West Coast, Messed Coast™ Report: Abortion Contortion Distortion Edition

Welcome to the West Coast, Messed Coast™ report, where your intrepid correspondent has collected the outsized and hysterical responses by West Coast, Messed Coast™ governors to the leak of the draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito is now busily fortifying his home to protect him from the “peaceful protesters” who plan a “walk by” his house next week — after giving out directions to his house on the interwebs. Subtext: OK, Antifa, do your thing.

The Supreme Court is expecting “peaceful protesters” outside its building too.

Heavy-duty fencing has been put up around the US Supreme Court following protests & threats of violence by the left over abortion. The same type of fencing was put up around the Portland federal courthouse due to #Antifa attacks in 2020. It remains today. pic.twitter.com/a2hIve2Tu7

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) May 5, 2022

You know, just like the “peaceful protesters” at the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh.

You mean Democrats don't incite violence or attempts at an insurrection? how quickly yall forget in 2018 they broke into the Kavanaugh hearing and caused violence and damage all while being truly encouraged by democrats https://t.co/0fEPm0ghUC

— Joe (@Kinofthehill) August 9, 2021

The leaked draft decision, which has been authenticated by Chief Justice John Roberts, blows up current abortion law enshrined in the Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood cases and gives the power of deciding the legality of abortion to a distant dementor just who wants to visit pain upon all women of reproductive age. Naw, just kidding, it hands the decision back to the states, which is where it used to be. You know, the voters?

The problem for the abortionistas is that more than a few states don’t like killing babies, which is why the governors and their big “Planned Parenthood” Pac funders are now histrionically screeching and pounding lecterns up and down the West Coast, Messed Coast™.

Amber Heard gave more convincing testimony this week than this bunch.

You’d think that by now that our supposed betters would have taken an hour or two to read the opinion they’ve been busy excoriating. But apparently, you’d be wrong. Or maybe they have read it, but it’s much more fun to lie to a gullible bunch of hysterical, pink-capped women, busying themselves with painting their pants red.

Newsom spent this week lecturing women that he, a man, is “protecting women” — just not those in the womb. He has proclaimed California an abortion sanctuary state, and laws have moved through the legislature to allow “aborting” a child up to 28 days old — out of the womb. Fact-checkers say that isn’t so, but it so is.

NEW: We are proposing an amendment to enshrine the right to choose in the California constitution.

We can’t trust SCOTUS to protect the right to abortion, so we’ll do it ourselves.

Women will remain protected here. https://t.co/WTUpfymLS0

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) May 3, 2022

You might be saying to yourself right about now, “Well gee, if abortion policy is going back to the states to be decided by the people, according to the draft opinion leaked by a ‘suicide’ leaker, then why are the governors so hysterical on the West Coast, Messed Coast™, whose states have had freewheeling abortion laws since the 1960s and 1970s?” Well, Gavin Newsom wants to be president, that’s why. Washington’s unremarkable Jay Inslee may want to run for president again to tee himself up for a cabinet post (see Pete Buttigieg), and he needs the PAC money. Oregon’s Kate Brown, in the last year of her nightmarish tenure as the freer of murders and felons, is looking for a cushy gig. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” after all.

The West Coast, Messed Coast™ governors plan to pay for women to come to their states to get their abortions.

Kate Brown vows to keep abortion legal in Oregon. Also, thousands are paid for every year with our taxpayer dollars, and now Democrats want to us to foot the bill for all travel expenses for residents of OTHER states who fly here just to have an abortion.https://t.co/8gZpiM1xqh

— OregonTeaParty (@OregonTeaParty) May 3, 2022

Inslee, a lockdown artist who fired state employees for failing to get a COVID-19 shot, kept abortion clinics open while closing churches during the pandemic and has still not relinquished his emergency powers. He said during a press conference that “we understand the forces of oppression that understand the government intrusion in Washingtonians’ most private decisions are after the right to have women access the right to abortion in our state.”

No one laughed.

There are plenty of Washington State Patrol officers, a state fire investigator, and hundreds of others who’d like to have their jobs back.

Departing Washington Department of Transportation workers left a parting gift for Governor Jay Inslee ahead of the state's vaccine mandate for government workers taking effectpic.twitter.com/CzICkneBNv

— Katie Daviscourt🇺🇸 (@KatieDaviscourt) October 14, 2021

Inslee has also expanded the kinds of medical personnel who can do abortions. After June, abortion is no longer merely the purview of doctors but of “physician assistants, advanced registered nurse practitioners, and other providers acting within their scope of practice.”

But it behooves us to call out a few items in the draft opinion to perhaps educate those who wrongly characterize Roe v. Wade as the sine qua non of abortion law. In fact, the Casey decision subsumed and replaced Roe in 1992, but there were no howls of protest because the decision left Roe in place and replaced the so-called viability standard with a new test of “undue burden.” This is sort of like when Barack Obama told America he liked abortion after saying he didn’t because he didn’t want his daughters to “be punished with a baby.”

On page 39 of the leaked draft opinion, Alito writes for the majority that there were five main reasons the Court struck down Roe and Casey: the nature of the Court’s error in deciding them, the quality of the Court’s reasoning, the workability of the rules they imposed on the country, their disruptive effect on other areas of the law, and the absence of concrete reliance.

Alito writes that “Roe was egregiously wrong and deeply damaging” and “short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who dissented in any respect from Roe.” But he doesn’t just leave that assertion lying there; he fleshes it out in multiple pages of the decision.

Roe was on a collision course with the Constitution the day it was decided, and Casey perpetuated its errors, and the errors do not concern some arcane corner of the law of little interest to the American people. Rather wielding nothing but ‘raw judicial power,’ the Court usurped the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally leaves to the American people.

Alito gave a thoroughgoing historical background of abortion law, something Roe did poorly.

Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history or precedent. It relied on an erroneous historical narrative; it paid attention to and presumably relied on matters that have no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution; it disregarded the fundamental differences between the precedents on which it relied and the question before the Court; it concocted an elaborate set of rules, with different restrictions for each trimester of pregnancy, but it did not explain how this veritable code could be teased out of anything in the Constitution, the history of abortion laws, prior precedent, or any other cited source; and its most important rule (that States cannot protect fetal life before viability) was never raised by any party and never plausibly explained. Roe’s reasoning quickly drew scathing scholarly criticism, even from supporters of broad access to abortion.

Not only did the Court write in Roe what was tantamount to a “regulation or law,” which is not its job, but it also made up the viability standard out of whole cloth.

“This elaborate scheme was the Court’s own brainchild. Neither party advocated the trimester framework; nor did any party or the amicus argue that ‘viability’ should mark the point at which the scope of the abortion right and a state’s regulatory authority should be substantially transformed.”

And the Court didn’t explain where it got its ideas either. It ignored historical proof that, far from being silent on the issue, statutes from ancient times through contemporary state laws had outlawed the practice.

None of the cases relied upon by the Court had to do with the distinction between abortion and the ending of a potential life. That’s why they made it up.

Alito wrote that the moral and political decisions surrounding abortion should be made at the state level.

So why are the West Coast, Messed Coast™ governors crying?

Let the debate begin.

Until next time.