Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Biden champions abortion rights

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” Today, Texas law SB8 went into effect.  This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century.

The Texas law will significantly impair women’s access to the health care they need, particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes.  And, outrageously, it deputizes private citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who they believe has helped another person get an abortion, which might even include family members, health care workers, front desk staff at a health care clinic, or strangers with no connection to the individual.

My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade nearly five decades ago and will protect and defend that right.”

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President Joe Biden statement on 9/1/21

 

This is what real leadership sounds and looks like !

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    • I predict that you’ll see some Olympic level legal gymnastics while the American Taliban appointees to the Supreme Court twist our system of justice to allow and enable their agenda.

      • Although I have a glimmer of hope that this bill might be just a little too in your face even for the SC. Nobody needs to see Gorsuch on the uneven parallel bars.

  2. I predict that the American Taliban will attempt to pass similar “Deputy Dog” measures in all 50 states.

    They’ve already clogged the courts with dozens of fraudulent lawsuits on their own.

    These seditionists are attempting to destroy the rule of law. They are doing so by conducting what amounts a giant and orchestrated “Denial of Service” attack on EVERY American institution.

    They are flooding America’s media, legislatures, hospitals, and now courts with one common purpose — destroy the targeted institution by overwhelming it with traffic that it was never intended to handle.

    The purpose of the American Taliban is to destroy the America that most of us hold dear. We ignore them at our extreme peril.

        • Speaker Pelosi announced today that she plans to bring up legislation to codify Roe v. Wade in response to the Supreme Court’s ” cowardly, dark-of-night decision” to greenlight Texas’ extreme anti-abortion law, that ” delivers catastrophe to women in Texas, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities.”

          That ‘s how you fight and destroy the American Taliban neo-fascist pukes.

          • I’m not confident that this legislation can pass the House and Senate anytime soon. Even if it does, I’m even less confident that it will be enforceable if the Supreme Court decides to vacate Roe v. Wade — which seems very likely.

            It appears to me that an amendment to the Constitution is the only truly effective way to preserve these fundamental rights of women.

            It joins the queue that already includes the ERA and a desperately needed restriction of the 2nd Amendment.

            I do have a prediction, however. I predict that if the American Taliban succeeds at taking control of American government, it will repeal the Second Amendment within weeks. Once in power, it will NEVER allow citizens to own or carry weapons that might be used to overthrow it.

            • Roe v. Wade only says that it is unconstitutional to ban abortion in many circumstances. Vacating it would only say it’s constitutionally OK to ban them, but not constitutionally required. It would revert to being regulated by statute alone so if Congress in fact decides to protect the procedure by statute there’s no reason that would not past muster.

              • The Supreme Court will do whatever the American Taliban tell it to do about abortion. The next target — some say it’s the actual target of the anti-abortion agitation — will be artificial contraception.

                I note that the religious opposition to contraception is literally indistinguishable from its opposition to abortion. The fundamental premise — especially of the Roman Catholic Church — is that the primary purpose of a woman is to be a mother, and that the ONLY legitimate purpose of sex is to procreate.

                Every sex act that is not procreative is a “sin” according to Roman Catholic dogma (and according to the Protestant sects that mimic all this). I invite you to offer even one example — even within marriage — of a non-procreative sex act that is allowed or celebrated within the Roman Catholic church.

                The American Taliban is doing all in its power to subjugate women. The current Supreme Court is a pawn of the American Taliban. The previous administration, in conjunction with the previous House and Senate leadership, very explicitly — an illegally — ensured that.

                I suggest that anything short of a Constitutional Amendment will be blocked by the Supreme Court. We need only look at how an even less extreme Court gutted the Voting Rights legislation that worked so well for so many decades (which, of course, is why it was gutted).

                • So says many of us. Remember, the other side just as adamantly insists that being born alive is the fundamental human right of the fetus. I’m not sure arguments of moral superiority are going to help either side.

                • My son pointed out something as well. The American Taliban (as you call it) wants to subjugate women, but only women in the working class. This is a class issue. The women in the wealthy class will still, as before Roe, have access to safe abortions, working class women will not.

                  This keeps the working class “in their place” and ensures a steady supply of cheap exploitable labor available to support the wealthy class.

                • I see a flaw in that logic. If working class women keep getting pregnant and having to raise kids they are not available for the labor market.

                • We have no pregnancy leave in the USA.
                  A working class father and mother need to work at least two jobs. They can’t quit. They can’t complain. And their kids are the next generation of cheap labor.

                • Pretty sure Family and Medical Leave Act includes at least maternity if not paternity leave, and at least in my experience even before that maternity leave was common. There’s nothing that says the next generation has to follow the same path.

                • I think FMLA does not guarantee paid leave, only that you can’t be fired for taking unpaid leave.

                • Indeed — and it is yet another example of a feel-good law that has essentially NO practical effect.

                  The actual effect of the FMLA is to force the employer to be slightly creative in the language it uses to inform the employee that their services are no longer required or in the language it uses to describe the “equivalent” position being offered.

                  It also should be noted that the FMLA applies only to employers with 50 or more employees within a 75 mile radius of the employee in question, and does not apply to “key employees”.

                  A common trick frequently performed by the Massachusetts legislature is to pass a high-profile measure that sounds awesome, then ensure that it is virtually (or in some cases literally) impossible for any entity to actually benefit from the provisions of that measure.

                  For example, most of us have heard of the several measures that — on paper — provide reimbursements to residents who replace “qualifying” home heating and cooling systems with “green” equipment. In practice, there is often no WORKING mechanism for claiming the rebate.

                  Phone numbers are perpetually busy or not answered at all. Allegedly scheduled callback requests are ignored. Website links don’t work, and fail with no persistent record after wasting hours of the user’s time. For those who somehow did navigate the thicket of “unfortunate failures”, every request in the state is funneled to the desk of a single worker — actually paid by Eversource (when I did this) — who is completely powerless to actually DO anything.

                  Most applicants for those rebates choose, like yours truly, to simply give up on ever getting the rebate — it isn’t worth the herculanean effort needed to obtain it.

                  Collecting unemployment compensation is a similar racket, although not quite as hard in Massachusetts today as it once was.

                  Working families need and deserve much more than the FMLA.

                • “Indeed — and it is yet another example of a feel-good law that has essentially NO practical effect.”
                  I wouldn’t go that far. FMLA is a good thing. It does have some practical effect. It just doesn’t do what Christopher thinks it does.

                • I think many people don’t realize the number of employers excluded by the 50 employee floor.

                  The FMLA does no harm, and I agree that it doesn’t go as far as Christopher apparently thinks.

                  It certainly isn’t sufficient to protect working-class men and women from the American Taliban.

  3. I’m still trying to figure out why my FB feed was lit up with outrage at the Supreme Court over this. My understanding is that it is NOT the Court’s job to pre-emptively veto laws like a President can, but that it must wait to rule on a particular case brought under the law. I believe the Court specifically said they making no comment at this time on the constitutionality of the TX law.

    • Suppose the state of New York passed a law that said that any white man who had sex outside of marriage was a felon and arranged a $10,000 cash penalty to be paid to any citizen who even helped arrange the liason. For example, suppose an Uber driver who brought the man to the appointed place could be sued by a citizen who witnessed the dropoff.

      I think the Court would immediately and without hesitation block the enforcement of the law until the various challenges were heard. It wasn’t that long ago that this happened all the time.

      The Court could and should have blocked this law.

      • Still not sure that is the High Court’s role. Seems to me it would be a court within the jurisdiction the law covers – in the abortion case a TX state court or in your hypothetical a NY state court – which would issue such an injunction.

        • My understanding is that this was in fact being reviewed by a Texas court and was yanked out of that in order to create this situation.

          There is nothing normal about this — it’s an intentional strategy to block women’s access to abortion.

  4. I am reminded of the one-liner — “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

    • To which my thought is if men were the ones getting pregnant they wouldn’t be making the rules. Seems to me that the way more traditional gender roles developed was that since women gave birth they stayed home to raise kids while men ran the outside world. I suspect if one aspect were reversed, the whole paradigm would be.

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