The first one would mean that he’s a lazy blowhard who doesn’t actually care how the law and courts work if that reality doesn’t fit with the overbearing worldview he wants to impose on Arkansans. I am not sure which one of these possible answers is worst. With all this in mind, Rapert’s promise to “file legislation to completely abolish abortion in Arkansas” can only mean a few possible things: He has not read June Medical and is simply talking out of his ass he has read the decision, but he doesn’t understand what all the big Latin words mean, so he’s talking out of his ass or he has read the decision, knows that a law that banned all abortions in the state would be unconstitutional and would be struck down by the federal courts, and is fine with wasting everyone’s time and costing the state tens of thousands in legal fees to the ACLU because he just wants to grandstand about how he passed a law and “activist judges” struck it down. However, the long-standing effect of Roe and Casey and other post- Roe decisions is that a state law that banned all abortions (directly or indirectly) would be unconstitutional on its face. This is not to say that a state cannot pass any laws regarding or regulating abortion the Court has certainly allowed laws regarding parental notification/permission, waiting periods, and the like. Casey (1992), the Court reaffirmed the basic tenets of Roe, that the constitution protects the right to make decisions about procreation, as long as those decisions are balanced against a state’s interests in “safeguarding health, maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life.” Wade (1973), a 7-2 majority of the Supreme Court struck down a law banning all abortions in Texas, holding, “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or…in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” 5 Nineteen years later, in Planned Parenthood v. Unless you are Jason Rapert, you likely see where this is going. Roberts then went into a discussion of stare decisis, explaining that, “It has long been an established rule to abide by former precedents, where the same points come again in litigation as well to keep the scale of justice even and steady, and not liable to waver with every new judge’s opinion.” Importantly, as it relates to Jason Rapert’s digital idiocy, Roberts wrote, “for precedent to mean anything, the doctrine must give way only to a rationale that goes beyond whether the case was decided correctly.” Roberts specifically wrote in in his concurrence in June Medical that he was agreeing with the decision to strike down the Louisiana law because, while he “continue to believe that was wrongly decided,” the “doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike.” Accordingly, because “he Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.” 4 So what changed for Roberts between that case and Monday’s decision? Nothing. Importantly, Roberts had dissented in Whole Woman’s Health. Chief Justice Roberts based his concurring opinion on the fact that the Louisiana law was basically identical to a Texas law that the Court had struck down in Whole Woman’s Health v. Now, in case you haven’t read the decision in June Medical Services, what you need to know is that Chief Justice John Roberts was the fifth vote for striking down the Louisiana law, which he provided by concurring with the result–striking down the law–but for reasons different and more narrow than the four other justices who voted to strike it down.
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