Either our founding fathers had a strange and convoluted sense of values, or the SC has things all wrong.
Yesterday’s decision to overturn NYC’s gun laws (along with other jurisdictions around the country) made it easier for anyone in Manhattan to carry concealed weapons. Now - Have you ever been in Times Square? Just imagine what that might be like if a substantial number of people crammed into that area were armed and a gunfight broke out. I’m not sure I’ll ever visit NYC Again.
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It struck me that my life might have been during the period of time that women had the most respect, even if that level of respect was still inadequate. It also struck me that, despite separation of religion, the Catholic church was positioned with power to destroy more than half the population as it always has tried to do.
Ancillary to all of this is the harsh criticism from heads of state of virtually every free world nation. Even Boris Johnson (of all people) had scathing remarks for the abortion decision. As someone who has followed current events since a teenager, I’ve never seen such rancorous divisiveness on the Supreme Court as is evident in the statement of the 3 dissenting justices. To borrow a line from The Music Man - “They really don’t like each other.” (Albeit, they would deny it.)
Wall Street Week for June 24 is now posted in “Other Investing”. Larry Summers appears at 33:30 .
LINK
On the medical care side, this created a mess for the healthcare providers. https://npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/24/1107316711/doctors-ethical-bind-abortion
Lewis B rightly pointed out what is coming on the next phase of SC ruling - contraception and same sex marriages.
If there’s a hidden agenda here (I hope there isn’t ) it could be to embolden / strengthen militaristic right wing factions to pursue their eventual goal of overthrowing our democratic government and replacing it with some sort of ill-defined autocratic one. At least we can take solace in that none of the Justices were in any way connected to the January 6th insurrection.
My bad. Should have checked date. As to your 2nd point, yes - I served up a softball for you to hit out of the park. I generally despise conspiracy theories. Yet, having trouble making sense of the whole situation. These justices should be free of any prior obligation being lifetime appointees - so why in hell would they want to upset the apple cart to this degree? Seems to me “Something’s rotten in Denmark.”
@hank- Well, one would certainly think that they would feel less pressure to hew to any particular "prior obligations". And that certainly has been true in the past- remember the major transition in the perspectives of Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican appointee.
From following the court, I'm wondering if something similar is now occurring with Chief Justice Roberts. His recent opinions seem to be reasonably free of obvious political coloring.
From what's going on now though, it sure appears as if there's a group of justices who have such strong personal feelings about certain types of cases that they are going to vote predictably every time such a matter appears before them. I'm not sure that this equates to having "prior obligations" (ie, hewing to a particular political party), but in the end the results are pretty much the same thing.
In any case, I think that it's a very sad day for the Court. My suggestion for a possible fix:
• Maintain the present system of nine judges hearing any particular case, with the Chief Justice sitting as one of the nine in every case.
• BUT: increase the number of actual judges on the court so as to create a pool of judges numbering maybe 12 or 15. Each case would then draw eight judges by random choice from that pool, to form the panel of nine. That should go a long way to insure a panel of judges who are reasonably open minded on most issues.
Of course nothing like that will ever happen, because the elected politicians who run this country would never allow their influence in "shaping" the Supreme Court to be in any way diminished. "Power corrupts... absolute power corrupts absolutely." How very true.
But on the guns issue I can see no reason to upset / overturn over 100 years of NYC regulatory precedent and accede to the demands of the NRA. Have any of these dudes ever set foot on a crowded Manhattan street? I doubt it. That decision doesn’t make sense from any perspective I can imagine.
POWW, anyone?
https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/rgr/research-ratings?mod=quotes#subnav
https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/poww?mod=searchresults_companyquotes&mod=searchbar
Teaching the kids to shoot at summer camp in 1974 was a whole different thing than it has become today. It might make an interesting investigation: why so many religious dead-head fundamentalists are also gun fundamentalists.