Roe RIP 🌻🌻🌻

🌩🌨⛈:  Yesterday morning at 6 AM New York City was shocked out of bed by a thunder boom so jarring that had it been Kyiv everyone would have rushed to their nearest bomb shelter assuming another Russian missile attack or worse. As it turns out the boom was the least jarring part of the day because last night as the usual coterie of Anna Wintour approved celebutantes were sashaying up the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum celebrating the Gilded Age, the superficially shiny period from 1870 to 1900 when women had few rights, we learned that one of those hard earned rights, the right to choose, really is on the chopping block.  That revelation came after Politico published a draft of what is believed to be the Supreme Court’s upcoming opinion in Mississippi’s Dobb’s v Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. Authored by the very right wing Judge Alito, the draft opinion, which likely has the full support of Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch but not the support of the three liberal Justices or even of right of center Chief Justice John Roberts, is a “full throated, unflinching repudiation” of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v Casey that largely maintained that right. In the draft, Alito writes that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that it “must be overruled….returning the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”  Essentially, the draft opinion says that states and presumably Congress as well, can criminalize abortion with no rape or incest exception because the Constitution doesn’t explicitly consider it a right. Though the focus of the opinion is abortion, it’s not a stretch to see how it would also apply to other rights that the conservative justices aren’t fond of, like the right to privacy, the basis for Griswold v Connecticut which said that the courts couldn’t interfere with married couples use of birth control.  The bottom line, if this draft opinion is the real thing, or even close to what the final opinion will look like, reproductive freedom will cease to exist for most in this country and that’s not an exaggeration.  As to the leak itself, don’t be distracted by the number of people, mostly on the right who are horrified that someone had the nerve to take the unprecedented step of leaking a Court draft,  The issue isn’t the leak, it’s the elimination of reproductive rights and the willingness of this court to ignore fifty years of precedent to go there.

A Few Other Things:  It turns out that the reason that there were no Republicans on the Nancy Pelosi trip to Ukraine was because those invited turned down the opportunity to join the delegation.  To be fair, for security purposes none of them were informed that the group was going to venture into Ukraine, rather they, like all the Democrats who did join the Speaker, were told they were going to Poland. Another person who needs lots of security these days is Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis largely because a whole bunch of MAGA maniacs are upset that she is proceeding with her case against the Former Guy.  Yesterday she seated a special grand jury, one tasked with looking into  whether the FG and others in his orbit illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in Georgia when they  quite obviously illegally tried to get Brad Raffensperger to find those 11,780 extra votes. Also, it’s primary day in Ohio.  We will soon learn whether the FG’s endorsement of hillbilly guy JD Vance over the groveling brown noser Josh Mandel worked, whether State Senator Matt Dolan, who’s been climbing in the polls pulls off a surprise victory and, of course, just how many votes the not so real candidate JD Mandel garners as a result of that accidental endorsement he got over the weekend. And despite everyone’s desire to wish COVID away, it’s still here which is why New York City moved into the higher yellow risk category for virus transmission yesterday.