CLARENCE THOMAS SLAMS SCOTUS ON ABORTION LAW

  

INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.lifenews.com/2016/06/27/clarence-thomas-slams-supreme-court-bending-the-rules-to-create-putative-right-to-abortion/

Clarence Thomas Slams Supreme Court “Bending the Rules” to Create “Putative Right to Abortion”

National   Steven Ertelt   Jun 27, 2016   |   11:43AM    Washington, DC

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spared no criticism in his dissent today in the Texas case where the high court invalidated health and safety measures that have protected women from dangerous abortions and saved the lives of thousands of unborn babies.

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.

INTERNET SOURCE: http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/27/8-best-quotes-from-clarence-thomass-texas-abortion-dissent/

8 Best Quotes From Clarence Thomas’s Texas Abortion Dissent

June 27, 2016 By Bre Payton

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.

Photo Mark Wilson/Getty

Bre Payton is a staff writer at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter.