especially where abortion is concerned.

His dissent from the opinion in this week's June Medical Services vs. Russo is a case in point. In the case, the Court struck down a law that Louisiana had enacted to increase protection for the health and safety of women going to abortion clinics.

"Today a majority of the Court perpetuates its ill-founded abortion jurisprudence by enjoining a perfectly legitimate state law and doing so without jurisdiction," he wrote.

He continued by chiding Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the decision, and those who concurred with him (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) for finding the Louisiana law unconstitutional and for allowing abortionists to continue to claim third-party standing to represent women they don't even know.

Justice Thomas also blasted Supreme Court precedents that made this week's ruling possible to
begin with.

" ... Those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution's text," he wrote.  "Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled."

Because the majority invoked stare decis and precedent as justification for their ruling, Justice Thomas chastised his colleagues for justifying erroneous decisions by basing them on other erroneous decisions  that date back years before 1973's Roe v. Wade.

"This Court created the right to abortion based on an amorphous, unwritten right to privacy, which it grounded in the 'legal fiction' of substantive due process," Justice Thomas wrote. "As the origins of this jurisprudence readily demonstrate, the putative right to abortion is a creation that should be undone."

Honestly, his dissent is delightful to read, as he continues to elucidate and excoriate the bad decisions that led the U.S. to where it is now, one of only a handful of countries in the world that allow abortion for all nine months and for any reason, and where the states where a woman can get a third-trimester abortion are becoming more numerous (thanks to Democrat extremism).

Certainly he pulls no punches in this dissent. Here are some other notable quotes:

* "Roe is grievously wrong for many reasons, but the most fundamental is that its core holding--"that the Constitution protects a woman's right to abort her unborn child--"finds no support in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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* "... the idea that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood the Due Process Clause to protect a right to abortion is farcical. In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, a majority of the States and numerous Territories had laws on the books that limited (and in many cases nearly prohibited) abortion.

* "... our abortion jurisprudence remains in a state of utter entropy."

* "Because we can reconcile neither Roe nor its progeny with the text of our Constitution, those decisions should be overruled."

Justice Thomas's conclusion is clear: The Supreme Court should not rely on Roe or any of the erroneous decisions that have followed when it finds itself again adjudicating abortion law, as it most certainly will. Justices must start and end with the Constitution of the United States and refrain from reading into it any rights that do not exist.

Those are exactly the kinds of judges that President Trump looks for, and has been appointing (to the tune of 200 and counting) in federal courts throughout the land.

And this will be a key motivating factor for the voters in this year's elections, as it was in 2016.