“We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion, pointing to landmark decisions that protected the right to obtain contraception, the right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts, and the right to same-sex marriage.
No other justices signed onto Thomas’s opinion, but it nonetheless served as the alarm bell that Democrats and gay rights advocates have feared since a draft of Friday’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade
In the Roe ruling, the court declared that the abortion access is not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” and that the right to abortion is not a form of “liberty” protected by the due process clause.
Thomas says the same goes for the other rights he listed. And he urged the court to go further, scrapping substantive due process — the legal theory underpinning those rights — all together.
“In future cases, we should ‘follow the text of the Constitution, which sets forth certain substantive rights that cannot be taken away, and adds, beyond that, a right to due process when life, liberty, or property is to be taken away,’” he wrote. “Substantive due process conflicts with that textual command and has harmed our country in many ways. Accordingly, we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity.”
This is a developing story; check back for updates.
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending recognition of a constitutional right to abortion and giving individual states the power to allow, limit, or ban the practice altogether.
The ruling came in the court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which centered on a Mississippi law that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Republican-led state of Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to strike down a lower court ruling that stopped the 15-week abortion ban from taking place.
“We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. 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,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s opinion.
Alito’s opinion began with an exploration and criticism of Roe v. Wade and its holding that while states have “a legitimate interest in protecting ‘potential life,” this interest was not strong enough to prohibit abortions before the time of fetal viability, understood to be at about 23 weeks into pregnancy.
“The Court did not explain the basis for this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe’s reasoning,” Alito wrote.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed that the viability line “never made any sense,” but said he would have taken “a more measured course” with this case. Rather than overturn Roe v. Wade altogether, Roberts said he would have continued to recognize a right to get an abortion, and that the right should “extend far enough to ensure a reasonable opportunity to choose, but need not extend any further.”
The court’s majority took a firmer stance against Roe v. Wade and the subsequent case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, holding “that Roe and Casey must be overruled.”
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito wrote.
The Court’s opinion recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause has been found to guarantee certain rights that are not spelled out in the Constitution, but that those rights are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Abortion, the Court said, “does not fall within this category,” as “such a right was entirely unknown in American law” until the late 20th century.
The opinion continued to shred the Roe decision, saying it “was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that “[i]ts reasoning was exceptionally weak[.]”
Rather than continue the tradition established by Roe and Case, the Court wrote that it “is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The opinion comes after a leak of a draft opinion from February striking down Roe caused nationwide debate and promoted pro-choice activist protests at the homes of the six conservative justices. In addition, dozens of pro-life pregnancy centers were vandalized since the opinion leak, Catholic churches were targeted for protests and unrest, and a suspect was charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Bishop Cornelius Duncan & Pastor Maggie Anna Duncan at Jesus Christ Chapel Sunday June 19, 2022. Join us next Sunday on our conference line at 1-701-802-5041 Access code 8867144#. God bless you! Thank you for your participation!
Bishop Cornelius Duncan & Pastor Maggie Duncan worship at Jesus Christ Chapel on Sunday June 12, 2022. Join us next Sunday at 10:30 am by dialing 1-701-802-5041 Access Code 8867144# or listen to this podcast for Sunday evening service. God bless you all.
BISHOP CORNELIUS DUNCAN & PASTOR MAGGIE ANNA DUNCAN AT JESUS CHRIST CHAPEL SUNDAY JUNE 5, 2022. GOD WRITES HIS LAWS ON THE HEART THROUGH THE POWER OF HOLY GHOST.
A Russian lawmaker on Russian state-run television threatened this week that Russia could destroy the entire east coast of the United States with just two missiles if Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered such a strike.
The New York Post reported that in a Monday interview on the state-run Russia-1 television station, parliament member Alexei Zhuravlev said “I will tell you absolutely competently that to destroy the entire the East Coast of the United States, two Sarmat missiles are needed.”
“The same goes for the West Coast,” Zhuravlev added. “Four missiles, and there will be nothing left.”
The Russian RS-28 Sarmat missile, which is also known as the Satan II, is an intercontinental ballistic missile believed to be able to carry multiple warheads, including up to 10 large nuclear warheads, or 16 smaller ones, or a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles. In 2016, the Russian military news station TV Zvezda reported the Sarmat missile could carry enough warheads to destroy an area the size of Texas or France.
Last month, Russia 1 host Dmitry Kiselyov aired a segment depicting England being destroyed either by a Sarmat missile or being flooded by a radioactive title wave created by a nuclear weapon detonating along its coastline.
Russian missile forces are reportedly set to begin receiving the new Sarmat missiles — which is nicknamed “Satan II” — by fall of this year.
Russian officials have repeatedly threatened that the U.S. could face “unpredictable consequences” for continuing to support Ukrainian forces fighting against Russia’s ongoing invasion. Russia has said it would treat suspected U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine as legitimate military targets.
This week, the Biden administration announced the U.S. would provide an additional $700 million in weapons to Ukraine, including long-range mobile rocket artillery systems known High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
“We know that the United States has been purposefully and meticulously adding fuel to the fire,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax, ABC News reported. “The United States pursues the course towards fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”
The Russian state-run TASS news agency reported Peskov also told reporters that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s claims that Ukrainian forces won’t use the long-range HIMARS weapons to attack Russian territory.
“In order to trust, there must be previous experience when such promises were fulfilled. Unfortunately, such experience is completely nonexistent,” Peskov said. “On the contrary, the entire history of events proves that, starting with Zelenskyy’s main campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine’s southeast once and for all, [the promise] was not fulfilled, and the Minsk Agreements were not implemented, they sunk into oblivion, and by Ukraine’s fault at that.”
The Minsk Agreements were a series of international agreements to end the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, which has been ongoing since 2014.
From left, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend the Japan-U.S.-Australia-India Fellowship Founding Celebration event in Tokyo Tuesday, May 24, 2022. (Yuichi Yamazaki/Pool Photo via AP) more >
U.S. President Biden and other leaders of the “Quad” strategic group with India, Australia and Japan issued a carefully worded warning Tuesday to China, which has triggered unease in recent years by building military bases on disputed islands in the South China Sea.
The leaders expressed collective opposition to “coercive, provocative or unilateral actions” that would change the status quo in the Indo-Pacific.
The Quad showed unity one day after Mr. Biden made global headlines by saying bluntly that the U.S. will intervene militarily if China attempts to invade Taiwan. The White House has since walked back the statement.
The summit in Tokyo represents the diplomatic centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s weeklong visit to Asia.
China’s military muscle-flexing, North Korea’s increasingly provocative missile tests and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine have loomed over the gathering of the region’s four most powerful democracies. Successive U.S. administrations have sought to rally the Quad against the authoritarianism and aggression emanating from Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang.
Mr. Biden, who ended his Asia trip after the summit, attempted to seize on the gathering as a chance to show solidarity.
The U.S., India, Australia and Japan are navigating “a dark hour in our shared history” stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden said at the opening of the summit. He called on other Quad leaders to work more cohesively to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
“This is more than just a European issue,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s a global issue.”
A joint statement at the close of the summit was notably less explicit. Although the Quad openly condemned “North Korea’s destabilizing ballistic missile development and launches,” it did not specifically mention Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The leaders said only that they had “discussed our respective responses to the conflict in Ukraine and the ongoing tragic humanitarian crisis, and assessed its implications for the Indo-Pacific.”
The American people should have no problem seeing the destructive Biden Administration agenda in action for over a year, and it is every bit as bad as Republicans feared, and warned Americans it would be.
Open borders and a humanitarian crisis of Biden’s own making at the southern border that could have been avoided;
Destroying good-paying jobs today for vague promises of jobs tomorrow;
Raging inflation driving up the cost of gorceries along with higher energy prices; Reverting to a failed foreign policy that led to the deadly and disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and now Russia’s omnvasion of Ukraine and;
Using their toxic cancel culture to silence critics who disagree with their Liberal policies that erode our liberties and constitutional rights.
But Biden and his Far-Left cronies misjudge the millions of Americans who appose his radical policies and support the Republican Party’s commonsense principles of limited government, lower taxes and spending, economic opportunity for all and protecting individual freedom. -RNC
