Another angle showing multiple officers pushing me to the ground at tonight’s abortion rights protest downtown even as I complied with police orders https://t.co/K41WNsOx7M

— Samuel Braslow (@SamBraslow) June 25, 2022

PDA’s endorsed candidate for #IL13 @PalmerforIL‘s statement on #RoeVsWade pic.twitter.com/Q4PGGk8B7b

— PDA Illinois (@PDAIllinois) June 25, 2022

This is the candidate I’m voting for in next Tuesday’s primary for the district’s congressional seat. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the backing of the Dem locals other than PDA.

The #Dems are telling us they think we're stupid. This is the most idiotic stunt I've seen from them since last week. https://t.co/yGK0VJZRut

— Steven Searls (@StevenDBT) June 25, 2022

I agree with the blogger. Pelosi was totally tone-deaf.

Brett Kavanaugh Has Beclowned Susan Collins

Rarely in history has a United States senator been so blatantly beclowned as Susan Collins was on Friday.

Four years ago this summer, the Republican senator from Maine announced that President Trump’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, had assured her that he believed the recognition of abortion rights in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision was “settled law.” Kavanaugh, a longtime conservative judicial activist, was lying, as was obvious to anyone who knew his record and was aware of his weak allegiance to the truth. Yet Collins announced that she believed Kavanaugh and, that fall, the senator cast the essential vote to put a justice who was widely understood to be opposed to abortion rights on the US Supreme Court.

Collins’s colleagues and constituents warned her that Kavanaugh’s assurance could not be trusted. Two hundred and thirty Maine attorneys urged her to reject President Trump’s nominee because of their certainty that he would use his position on the bench to overturn Roe.

The Supreme Court Took the Most Extreme Course Possible
But Collins was a willing dupe, who placed her Republican Party affiliation ahead of her long-proclaimed pro-choice position.

Now, Kavanaugh has joined the activist majority on the high court in overturning Roe, with a sweeping decision that rejects almost five decades of precedent, as outlined in the 1973 ruling and the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that sustained it. And, on the outside chance that there was any doubt about his position, Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion that added insult to injury by absolutely rejecting the notion that Roe was ever “settled law.”

In his concurrence, Kavanaugh declared that Roe was “wrongly decided” and pointedly asserted that the 49-year-old decision “should be overruled at this time.”

Kavanaugh formed part of a 6-3 majority. So his was not the decisive vote to overturn Roe. Unfortunately for Collins, another Trump nominee for whom she provided cover, Neil Gorsuch, also joined the majority. So it’s fair to say, as the group Mainers for Accountable Leadership did on Friday, “Senator Collins, the overturning of Roe and Casey is your legacy.”

Kavanaugh rubbed salt in the wound with his concurrence’s clear rejection of the legal principle of stare decisis—which translates from Latin as “to stand by things decided”—in the case of abortion rights. He wrote, “Adherence to precedent is the norm, and stare decisis imposes a high bar before this Court may overrule a precedent. This Court’s history shows, however, that stare decisis is not absolute, and indeed cannot be absolute.”

Those words shame Collins, who in the fall of 2018 was in a position to prevent the confirmation of Donald Trump’s most controversial nominee to the court. Instead, she provided essential cover for Kavanaugh—promising her fellow senators and people across the country that the former Bush administration aide would not work to undermine, let alone overturn, the Roe v. Wade decision. In so doing, as Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has explained, Collins “did more to destroy reproductive rights than any single senator.”

As one of the few remaining self-proclaimed supporters of abortion rights in the congressional caucuses of the Republican Party, Collins was identified as a critical swing vote on the Kavanaugh nomination. She met with the nominee for two hours and emerged as his most important defender. Collins vouched for Kavanaugh, even after California college professor Christine Blasey Ford testified that he had assaulted her when they were high school students.

Collins actively campaigned for Kavanaugh, delivering a Senate floor speech that went all in on the argument that the nominee’s acceptance of Roe as “settled law” was deeply rooted in his reading of the US Constitution. “To my knowledge, Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself,” Collins declared in the October 2018 address. “He said decisions become part of our legal framework with the passage of time and that honoring precedent is essential to maintaining public confidence.”

That was never a credible argument. But it was sufficient to shore up support for the nominee at a point when at least some Republicans—along with West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin—were wavering on whether to vote to confirm Kavanaugh. In the end, Manchin joined Collins and every Republican, except Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, in putting Trump’s nominee on the high court.

When the decision to overturn Roe came down Friday, Collins announced, “This decision is inconsistent with what Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh said in their testimony and their meetings with me, where they both were insistent on the importance of supporting long-standing precedents that the country has relied upon.”

She even suggested that she would make an effort to codify aspects of Roe, along with Murkowski. But her refusal to work with Democrats to upend the Senate filibuster means that Collin’s codification promise rings hollow—as hollow as her promise that “I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade.”

Despite her promises to defend Roe, Maine’s “Collins Watch” project spoke the bitter truth after the court’s ruling was released, when it declared, “If Susan Collins was the steadfast abortion rights supporter she’s always presented herself as, she would of course resign at this point for her outsized complicity in the outcome.”

The Supreme Court Took the Most Extreme Course Possible

The Supreme Court has issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. It has said unequivocally, by a vote of 6-3, that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” and that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are “overruled.”

The majority opinion, written by Samuel Alito and largely conforming to the draft of this opinion leaked a month ago, is the most extreme version of this ruling possible. The issue at the heart of the case was a ban in Mississippi on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation. That ban was intended, clearly and directly, to frustrate the work of Jackson Women’s Health (the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi), which provided abortions up to 16 weeks. The conservative majority could have simply upheld the 15-week ban. Instead, it chose to tear down the whole constitutional edifice making abortion legal and revoke the right to bodily autonomy.

In overturning Roe and Casey, the conservatives left no exception for incest—when, say, a father illegally and grotesquely impregnates his young daughter. They left no exception for rape—when, say, an assailant violates a person and impregnates them against their will. Alito indicated that there might be an exception in cases where the life of the mother is at risk, but for us to know the contours of that exception, some unfortunate pregnant person will have to make a decision—under threat of being arrested and prosecuted or watching their doctor be arrested and prosecuted—and then bring a constitutional case that their rights were violated.

If that sounds like a dystopian hellscape, that’s because it is. It’s because the court’s conservative majority, and Republicans around the country, want to force others to live in that hell. It is a hell created entirely out of Christian fundamentalism that ignores the views of people with different faiths, or people who believe secularism is the proper grounding for law.

The conservative crusade, however, fails its first contact with any robust conception of individual rights. That life begins at conception is a religious position, not a legal one. Whether walking, talking, born people have a right to their own bodies, untrammeled by state religious dogma, is not merely a moral position; it’s the only possible foundation of legitimate government.

Alito comes to his barbaric conclusion in the usual way ideologues on this court craft their horrible decisions: by concerning himself only with the views of white men from the 18th and 19th centuries. Abortion rights in this country are (or were) grounded in the Fifth and 14th amendments’ right to due process. Alito says, quite rightly, that the people who wrote those amendments did not think they were conferring upon women a right to bodily autonomy. For Alito and the conservative majority, that is enough: If dead white men didn’t grant it, we can’t have it.

In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan (who cowrote the opinion) point out that all of the constitutional text Alito relies on was written by men. They write: “But, of course, ‘people’ did not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Men did. So it is perhaps not so surprising that the ratifiers were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s liberty, or for their capacity to participate as equal members of our Nation.”

The liberal justices also devote a lot of time to castigating Alito and the conservatives for their wholesale rejection of stare decisis—the idea that past Supreme Court precedents should be respected unless something has materially changed in the functioning of society. All three Trump-nominated justices—Neil Gorsuch, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy “Handmaid” Barrett—lied under oath to senators and the American people about their respect for precedent, and they as well as the bad-faith actors who supported their nominations should answer for those lies.

Still, while the legal jousting over precedent and states’ rights is important, I keep coming back to Alito’s white’s-only, male-only view of the 14th Amendment as the seminal failure of this ruling. Conservatives (regardless of what party they happen to belong to) think that the 14th Amendment can only do what the white men who wrote it and ratified it thought it could do. They believe that the country is and should be permanently stuck in a vision of the world as articulated by white men who purposely excluded everybody else from participating. Sometimes conservative commentators argue that they believe the only way to break out of that racist and misogynist past is with “new” constitutional amendments, but that argument is easily exposed as a lie, because they never support the constitutional amendments (note the conservative opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment) that would make the inequality stop. They want the constitution and its protections to be by white men and for white men, and they resist any effort to change it.

Conservatives are always like this. They’ve always been like this. And they will continue to be like this. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas straight-up calls for the reconsideration of the cases recognizing LGBTQ rights, legalizing same-sex marriage, and protecting the right to contraception. He asks the court to do to the LGBTQ community what it just did to women and pregnant people, which is nothing less than the reversion to second-class status. Conservatives on the Supreme Court—as well as in Congress and in the White House, if their voter suppression tactics work—will keep taking things away from people who do not identify as white or male or cis or a corporation or an automatic submachine gun.

The court has issued its ruling, and there will be more rulings just like it. The question for the rest of us, all of the people Thomas Jefferson would not have recognized as such, is whether we will accept these rulings.

Obviously, it starts with President Joe Biden. Ever since Texas revoked the constitutional rights of pregnant people, last September, I’ve been calling for him to use maximal federal power to protect what conservatives have stripped away. He hasn’t yet, he must do so now. But in a speech this afternoon, after the ruling, Biden offered little more than thoughts, prayers, and exhortations to go vote.

The problem is that people have voted. People have marched. People have knitted hats. People engaged in wholesale civil unrest for an entire summer during a pandemic. Nothing has stopped the conservatives. “Normal,” “acceptable,” “institutionalist” responses have, by and large, failed. Donald Trump boldly stated that he would only appoint people to the Supreme Court who opposed abortion rights. People voted for him. He was then gifted a Supreme Court seat stolen from the previous administration, elevated a man credibly accused of attempted rape to the court, and nominated another justice after the election to replace him had already started. With the lifetime power these conservatives now hold, the idea that there is an acceptable, institutionalist, “good government” response to their anti-democratic decrees is just folly. Even if Congress and the Senate get their act together to pass a bill restoring abortion rights, this Supreme Court will surely strike it down.

If people want to regain their untimely ripped rights, they will have to expand the Supreme Court. There is no other solution. To do that, yes, Democrats need to be in control of the White House and both houses of Congress (as they are now). But those Democrats will also have to be willing to do what is necessary to reform the court and diminish the power of the conservative justices.

Right now, only Republicans are willing to use all their power to get what they want. And what they want is for women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community to have fewer constitutional rights than cis-hetero white men.

Second-class status for roughly half of the country is now the law of the land. Conservatives and Republicans couldn’t be happier.

If you want to understand why liberals always lose, even when they win, read the responses from the dudes who think the only difference between FDR and Biden is how many Democratic Senators there were. Really sad stuff.

— Moshik Temkin (@moshik_temkin) June 25, 2022

Gov. J.B. Pritzker calls special legislative session on reproductive rights as Roe decision reverberates through Illinois politics

The U.S. Supreme Court decision Friday overturning Roe v. Wade reverberated swiftly in Illinois, with Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling for lawmakers to return to Springfield to strengthen the state’s already formidable abortion rights laws while candidates and activists across the political spectrum prepared for the issue to become central in campaigns this fall.

Surrounded by other Democrats and abortion rights advocates at the Howard Brown Health Clinic in Rogers Park on Friday morning, Pritzker said the high court’s decision, foreshadowed in a draft opinion leaked early last month, was the product of “the radical majority Donald Trump and his right-wing allies created on the Supreme Court.”

“Privacy rights are being eviscerated right before our very eyes,” he said. “If they can take away your ability to control your own body, there’s not much that stops them from making marriage equality illegal and taking away employment protections for your beliefs or your orientation.

“No ifs, ands, or buts about it: we are headed down a dangerous spiral that will erode our democracy.”

Pritzker, whose recent trip to New Hampshire added fuel to speculation about a potential presidential bid, has positioned himself as a national leader on abortion rights and on Friday cast himself as “the most pro-choice governor in the entire nation.”

His call for a special legislative session this summer, with the backing of House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and Senate President Don Harmon, is an effort to increase legal protections for abortion providers and patients in a state where the procedure is enshrined in law as a “fundamental right.”

It’s also to make sure Illinois is prepared for an even greater influx of people from other states crossing its borders to terminate a pregnancy. One proposal under consideration would expand the ranks of medical professionals who are allowed to perform abortions in Illinois.

State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, a Chicago Democrat who was House sponsor of the 2019 measure signed by Pritzker that established abortion as a fundamental right, said Illinois lawmakers have been working for years in preparation for this day.

The focus for legislators when they return to Springfield will be “to create proactive supports” for providers and patients in Illinois and those who will come here as a result of Friday’s decision, Cassidy said.

“While all around us reproductive health and gender affirming care are under attack, we will protect those patients and those providers,” she said. “We will make it possible for them to continue to provide care and receive care without fear.”

Cassidy said she’s working on a proposal modeled on recent legislation in New York and Connecticut that would protect Illinois providers from legal jeopardy in states with more restrictive laws. She said she also hopes the state Senate will take up a measure passed in the House this spring that would shield providers from losing their Illinois licenses if they were subject to discipline in other states as a result of abortion bans.

Colleen Connell, executive director of the Illinois ACLU, from left, state Rep. Kelly Cassidy and state Sen. Cristina H. Pacione-Zayas, huddle together while listening to Gov. J.B. Pritzker talk about the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, in Chicago. (Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)
Republican legislative leaders sought to portray Pritzker and other Illinois Democrats as outside the mainstream on abortion issues, noting the recent repeal of the state’s parental notification law for minors seeking abortions and a proposal to allow certain medical professionals other than doctors to perform the procedure.

“Pritzker is embracing an extreme agenda that will make Illinois an outlier even amongst the most liberal states,” Senate GOP leader Dan McConchie of Hawthorn Woods said in a statement.

For abortion opponents, Friday marked “an absolutely joyous day for the most innocent members of the human family and their mothers,” Amy Gehrke, executive director of Illinois Right to Life, said in a statement.

However, “here in Illinois our work is just beginning thanks to our radical laws,” Gehrke said.

The court’s ruling is likely to have a minimal effect on Tuesday’s primary in Illinois, where voters choose partisan ballots. It will likely resound more strongly in the November general election, when each party will work to galvanize its base while also trying to sway independent voters.

As always, a key factor in the fall will be the vote of socially moderate and fiscally conservative suburban women. Democrats will portray the ruling as a Republican-led attack on women’s rights as well as their right to privacy, and also a precursor for attempts to restrict other rights such as same-sex marriage and legal protections for the LGBTQ community.

With Democrats facing election headwinds on the economy, crime and political corruption, Pritzker said he thinks the court’s decision will rally voters behind his party.

“A strong majority people in the state of Illinois are pro-choice,” he said. “I believe that people are going to come out and vote in very big numbers to protect their individual rights.”

Polls from The Associated Press in the past two general elections lend some credence to the governor’s point of view.

Among Illinois voters in the 2018 governor’s race and the 2020 presidential race, about two-thirds supported abortion rights, according to survey results from AP VoteCast conducted in conjunction with NORC at the University of Chicago.

All six men seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Pritzker in November oppose abortion, to varying degrees.

Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin has been the most circumspect on the issue. He calls himself “pro-life” and said he supports exceptions to allow abortions in cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother is at risk. He has also said he would seek to reinstate the parental notification requirement for minors seeking an abortion.

But he has refused to say whether he supports a federal ban on abortion or the overturning of Roe. In a statement issued after his campaign was asked to respond to Friday’s decision, he continued to walk a fine line on the issue and did not respond directly to the Supreme Court action.

“As a pro-life Republican, I will continue to fight for every parent’s right to know if a minor child is having an abortion — a right J.B. Pritzker has outrageously taken away,” Irvin said. “With Democratic majorities in the Illinois General Assembly, this Supreme Court ruling will have no effect on the law in our state.”

In a Facebook post, state Sen. Darren Bailey of Xenia, who’s running in Tuesday’s Republican primary for governor, called Friday’s decision “a historic and welcomed moment.”

“As I have consistently stated for several months, as governor, I will work to remove taxpayer-funded abortion and restore parental notification in Illinois,” Bailey said. “I will also work with the legislature, civic groups, and nonprofits to support women during and after pregnancy, to make adoption easier, and abortion unnecessary.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Jesse Sullivan tweeted out a video lauding the Supreme Court decision under the headline, “God is good.”

“Now the battle for life in the front lines moves right here to Illinois,” Sullivan says in the video while clutching a squirming infant.

Bull Valley businessman Gary Rabine, tweeted: “Thanks to President Trump for appointing conservative justices that finally ended 50 years of abortion in the United States.”

On Twitter, U.S. Rep. Marie Newman, who represents the 3rd District while running for election in the south and west suburban 6th, posted “It’s not just abortion. They are coming for same-sex marriages. Birth control. And so much more.”

“Fight like hell,” said Newman, who recently revealed she had an abortion when she was 19. “We need more women with the lived experience in Congress. I won’t let the next generation have fewer rights than I had.”

Newman’s opponent in the Democratic primary, U.S. Rep. Sean Casten wrote in a tweet: “These SCOTUS decisions, the continuing commitment by the @GOP to oppose democracy rather than reflect the will of the people.”

Republican U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood of Peoria in a statement blasted Pritzker for continuing “to push his radical abortion agenda in Illinois, which includes late-term and taxpayer-funded abortion, restrictions on conscience protections, and limits on parental involvement. The Governor’s policies are widely outside the mainstream.”

Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he plans to call a hearing next month to “explore the grim reality of a post-Roe America.”

“Millions of Americans are waking up in a country where they have fewer rights than their parents and grandparents,” Durbin said in a statement. “The bottom line: on critical, personal choices involving a woman’s right to make reproductive decisions about her own body, do you trust her or the government? The Supreme Court now says a woman’s right to privacy does not extend to the most personal, private choice she will ever face”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat who’s up for reelection this year, said she was “outraged and horrified” by the Supreme Court decision.

“This outcome is a nightmare that robs women of their right to make their own choices about their health care and their bodies, and it paves the way for a nationwide abortion ban that Republicans have been seeking for decades,” Duckworth said in a statement.

While much of the attention in the coming months will be on the race for governor, a pair of down-ballot races also could play a significant role in whether abortion remains legal in Illinois.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot pointed to one race in particular to show up for: two open seats on the Illinois Supreme Court, which currently has a 4-3 Democratic majority.

“We are one Supreme Court justice away in Illinois from having a very different conversation,” Lightfoot said Friday afternoon at Planned Parenthood’s downtown office. “We cannot afford to go back.”

McConnell specifically got rid of the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees so they could steal seats and overturn Roe.

Senate Dem leadership won’t even try a one-time carveout to protect abortion rights.

The asymmetry is breathtaking.

— Jeremy Slevin (@jeremyslevin) June 25, 2022

This you, @Nike? Funding both sides of the war on women? pic.twitter.com/zPGiGwPABe

— THE PERSUADERS by Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) June 25, 2022