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This is a little tangential but it’s kind of funny that both you and the person you’re disagreeing with, and the camps you represent, agree that SCOTUS judges are political. In fact, almost everyone seems to agree with that (myself included) except notably for the judges themselves, who consistently insist their jobs are apolitical. Roberts in particular has embarked on the fool’s errand of convincing the public of that.

It kind of reminds me of this nonsense that universities offering liberal arts degrees still pay lip service to: that everyone is there for education for its own sake, oh no, it’s not a giant machine that gates public employment, it’s there for knowledge!

Uh huh.

SCOTUS is ideological, not political. The ideologies often line up with politics: the Constitution is a 244 year old document with a heavy emphasis on economic liberty and protection of personal and property rights. Interpreting the Constitution according to its text and original intent will naturally lead to conservative outcomes.

Likewise, viewing the Constitution as an evolving document that gives great discretion to judges to fashion rules for a changing world naturally favors liberal outcomes, because lawyers and judges are overwhelmingly liberal, even the republicans. (It was, after all, a majority Republican Court that wrote Roe in the first place.)

Indeed, overruling Roe is a good example of the distinction between ideology and partisanship. 1/3 of republicans don’t agree with their party on abortion: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/18/three-in-te.... (And about 29% of Democrats don’t.)

Republicans are heavily favored in the upcoming 2022 elections. Biden’s approval rating among republicans is 7%. Why would a savvy partisan blow up an issue that fractures the GOP and draws attention away from how unified they are in hating Biden? The GOP has the rural, churchgoing mom vote locked up. Inflation is what they want to be talking about right now to win back suburban moms, not abortion.

Not political? They are following the dictionary definition of political: "relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in politics."

Nearly every decision of Bush/Trump appointed judges is directly in line with the Republican platform: anti-abortion, pro Christian supremacy, and pro-corporate.

As to why are they trying to ram this decision through? The point of politics is to gain power and then assert your political leanings as law. Tearing down Roe is the final goal of a long-term Republican power surge: first whinging about activist judges in the 90s, then pushing identity politics in their base, then gerrymandering many states to death to control state legislatures, stonewalling the Supreme Court to push it into it's current radically partisan state, and finally asserting the Republican platform into law.

The ideologies often line up with politics: the Constitution is a 244 year old document with a heavy emphasis on economic liberty and protection of personal and property rights. Interpreting the Constitution according to its text and original intent will naturally lead to conservative outcomes.

I think that interpreting the Constitution by its literal text yields interpretations different from interpreting according to original intent. And that the literal text reading does not align all that closely with mainstream Republican or Democratic positions.

Consider the text of the First Amendment, for example.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

No abridgment of freedom of speech or of the press. Pretty clear as text. Yet the Sedition Act of 1798 was never overturned as unconstitutional. Nor is there an exception in the plain text for "unless it's obscene" or "unless it's a lie" yet there are Federal laws limiting obscenity and fraud and other kinds of speech that were never struck down on First Amendment grounds. Some such laws were passed in the lifetime of the original framers of the constitution and others are in force today. Some state level blasphemy laws remained in place until the 20th century [1].

As I see it, either the literal text reading of the Second Amendment protects private ownership of machine guns just like it does bolt action rifles and revolvers, or handguns are no more protected than machine guns, whose private ownership was limited by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and then outlawed for all but affluent collectors by the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986.

A maximal-individual-liberty interpretation of the literal text of the First and Second Amendments produces a United States in which there are no Federal laws against publishing pornographic videos of minors, nor against private ownership of anti-aircraft missiles. (Among other startling developments.) That's closer to a fantasy of a certain strain of libertarian than anything aligned with mainstream political factions in the United States, either contemporaneously or at any time since independence. The original framers were (at least mostly) not libertarian libertines, devoid of communitarian feeling, while the literal text gestures toward an uncompromising individual liberty that would be equally outside the Overton window in 1792 or in 2022.

[1] Though it's fair to consider that, pre-Civil War, states had more latitude to pass laws that the Federal government was Constitutionally forbidden to pass.

Go look at political donations by employees from your random law firm. 90% is a conservative number.

I had a lot of convo with that poster in another thread. I would suggest not wasting your time by engaging with him, and I say this as someone who agrees with him in certain respects.

> > liberal lawyers (which is 90% of them) > What is the basis for this claim?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secret...

> You seem to be accusing everyone who disagrees with you of malice and abandonment of all principles - more or less evil.

Not at all. I think they have the best of intentions. But their principles are different than the principles of our parents’ generation of liberals.

> And one could likewise say that much of conservative thought is an attempt to force people to adhere to certain religious values using state coercion. But that would just be an opinion, not a fact.

That’s a good comparison actually. It’s reminiscent of the old religious right. The difference is that these new liberals are ascendant, while the religious right is in the decline, being supplanted by the populist right.

> What is fact is that many (possibly most?) conservative policies and doctrines do not enjoy majority support in the United States

The irony is that liberals have consistently used the Supreme Court to overturn the conservative policies that do enjoy popular support.

Roe, of course, overturned laws that had the support of the public. To this day, Roe draws a line—abortion until viability—that the public rejects: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort...

Conservative policies are popular on many other issues. As of 2013, a strong majority of Americans still opposes the Supreme Court’s ban on school prayer: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/13/south-carol...

If the Supreme Court bans racial preferences in the Harvard case, liberals will attack the Justices as racist for adopting a position most Black and Hispanic people agree with: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...

It’s “heads I win, tails you lose.” Liberals invoke the “will of the people” when it comes to Obamacare, but insist on edicts from ivory tower elites to override the popular will when it comes to unpopular liberal efforts at social engineering.

> convenient wedge issues or rallying cries for a small minority of the voting base - a minority that happens to be highly motivated.

When folks call abortion a “wedge issue” what they mean is that liberals feel like that they own that issue so completely it’s not even up for debate. Those issues are a therefore a distraction from the ones that they are willing to subject to the political process. Thus the intense outrage over this draft opinion, while extended ETC benefits passed quietly into the night.

Imposing the social mores of (mostly white) educated liberals on the population is the #1 priority of the Democratic Party. That’s why abortion is a litmus test—rather than raising taxes on the upper middle class—in a party where 1/3 of the actual voters identify as “pro life.” That’s why Democrats are pissing away historic opportunities created by unforced errors by the GOP, and alienating Hispanic voters they depend on, by doing stuff like trying to convince parents to let them talk about sexuality to young kids. Because that’s the party’s actual priority.

Your point about minorities suppressing the majority is ironic. Leaving aside that the effect you’re talking about is small—look at the Congressional popular vote, where Republicans have won an outright majority half the time since 2000–you’re correct. It is a problem when minorities overrule majorities. That’s why decades of liberal Supreme Court rulings overruling the public on issue after issue have been tremendously damaging to our political process.

After decades of beating down the public and doing stuff like forcing small towns to allow strip clubs to operate in the name of free speech, complaining about the Supreme Court “ignoring the popular will” is the height of irony.

I have to say that while I disagree with your overall point - for example, I think the paralysis of the political system is derived from oligarchic economic control of the political process, rather than the distraction created by this culture war bullshit -, I think you made perfectly reasonable arguments, and should not be downvoted simply because they are unpalatable. In particular, the argument that abortion is popular and therefore should be legal does contradict several things that Democrats would like to keep illegal, despite being popular, as you illustrate with prayers in schools.

> Many of the nation’s largest and most influential law firms donated more than 90% to Democrats and President Joe Biden in the last election cycle, confirming their position as one of the most liberal professions in the country.

That does not say what you think it does.