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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

The point is if you believe this to not be up to the Supreme Court to decide, then you don't believe it's up to the Supreme Court to undo until the people have decided.

The Supreme Court didn't issue a law here, they changed their interpretation of a decision they had made 50 years prior, for no reason at all except that the composition of the court had changed.

That's like hiring a new guy and his first action is to remove an entire technology that was propping up your infrastructure, because it wasn't being stored in the "correct" VCS.

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Say a supreme court 50 years ago interpreted the constitution that woman did not have a right to vote. Then today the court ruled, the constitution doesn't actually state anything of the sort and overturns that past judgment.

In that case would you want the court to instead state, well a decision 50 years ago was made. So we wont change it. The US Congress needs to pass a law explicitly granting woman the right to vote. Such-as with say Minor v. Happersett, "Court held that, while women are no less citizens than men are, citizenship does not confer a right to vote, and therefore state laws barring women from voting are constitutionally valid"

A good court in a Democratic government must be objective in interpretation of law . And the system is such that it is the US Congress's responsibility to pass law.

A vote to prohibit women from voting isn’t analogous because it’s restrictive, not permissive.

There is zero legitimate reason for this to be reversed now, compared to after it’s been codified in the legislature.

But all of this is a silly distraction. The real reason has nothing at all to do with what the court’s role should be, and everything to do with the religion of the people currently serving on the court.

To keep the tech analogies going, it’s like a new tech lead deleting the web app code because be doesn’t believe in monorepos, but saying it’s a security issue.

> The real reason has nothing at all to do with what the court’s role should be, and everything to do with the religion of the people currently serving on the court.

You’re inferring that the court made it’s decision on a religious reason, and you’re entitled to your inference.

So here’s my inference, as an atheist conservative. No the Supreme Court did not overturn the case for religious reasons. They overturned it exactly for the reasons they stated:

“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives”

> compared to after it’s been codified in the legislature

The legitimate reason it is reversed _now_ is that it is _now_ when the matter is before them in the court of law that conflicts with Roe in a way that is hard to reconcile against precedent.

If your complaint is that it hasn't been codified into law by the legislature since 1973 (and you're right -- it hasn't) that is not the fault of the judicial branch, rather the legislative.

To borrow from your analogy, it's more like a repository deprecating its code, watching everybody for years claim that "they're going to delete this any minute now" and nobody stepping to the plate to take over as maintainer.

"It's not their fault" What? That brings exactly zero people the help they need.

When your action is the proximate cause of the revocation of freedom from 165m people, it's definitely 'your fault'."

This may not have been a great way to keep women safe forever, but today was not the day it needed fixing.

It also by itself does not restrict anyone from the help that they need.

It is not the job of the Supreme Court to care for the reproductive health of the American people. Of the federal government, that would either be the job of the executive or the legislature, depending on your preferred view of the executive branch.

It is absolutely the job of the Supreme Court to care for the entire health of the American people, there is literally no other reason for the body to exist other than to maximally enable Americans' life, liberty, and their pursuit of happiness.

If the Supreme Court cannot do this, it should not exist.

At no time in the history of the United States has that been anywhere near the purpose of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court's one and only purpose is to exercise the judicial power of the United States in cases or controversies before it, with original jurisdiction as specifically enumerated in Article III, Marbury v. Madison, and with appellate jurisdiction with regard to all other cases.

It exists to referee the non-violent resolution of a subset of emotionally charged disputes through a functioning legal system. It does not exist to ensure that one side or the other wins.

It is supposed to exist to further a functional legal system. But it has been long since been perverted into a nakedly partisan purpose.

At least four sitting justices were put on the court specifically to ensure this ruling occurred.

You're lost.

Those things are only useful if they help people. The root purpose of any system of government to exist is to provide for the health and happiness of the governed.

If any system of government fails to do that, it is broken, and the fact that you've lost sight of the entire purpose of government is both sad and entirely predictable.

Having a system to resolve disputes without someone getting shot is helping people. This is not a disputable point.

And cool it with the personal attacks. That kind of behavior is inappropriate.

> The legitimate reason it is reversed _now_ is that it is _now_ when the matter is before them in court.

And it's in the court now because this is the first time in 50 years that we've had a court regressive enough to vote it down.

It hadn't been codified in law because there wasn't a need because the court's had settled the issue.

To follow your analogy it's like finally removing that deprecated code after 50 years and seeing side-effects across the code base that are hugely disruptive to a tiny percent of users and anger inducing to a majority, while also making a minority of users feel smug about it finally being removed.

> And it's in the court now because this is the first time in 50 years that we've had a court regressive enough to vote it down.

This is silly. It's basically always in the courts. This particular case has been ongoing since 2018 IIRC. Before that it was June Medical. Before that it was Whole Women's Health v Hellerstedt.

> It hadn't been codified in law because there wasn't a need because the court's had settled the issue

Except it had not legislatively, and it needed to have been. At the same time as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was lamenting the flaws of Roe halting legislative process that she knew still needed to happen, Joe Biden was proposing amendments to overturn Roe v Wade so that abortion could be outlawed.

It is and always has been balanced on the head of a pin. Both sides have of course been using it more as a platform for fund-raising than doing anything legislatively, while warning that the other side was moments away from winning. Please donate $5, $10, or $50 to the cause.

It isn’t silly, the state legislatures deliberately crafted more extreme bills in the hopes of overturning Roe, then the GAs all they could to expedite them up to the Supreme Court.

The boundaries of Roe v Wade have been debated for a looong time, especially as new medical technology have come out but this case only existed because conservatives believed they had a good chance of overturning Roe.

> That's like hiring a new guy and his first action is to remove an entire technology

That isn't a good analogy. A better analogy is the security team modifying ACLs that allow them push changes. It may be a destructive change, but it's outside of scope of the security team.

How about a new customer support director deleting your Postgres instance backing your main SaaS product because it's hosted on a server in their cage?

Shouldn't have been in the CS datacenter, so screw the customers and the business as a whole who relied on that system, right?

The analogy is flawed as the codebase is to laws. And the supreme court didn't change any law. Instead this would be like the new guy coming in and stating, "Wow that codebase actually mutates objects and the commentary of it being non-modifying to its parameters isn't valid."

That is actually a great analogy

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