Clarence Thomas Slams
Supreme Court “Bending the Rules” to Create “Putative Right to Abortion”
National Steven Ertelt Jun 27,
2016 | 11:43AM Washington, DC
Thomas
said the Supreme Court was doing the bidding of the abortion industry and
deciding to “bend the rules” to create a “putative right to abortion.”
Justice
Clarence Thomas, who authored the dissenting opinion, wrote, “Today the Court
strikes down two state statutory provisions in all of their applications, at
the behest of abortion clinics and doctors. That decision exemplifies the
Court’s troubling tendency ‘to bend the rules when any effort to limit
abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.’”
He
continued, “… today’s decision creates an abortion exception to ordinary rules
of res judicata, ignores compelling evidence that Texas’ law imposes no
unconstitutional burden, and disregards basic principles of the severability
doctrine. I write separately to emphasize how today’s decision perpetuates the
Court’s habit of applying different rules to different constitutional rights—
especially the putative right to abortion.”
As
to the bending of the rules, here’s what Thomas wrote:
Thomas
added: “Eighty years on, the Court has come full
circle. The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like
the right to abortion into preferred constitutional rights, while disfavoring
many of the rights actually enumerated in the Constitution. But our
Constitution renounces the notion that some constitutional rights are more
equal than others. A plaintiff either possesses the constitutional right he is
asserting, or not—and if not, the judiciary has no business creating ad hoc
exceptions so that others can assert rights that seem especially important to
vindicate. A law either infringes a constitutional right, or not; there is no
room for the judiciary to invent tolerable degrees of encroachment. Unless the
Court abides by one set of rules to adjudicate constitutional rights, it will
continue reducing constitutional law to policy-driven value judgements until
the last threads of its legitimacy disappear.”
“I remain fundamentally opposed to the Court’s abortion
jurisprudence,” he
concluded.
Julie
Schmit-Albin, Executive Director of Nebraska Right to Life, told LifeNews
applauded the high court justice.
“Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in this case is very poignant and
speaks to a Court which is bending over backwards to protect the abortion
industry which preys on women and kills over a million unborn babies a year,” she said.
8 Best Quotes From
Clarence Thomas’s Texas Abortion Dissent
The
Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion proponents today, striking down a Texas state law that required abortion clinics to adhere
to the same health codes as outpatient facilities and that all abortionists
must have hospital admitting privileges.
In
the majority opinion, the justices who ruled in favor of abortion advocates in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt
argued Texas’s laws were in contention with a 1992 Supreme Court ruling (Casey) in which the court
had determined that laws restricting abortions must not place an “undue burden”
on a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy.
Justice
Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion ripping apart the court’s tendency
to bend over backwards to accommodate abortion. Here are eight of the
sickest burns in that opinion.
1.
The court’s interpretation of “undue burden” is confusing as hell.
Today’s opinion does resemble Casey in one respect: After
disregarding significant aspects of the Court’s prior jurisprudence, the
majority applies the undue-burden standard in a way that will surely mystify
lower courts for years to come.
2.
Judges aren’t medical experts — even if they try to appoint themselves as such.
Moreover, by second-guessing medical evidence and making its own
assessments of ‘quality of care’ issues. . . the majority reappoints this Court
as ‘the country’s ex officio medical board with powers to disapprove medical
and operative practices and standards throughout the United States.’ . . . And
the majority seriously burdens States, which must guess at how much more
compelling their interests must be to pass muster and what ‘commonsense
inferences’ of an undue burden this Court will identify next.
3.
Arbitrary standards mess up constitutional law.
As the Court applies whatever standard it likes to any given case,
nothing but empty words separates our constitutional decisions from judicial
fiat.
4.
The court just makes stuff up to get what it wants.
The illegitimacy of using ‘made-up tests’ to ‘displace longstanding
national traditions as the primary determinant of what the Constitution means’
has long been apparent. . . The Constitution does not prescribe tiers of
scrutiny. The three basic tiers— ‘rational basis,’ intermediate, and strict
scrutiny—’are no more scientific than their names suggest, and a further
element of randomness is added by the fact that it is largely up to us which
test will be applied in each case.’. . . But the problem now goes beyond
that. If our recent cases illustrate anything, it is how easily the Court
tinkers with levels of scrutiny to achieve its desired result.
5.
Muzzling free speech? No problem. Defining marriage? Good luck.
Likewise, it is now easier for the government to restrict judicial
candidates’ campaign speech than for the Government to define marriage—even
though the former is subject to strict scrutiny and the latter was supposedly
subject to some form of rational-basis review.
6.
Made-up rights don’t trump those enumerated in the Constitution.
The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights
like the right to abortion into preferred constitutional rights, while
disfavoring many of the rights actually enumerated in the
Constitution. But our Constitution renounces the notion that some
constitutional rights are more equal than others. A plaintiff either possesses
the constitutional right he is asserting, or not—and if not, the judiciary has
no business creating ad hoc exceptions so that others can assert rights that
seem especially important to vindicate. A law either infringes a constitutional
right, or not; there is no room for the judiciary to invent tolerable degrees
of encroachment.
7.
There are too many legal exceptions for made-up rights.
Our law is now so riddled with special exceptions for special rights
that our decisions deliver neither predictability nor the promise of a
judiciary bound by the rule of law.
8.
Some may call the decision a victory, but it’s a loss for America.
Today’s decision will prompt some to claim victory, just as it will
stiffen opponents’ will to object. But the entire Nation has lost something
essential. The majority’s embrace of a jurisprudence of rights-specific
exceptions and balancing tests is ‘a regrettable concession of defeat—an
acknowledgement that we have passed the point where ‘law,’ properly speaking,
has any further application.’
The
decision is the most significant abortion ruling since the Carhart ruling in 2007,
which upheld a federal ban on partial-birth abortions.
Bre
Payton is a staff writer at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter.
