Pro Choice Comments on Roe

Laurence Tribe — Harvard Law School. Lawyer for Al Gore in 2000.

“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.�

“The Supreme Court, 1972 Term—Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law,� 87 Harvard Law Review 1, 7 (1973).

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

“Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.�

North Carolina Law Review, 1985

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Edward Lazarus — Former clerk to Harry Blackmun.

“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather.�
….

“What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent – at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed.â€?

“The Lingering Problems with Roe v. Wade, and Why the Recent Senate Hearings on Michael McConnell’s Nomination Only Underlined Them,� FindLaw Legal Commentary, Oct. 3, 2002

“[A]s a matter of constitutional interpretation, even most liberal jurisprudes — if you administer truth serum — will tell you it is basically indefensible.�

“Liberals, Don’t Make Her an Icon� Washington Post July 10, 2003.

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William Saletan — Slate columnist who left the GOP 2004 because it was too pro-life. 

“Blackmun’s [Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference.�

“Unbecoming Justice Blackmun,� Legal Affairs, May/June 2005.

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John Hart Ely — Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School 

Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.�
….

“What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it.… At times the inferences the Court has drawn from the values the Constitution marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.�

“The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,� 82 Yale Law Journal, 920, 935-937 (1973).

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Benjamin Wittes — Washington Post 

Roe “is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.�

“Letting Go of Roe,� The Atlantic Monthly, Jan/Feb 2005.

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Richard Cohen — Washington Post 

“[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision — the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution — strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.�
….

“As a layman, it’s hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is.

“If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe , with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers.
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Roe “is a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.�
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“Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument — but a bit of our soul as well.�

“Support Choice, Not Roe� Washington Post, October 19, 2005.

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Alan Dershowitz — Harvard Law School 

Roe v. Wade and Bush v. Gore “represent opposite sides of the same currency of judicial activism in areas more appropriately left to the political processes…. Judges have no special competence, qualifications, or mandate to decide between equally compelling moral claims (as in the abortion controversy)…. [C]lear governing constitutional principles … are not present in either case.�

Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000 (New York: Oxford) 2001, p. 194.

Cass Sunstein — University of Chicago and a Democratic adviser on judicial nominations

“In the Court’s first confrontation with the abortion issue, it laid down a set of rules for legislatures to follow. The Court decided too many issues too quickly. The Court should have allowed the democratic processes of the states to adapt and to generate sensible solutions that might not occur to a set of judges.�

“The Supreme Court 1995 Term: FOREWORD: LEAVING THINGS UNDECIDED,� 110 Harvard Law Review 6, 20 (1996).

“What I think is that it just doesn’t have the stable status of Brown or Miranda because it’s been under internal and external assault pretty much from the beginning…. As a constitutional matter, I think Roe was way overreached. I wouldn’t vote to overturn it myself, but that’s because I think it’s good to preserve precedent in general, and the country has sufficiently relied on it that it should not be overruled.�

Quoted in: Brian McGuire, “Roe v. Wade an Issue Ahead of Alito Hearing,� New York Sun November 15, 2005

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Jeffrey Rosen — Legal Affairs Editor, The New Republic 

“In short, 30 years later, it seems increasingly clear that this pro-choice magazine was correct in 1973 when it criticized Roe on constitutional grounds. Its overturning would be the best thing that could happen to the federal judiciary, the pro-choice movement, and the moderate majority of the American people.
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“Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself. As a result, the pro-choice majority asks nominees to swear allegiance to the decision without being able to identify an intelligible principle to support it.�

“Worst Choice� The New Republic February 24, 2003

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Michael Kinsley

“Against all odds (and, I’m afraid, against all logic), the basic holding of Roe v. Wade is secure in the Supreme Court.
….

“…a freedom of choice law would guarantee abortion rights the correct way, democratically, rather than by constitutional origami.�

“Bad Choice� The New Republic, June 13, 1994.

“Liberal judicial activism peaked with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision….

“Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching. I also believe it was a political disaster for liberals. Roe is what first politicized religious conservatives while cutting off a political process that was legalizing abortion state by state anyway.�

“The Right’s Kind of Activism,� Washington Post, November 14, 2004.

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Kermit Roosevelt — University of Pennsylvania Law School

“[I]t is time to admit in public that, as an example of the practice of constitutional opinion writing, Roe is a serious disappointment. You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result.

“This is not surprising. As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether. It supported that right via a lengthy, but purposeless, cross-cultural historical review of abortion restrictions and a tidy but irrelevant refutation of the straw-man argument that a fetus is a constitutional ‘person’ entited to the protection of the 14th Amendment.
….

“By declaring an inviolable fundamental right to abortion, Roe short-circuited the democratic deliberation that is the most reliable method of deciding questions of competing values.�

“Shaky Basis for a Constitutional ‘Right’,� Washington Post, January 22, 2003.

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Archibald Cox — Watergate Special Prosecutor, Harvard Law School

“The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution�

The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government, pp. 113-114 (1976)

President Bush on Freedom

 

“If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and participation of free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end. By standing for hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.�
That is it. That in a nutshell is why we are in Iraq.

Leading Democrats Thoughts

Bill Clinton: “If Saddam rejects peace, and we have to use force, our purpose is clear: We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.”

Madeleine Albright, Clinton Secretary of State: “We must stop Saddam from ever again jeopardizing the stability and the security of his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction.”

Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Advisor and Classified Document Thief: “[Saddam will] use those weapons of mass destruction again as he has ten times since 1983.”

Harry Reid: “The problem is not nuclear testing; it is nuclear weapons. … The number of Third World countries with nuclear capabilities seems to grow daily. Saddam Hussein’s near success with developing a nuclear weapon should be an eye-opener for us all.”

Dick Durbin: “One of the most compelling threats we in this country face today is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Threat assessments regularly warn us of the possibility that…Iraq…may acquire or develop nuclear weapons.”

John Kerry: “If you don’t believe…Saddam Hussein is a threat with nuclear weapons, then you shouldn’t vote for me.”

John Edwards: “Serving on the Intelligence Committee and seeing day after day, week after week, briefings on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and his plans on using those weapons, he cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons, it’s just that simple. The whole world changes if Saddam ever has nuclear weapons.”

Nancy Pelosi: “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons-inspection process.”

Sens. Levin, Lieberman, Lautenberg, Dodd, Kerrey, Feinstein, Mikulski, Daschle, Breaux, Johnson, Inouye, Landrieu, Ford and Kerry in a letter to Bill Clinton: “We urge you, after consulting with Congress and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions, including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.”

Ted Kennedy: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

John Kerry: “I will be voting to give the president of the U.S. the authority to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security. … Without question we need to disarm Saddam Hussein.”

Hillary Clinton: “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock. His missile-delivery capability, his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists including al-Qa’ida members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

Carl Levin: “We begin with a common belief that Saddam Hussein…is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.”

Al Gore: “We know that he has stored nuclear supplies, secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”

Bob Graham: “We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has and has had for a number of years a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.”

  

 

Americans United for Life

Peruse this Americans United for Life press release:

http://www.unitedforlife.org/press_releases/050914.htm

Iraq & al-Qiada

The Clinton Justice Department’s 1998 indictment against bin Laden, stated:
al-Qaida reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

The evidence pointed in the same direction in 2002, when Clinton-appointee George Tenet told the Senate:
We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida going back a decade.