Diving into the leftist cesspit of NPR is not my favorite read. Today they surprised me with a balanced article. Not fully but not tilted so far left that the deck chairs are tumbling into the sea.
You write, this court is not ideologically motivated, which, of course, is hard for some people to accept because they just produced what can easily be seen as Republican outcomes on abortion rights, gun laws and climate regulation. Granted, some rulings have gone the other way, but the big ones all went one way in rapid succession. What’s the case that those rulings are not ideological?
CURT LEVEY: Well, the case is that the court – if they wanted to decide all cases with a conservative outcome, they could have, and they didn’t. Conservatives were very unhappy with their decision about the Remain in Mexico policy. They turned down a vaccine mandate case from New York. So the court could’ve been 100% conservative outcomes. And it wasn’t. And if you look at why, it’s because it’s a textualist court. Some people like to call it originalist. I prefer the term textualist, but they’re often used in the same way. If you want to understand why they ruled one way on guns and another way on abortion, it’s because the Constitution contains an explicit Second Amendment that guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, whereas the Constitution – not only does it not contain a right to abortion. It doesn’t even contain a general right to privacy.
They interview with Curt Levey, a member of the Federalist Society, isn’t gotcha, isn’t nasty, it is very matter of fact and does bring up good points.
Read the entire thing over at NPR:
Is the Supreme Court majority ruling on the law or their personal preference?
Comments
4 responses to “NPR Reports Conservative PoV Regarding SCOTUS”
Liberals and “Progressives” are whining about how “right-leaning” the Court has become, and how their decisions are overwhelmingly “conservative”.
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That’s not actually the case at all.
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Here’s the thing: The Far Right and the Far Left both interpret the plain language of the Constitution opposite ways … but they both read much more into it than is there.
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What we have in SCOTUS right now, is an originalist/textualist majority, who decide based on what the written words of the Constitution and Bill of Rights — as they were understood when they were ratified — actually say. No more and no less.
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The recent textual-based decisions are perceived as having “favored conservatives” for two reasons: 1. The Court in the past has had a Leftist majority that has read more than is there, so their track record trends Left; and 2. There are no Far Right Justices currently on the Court — the decisions have been originalist/textualist majorities and Leftist dissents.
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Originalist and Leftist, not Right and Left; they could go MUCH further Right. But that dichotomy looks like “Right and Left” to people on the Left who don’t see the distinction. (The fact that, from their point of view, anyone less Socialist than Josef Stalin is “Far Right” doesn’t help things, either.)
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As much as the Left whines about the “Far Right” majority handing down conservative decisions, if there were actually a Far Right majority on the Court, those decisions would look a LOT different.
Even Sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought Roe V. Wade was Bad Law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/06/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-wade/
RBG thought SCOTUS went way, way too far with Roe. “Ginsburg, who died in 2020, criticized the 7-to-2 decision both before and after she joined the high court. She argued that it would have been better to take a more incremental approach to legalizing abortion, rather than the nationwide ruling in Roe that invalidated dozens of state antiabortion laws.”
RBG wanted to use a case called Struck v. Secretary of Defense, where she was fighting for the rights of a USAF Nurse in Vietnam to NOT BE FORCED TO ABORT her child by USAF Regulations. RBG got a stay, and Ms. Struck was able to birth her child alive.
Then rbg would use European law in her opinions of the court’s decisions. Even a blind squirrel will find an acorn occasionally, but still starve to death.
It took a long time to get us from the AWB to Bruen. Twenty Plus Years. When most states were still “May Issue” and too many were effectively NO Issue? When David Souter was a “Republican SCOTUS Justice.”
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Do you think Bruen would have even been possible in 1995? Remember the wailing and rending of garments over Heller and McDonald just a few short years ago? The disappointment of Kocharsky (sp?)?
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Now when
43ALL states are Shall Issue and half are Constitutional Carry? Bruen makes sense to most people. Everyone except a closed minded hoplophobe realizes that millions of carry permits have not resulted in blood baths or “Wild West” shootouts; and that murder and mayhem are caused by criminals, not by the firearms they are often illegally carrying.–
It will take years of legal battles to fight back against the illegal gun laws passed by NY to gut Bruen. It will take more years to fight against the unconstitutional gun, magazine and ammo bans by many blue states. We need to keep fighting at the state, local and federal levels until the Second Amendment is treated like the First Amendment should be.