What's sauce for the Roe is sauce for the Heller

Don't blubber about their hypocrisy, make them eat it

Because of the flagrance with which the Supreme Court conservatives — who during their appointment hearings had professed a weaselly respect for Roe v. Wade as precedent — pulled the rug out with the Dobbs decision, there has been a tendency among liberals to focus on what is characterized as conservative hypocrisy in that matter. There are a couple of problems with that point of view.

First, no one ever believed them. For a long time they simply didn’t have the votes. And when they started to accumulate them, there was a general consensus that even should they achieve critical mass, the GOP Justices would yet restrain themselves, if only to keep back the ire of the nation that — then as now — opposed such a move from being visited on the movement those Justices represented.

Even as the Trump appointments were making such a result inevitable, the Sensible Moderates were telling us not to sweat it.

I recall William Saletan at Slate telling us in 2018 — when Anthony Kennedy retired, paving the way for the second of three Trump appointments — “Why Republicans don’t actually want to repeal Roe v. Wade.” He cited the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which had softened the ground under Roe without destroying it, as a sign, much like the rainbow after the Great Flood, that the Sensible Moderate playbook would obtain whenever abortion was on the SCOTUS agenda: The presumed hypocrisy of conservatives demanded split decisions on abortion, and thus would Roe continue to be spared.

“Conservative politicians denounced the court and safely resumed their empty threats to ban abortion,” said Saletan. “Pro-lifers regained their advantage in exit polls.” Thus, the worries of repro rights people in 2018, “like those of nearly 30 years ago, don’t signal the end of the legal right to abortion. They signal the beginning of its revival.”

The Casey majority was 26 years old at the time of Saletan’s column and the majority from that case — liberals, after a fashion, and Sandra Day O’Connor — was long gone. Nonetheless the average prestige press columnist’s desire to believe, even as Republicans are hoisting the no-quarter flag all around him, in the old soft-soap and sunshine is invincible.

Other columnists went so far as adopt that gently chiding tone such people imagine will urge conservatives back from radicalism unto Sensible Moderation (“Why Conservatives Should Beware a Roe v. Wade Repeal” — Politico; “Why Republicans Could Regret Overturning Roe v. Wade” — The New Yorker, etc.). Notwithstanding, as soon as the coast was clear Sam Alito and his gang dispatched Roe and conservatives across the country immediately started passing draconian state laws and threatening to make them national.

Do they have regrets? Don’t you believe it. Which brings me to the second problem with focusing on the “hypocrisy” of conservatives on Roe: Hypocrisy is meaningless to a crusader; it’s Just-War Theory all the way. The post-Dobbs election results that have been disastrous for Republicans are not leading to a rethink: On the contrary, Republicans are still passing new bans (the North Carolina lege heaved one up last week).

A few Republicans looking for votes, like Nikki Haley, pretend to seek consensus (“I believe in conversation, I believe in empathy”), but they absolutely aren’t sticking their necks out by advocating any policies that contradict official conservative positions (including the end of medication abortion nationwide). Their empathy shtick is no more believable than that of a David French.  They’re determined to ride out all opposition until they can gerrymander, voter-suppress, and just plain steal enough votes that it no longer matters what the voters think at all.

I bring this up in the context of what conservatives are saying as the mass gun murder numbers continue to accelerate off the charts — as in the Megyn Kelly’s expression of contempt toward liberals at the head of this newsletter (“you’ve failed to effect change. Pls face it. You can’t do it, thx to the 2A. We’re all well aware you don’t like that fact, but fact it is”).

You can’t do it? Fact it is? Who says?

The Second Amendment is in the Bill of Rights, but the current lunatic misreading of the Amendment is much more recent. As Josephine Harmon wrote in a brief history of the successful NRA/Federalist Society campaign to enlist every nutjob and psychopath into the “well-regulated militia”:

The newly militant gun movement took advantage of this shift by pushing what had once been a radical idea: that the prevailing interpretation of the Second Amendment as simply ensuring a collective right to bear arms as part of militia service was wrong. Instead, they argued that the amendment protected an individual right to carry firearms, rendering many gun control laws at the federal and state level suspect.

Thus came Heller, the mad guns-for-everyone decision that sane people in blue states are obliged to outfox, and crackpot state laws like permitless concealed carry.

Now, put this in the context of Roe: The public wanted to keep it, and disapprove of its removal and (clearly) of the results. Conservatives, however, think precedence doesn’t mean shit when their donors demand overturn.  

The public also wants gun control — it’s not even arguable. And all that’s preventing it is a relatively recent theory about what the Founders meant and how it might apply in an age of assault weapons and accelerating mass gun murder. But conservatives like Kelly claim their interpretation, novel and disastrous as it is, is unchangeable, the only conceivable one, and so we have to accept the bloodlust of their dark gods.

Again I say: Who says? Only the obviously politically motivated (and, as the news continually shows us, thoroughly corrupt) conservative judiciary. I see no reason why Democrats shouldn’t just step up and pack that shit. And if that doesn’t work, get started on repealing the Second Amendment and see if that gets somebody’s attention.