Chief Justice John Roberts Had It Right! If Only He Could Have Secured a Fifth Vote

  

Any prospect that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Roe will remove the debate on abortion from the judiciary and courts will quickly go up in flames.  The legal suits are emerging as I write this on such pregnant issues as, can pills/medication inducing abortion be mailed to or taken in states banning abortion?; who is accountable for an abortion in a state banning it when a women decides to use medication to induce an abortion?; what takes precedence:  the FDA’s approval of a medication (which now exits) or a state’s outlawing an abortion that could be induced by such medication? What about local DA's who refuse to enforce bans in states banning abortion? What about a clinic located in a state authorizing abortion promoting its availability in that state to women in a state not permitting abortion? 

 

These and many other legal issues are already boiling to the surface.  They are going to be the subject for appeals, suits and judicial proceedings galore.

 

There really is no intellectual basis in my opinion for failing to establish a national standard defining what constitutes a legally permitted abortion.  Deciding the case before the Supreme Court as it was originally launched by Mississippi was the correct course.  This is what Chief Justice John Roberts advocated.  It would have substituted the hard-to-define parameter of viability (the basis for Roe) with a 15-week permissible threshold.  It is true, as Justice Alito asserted in his opinion, that doing this would result in continued litigation, with some states arguing that the limitation on abortion should be tighter, i.e., fewer weeks.  But the Court shouldn’t have flinched from that reality.  What it has brought on the country through its ruling will result in far more chaos and litigation than we even had before--not to mention the risk, uncertainty and harm brought to countless women's lives. 

 

Think of it this way.  What if we still had in this country the condition that existed before the Supreme Court provided a national ruling on the right for individuals of the same sex or of different races to be married?  We know what it would look like.  People would still be going from state-to-state to achieve the condition of living which they desired and were entitled to.  So it will be now with abortion, magnified because of the ability to easily secure abortion-inducing medication through the mail, across state lines.

 

It’s only a question of time before this issue will be back before the Supreme Court facing the need for the decision which the Court failed to make this time around, i.e., establishing a national standard.

 

Chief Justice Roberts had it right.  He worked for months to secure the fifth vote he needed to achieve the ruling which the State of Mississippi originally wanted.  Only later, as they saw an

opening produced by Trump's court appointments, did Mississippi  change its plea to call for the total elimination of Roe. That perversely is what the Court has decided. It will not stand. 

 

Maintaining Faith, Stamina and Courage in Pursuit of our Vision for Our Country and the World

 

About three years ago, in summer, 2019, I read a splendid little book, on democracy by E.B. White.  I had read his essays collected in the Points of My Compass decades ago. White was born in 1908.  I find his writings from 60-70 years ago to be uncannily relevant today as we find democracy under challenge in our country and around the world. As we'll see, the challenges are not new nor is the need for courage and stamina in meeting them.

In the 1940's White wrote this:  " The pesky nature of democratic life is it has no comfortable rigidity; it always hangs by a thread, never quite submits to consolidation or solidification, is always being challenged, always being defended.”

 

Writing before the entry of the US into World War II, as Hitler’s reign creeped across Europe, he wrote:  “I just want to tell you, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with Freedom and that it is an affair of longstanding and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war.  From such adaptable natures, a smell rises.  I pinch my nose.”

 

What an apt description of how I felt about the Trump presidency and Trump himself as he is revealed by the January 6th Commission (and how I feel about Putin's invasion of Ukraine today).  

“My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call Freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.”

 

Writing in 1943, advocating the world coming together in a government, White writes:  “Were we ever to get one (a world government), it would impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom—although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.”

 

“A world made one by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would also deprive him of an enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he hasn’t seen.  This would be a severe depravation, perhaps an intolerable one.  The awful truth is, a world government would lack an enemy and that is a deficiency not to be lightly dismissed.  It will take a yet undiscovered vitamin to supply the blood of man with a substitute for national ambition and racial antipathy; but (White I fear far too optimistically concludes) we are discovering new vitamins all the time, and I am aware of that, too.” 

 

Eerily anticipating our own time, and commenting on the FCC’s regulation of radio, White writes, “This country is on the verge of getting news-drunk; the democracy cannot survive merely by being well informed, it must also be contemplative, and wise.” 

 

Never so much today as in taking the time and the care to try to understand the other point of view and what truth really is. 

 

In October 1952, White writes, “We doubt that there ever was a time in this country when so many people tried to discredit so many other people.” 

 

Well, he ought to be around today. 

“About a year ago, we started to compile a handbook of defamation, but the list got too big for us and we abandoned the project as both unwieldy and unlovely.  Discreditation has become a national sickness for which no cure has so far been found, and there is a strong likelihood that we will all wake up some morning to learn that, in the whole land, there is not one decent man.  Vilification, condemnation, revelation—these supply a huge part of the columns of the papers, and the story of life in the United States dissolves into a novel of perfidy, rascality, iniquity and misbehavior.  The writing of this lurid tale commands more and more of the time of the citizens.”

 

In June 1960 in the midst of that presidential campaign, White writes that he has read the books and published speeches of many of the candidates for president, including Kennedy, Chester Bowles, Nixon, Stevenson and Rockefeller.  He observes something that I’ve felt for at least the last eight years.  “They speak of new principles for a new age, but for the most part, I find old principles for a time that has passed.  Most of the special matters they discuss are pressing, but taken singly or added together, they do not point in a steady direction, they do not name a destination that gets me up in the morning to pull on my marching boots.  Once in a while, I try a little march on my own, stepping out briskly toward a reputable hill, but when I do I feel that I am alone, and that I am on a treadmill.”

 

For my money, President Obama described a vision worthy of “pulling on my marching boots.”  It was a vision of inclusiveness, of living our nation’s highest values embedded in living to a fuller degree our nation’s founding principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence.  But sadly his administration, impeded by Republican opposition aimed at making him a one-term president, didn’t in the end fulfill that vision.  We were not united as a country.  And President Trump divided this nation more than ever. 

 

Therein lies the greatest need for our next president, I wrote months before the 2020 election. We can’t just be driven by what we’re against even though the commitment to ensure that Trump doesn’t have another four years is correct.  We must anchor our vision and the plans to carry it out on the future, together united.  

Sadly, we remain far from realizing this vision. We remain divided,  and angry with those who disagree with us.Yet, we cannot falter in our pursuit of this vision. Just as in the past, we must retain the commitment and energy to keep going, recognizing in the words of the Talmud, we are not required to complete the task, but nor are allowed to desist from

it. 

Words to Live By--from Joseph Conrad

 “What one lives for may be uncertain; how one lives is not.  Man should live nobly, though he does not see any practical reason for it, simply because in the mysterious, inexplicable mixture of beauty and ugliness…in which he finds himself, he must be on the side of the virtuous and the beautiful.”

Looking Ahead to the Long Term--Russia's Place in the World

I believe Putin, and those supporting him, have put Russia on a course which will  be unsustainable over time. An isolated Russia--economically, politically, now even culturally --can probably survive--but it will not thrive. 

Relations with China and India and other non-aligned countries may help but they cannot begin to replace the value of the relationships with the West including the U.S. 

This will become clearer and clearer to the people and leaders of Russia just as it did at the end of the Communist era in the 1980s.

 How long this will take I do not know. It almost certainly will not happen in my lifetime. It will require new leadership. 

But in time, I  believe it will happen. The historical cultural roots and proven economic benefits of a healthy relationship between Russia and the West --as uneven as they have proved to be--are written large over time and will be equally important in the long term future. 

 So too, the West will recognize it must deal with Russia for many reasons--economic and cultural and most urgently its nuclear capacity. 

In the meantime, it is imperative that we continue to take all the action necessary to support Ukraine in preventing Russia under Putin's leadership from denying Ukraine its sovereignty.