This from The Intercept, based upon an article by Think Progress:
theintercept.com/…
I hope I am not going over “fair use” standards, because there isn’t much here I can do except raise the alarm.
On September 9, Think Progress published an article by Ian Millhiser that made text out of the subtext of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, describing how the Supreme Court nominee, in a fairly straightforward legal analysis, had revealed his belief that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. That legal analysis, the article noted, matched comments Kavanaugh had made in a speech in 2017. “Kavanaugh’s 2017 speech, when laid alongside a statement he made during his confirmation hearing, eliminates any doubt that he opposes Roe,” Millhiser wrote. Facebook, meanwhile, had empowered the right-wing outlet the Weekly Standard to “fact check” articles. The Weekly Standard, invested in Kavanaugh’s confirmation, deemed the Think Progress article “false.” The story was effectively nuked from Facebook, with other outlets threatened with traffic and monetary consequences if they shared it
I can’t check sources, so I felt that I had to leave the story somewhat conditional, but the analysis seems extremely powerful:
1) According to Kavanaugh, “all roads lead to the Glucksberg test as the test that the Supreme Court has settled on as the proper test” to determine the scope of these unenumerated rights.
“Glucksberg” means Washington v. Glucksberg, a 1997 Supreme Court decision holding that the Constitution does not protect a right to physician-assisted suicide. According to Chief Justice Rehnquist’s opinion for the Court in Glucksberg, the question of which unenumerated rights are protected by the Constitution should be answered by asking which rights are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”
We don’t have to guess, however, whether Judge Kavanaugh thinks that a constitutional right to abortion is grounded in this Glucksberg test, because he’s already answered that question. As law professor Jim Oleske points out on Twitter, Kavanaugh said in his 2017 speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute that “even a first-year law student could tell you that the Glucksberg’s approach to unenumerated rights was not consistent with the approach of the abortion cases such as Roe vs. Wade in 1973, as well as the 1992 decision reaffirming Roe, known as Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.”
2) This appears to go way beyond Roe, and also gives his views on a host of LGBTQ issues and other issues related to intimacy and relationships.
For what it’s worth, Kavanaugh’s statement that “all roads lead to the Glucksbergtest as the test that the Supreme Court has settled on as the proper test” is incorrect. As law professor Jamal Greene first pointed out on Twitter, Glucksbergwas “explicitly disavowed in Obergefell,” the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality decision.
According to Obergefell, Glucksberg “is inconsistent with the approach this Court has used in discussing other fundamental rights, including marriage and intimacy.”
Kavanaugh’s apparent endorsement of Glucksberg as the sole test for determining unenumerated rights, in other words, threatens a whole lot more than the right to an abortion. It also suggests that he believes that a wide range of Supreme Court decisions governing sex, romantic relationships, and intimacy were wrongly decided.
This stream of logic, of course, puts the lie to Collins’ claim that a nominee who would overturn Roe would be unacceptable to her. It further suggests a terrifying list of recent SCOTUS rulings that Kavanaugh would shitcan, and he would already have four allies. If it’s true that Facebook let The Weekly Standard review the content of this story before killing it, then, well, it’s time for a massive boycott.
Perhaps the case for attempted rape gets rid of this disaster. But there ought not be any doubt where he stands, and that Collins is a proven liar.