On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This is one of the most important decisions in our country s history, and one that will live in infamy.
00:18:53.820And they thought that maybe it would make it so that it wouldn't be such a contentious issue.
00:18:58.040And, of course, all that happened was their new standards of how to handle abortion jurisprudence just led to even more cases and more confusion.
00:19:06.260And so Roberts today says, oh, he's fine with the Dobbs.
00:19:09.580He's fine with the state limiting abortion in Mississippi.
00:19:13.080He just doesn't want to get rid of Roe or like this idea that you could somehow come up with some new test that would make the court into this legislature.
00:19:21.880And it just doesn't really make sense.
00:19:24.840Unfortunately for Roberts, unfortunately for the liberals, fortunately for justice and the American jurisprudential tradition and the Constitution and the babies, it doesn't make sense.
00:19:38.620And those cases collapsed under the weight of their own incoherence and because of the courage of these conservatives.
00:19:43.640Molly, thank you so much for being here.
00:19:45.060Molly Hemingway, everyone go follow her.
00:19:49.960I've never expected it to happen in my life.
00:19:53.300I, even after that draft was leaked, the Alito draft that said they would overrule it, I still didn't really believe that it would happen.
00:20:02.820That's how significant this ruling is.
00:20:07.200To help me, to help me parse what it all means, to help me make some sense of it, is my friend Ryan T. Anderson,
00:20:13.740the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and the author of the greatest titled book in the history of publishing,
00:20:24.280When Harry Became Sally, responding to the transgender moment, as well as a number of other books and publications.
00:20:30.180Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:20:47.060I say, okay, well, I got a long flight, so let's go through it.
00:20:51.900The, the conservatives seem a little split here.
00:20:55.220You've got Roberts saying he's going to uphold the pro-life law, but not go for Roe.
00:21:00.040You've got Kavanaugh saying he doesn't want the court to really say anything about abortion and just leave this to the legislatures.
00:21:07.140You've got the majority of the court, the five justices, saying that they're going to overrule Roe and Casey, but this isn't going to affect other cases.
00:21:16.280And then you've got my man, Clarence Thomas, with a concurring opinion.
00:21:54.780So I think the first thing we should do is we should celebrate that Roe and Casey are no longer the law of the land, right?
00:22:01.380I mean, Roe and Casey are no longer binding precedent on lower courts, and therefore they're not going to be used to prevent states, and for that matter, the federal government, from enacting laws that protect unborn babies and that protect their mothers from the violence of abortion.
00:22:16.420I mean, as we're speaking, several states are enforcing their pro-life laws that previously they were prevented from enforcing.
00:22:23.020And so, you know, you said you never thought you would actually see this day.
00:22:26.220So, I mean, I think the initial reaction has to be one of, like, praise God, it finally happened.
00:22:38.640But, you know, my thought is one of gratitude to the people who didn't give up, who didn't lose hope.
00:22:44.920It would have been easy, especially after the disaster of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, for pro-lifers to just be despondent, to despair.
00:22:52.320And I think a lot of people played the long game.
00:22:55.400They worked through the system nonviolently.
00:22:58.180I mean, it's unlike what we're seeing with Jane's Revenge tonight.
00:23:00.520It's unlike what we've seen with the firebombing of pregnancy resource clinics.
00:23:03.920People who worked through the process, they won elections, they got presidents to commit to appointing constitutionalists to the bench, and then they brought the case.
00:23:17.740So, I mean, that's my initial reaction.
00:23:18.660We had five justices say Roe and Casey or no more.
00:23:23.700Look, Kavanaugh's concurrence is not something I particularly appreciate.
00:23:28.100I think he should have just not written anything and just signed on to the Alito and period.
00:23:33.660But, I mean, he seems to be signaling that he has no appetite for the 14th Amendment personhood argument, for example.
00:23:40.940You know, something that two scholars that I've learned a great deal from, John Finnis at Oxford and Robbie George at Princeton,
00:23:46.840you know, they make the argument that on the original understanding of the 14th Amendment, no person can be denied equal protection of the law.
00:23:53.380They're not talking about Peter Singer people.
00:23:55.560They're talking about flesh and blood human beings.
00:23:57.960And the entity in the womb is a human being.
00:24:01.200And a state can't deny it equal protection of the law.
00:24:03.560I mean, that Kavanaugh's signaling that he's not going to entertain that argument.
00:24:08.140Which means that, you know, for at least the near future, I can't count to five on that argument,
00:24:14.060which means you and I and our listeners need to persuade our neighbors to get our elected representatives to pass laws protecting people from the violence of abortion.
00:24:52.780I mean, so, you know, I don't my guess would be that Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch might be more open to that than not.
00:25:04.200I don't know where Barrett would come down.
00:25:06.500The chief and Kavanaugh would probably not have an appetite for it.
00:25:10.140But that means it's something that as we're vetting justice nominees for the next conservative presidential administration, this can be one of the things that we're looking for.
00:25:18.860You know, who who filed amicus briefs, who who's embraced the legal theories that we're going to want to see vindicated.
00:25:25.280But in the meantime, at the very least, Section five of the 14th Amendment says Congress has the authority to enact legislation to protect the rights that the other sections of the 14th Amendment articulate.
00:25:39.760So there's a role for the federal government, for Congress to pass laws protecting babies.
00:25:43.980There's a role for all 50 states and that's where the more immediate protections are going to come from.
00:25:50.840So, you know, you're now what in Tennessee, I guess.
00:25:52.780You need to be working to see your state enact pro-life laws.
00:26:05.060I mean, 15 weeks just gets us to where Europe is.
00:26:07.360I mean, to give you an idea, like it's not even the Mississippi law was a 15 week law and it's like, I think, 42 out of the 47 European nations have laws at least that protective, if not more protective.
00:26:20.100This is something that Americans, even American conservatives, I think, fail to appreciate the radicalism and the barbarity of the American abortion regime.
00:26:30.060The Mississippi law puts us on par with France.
00:26:34.880France, these are people that chop off the heads of their own citizens and decapitate kings and queens.
00:26:41.220They're the people who invented the term left in political discourse.
00:26:45.320And they look at Americans and they say, oh my gosh, what are you doing to these babies?
00:26:49.380So obviously there's a lot of work to be done.
00:26:52.240What did you make of the Clarence Thomas concurrence?
00:26:55.780I think Thomas and back when Scalia was on the bench, they would frequently be writing dissents to educate the next generation and to educate law students.
00:27:07.640They thought they were in the truth telling business.
00:27:09.920And even though they kept being outvoted because at the time they didn't have enough colleagues who were right thinking, they were going to tell the truth in their dissents to educate that next generation of law student who is now on the court.
00:27:21.900Maybe Coney Barrett, you know, clerked for Scalia, came of age reading the Scalia dissents.
00:27:41.780He's also pointing out that the way that we did this was by operating within the framework of existing kind of 14th Amendment jurisprudence on so-called substantive due process.
00:27:51.740He points out that's an oxymoronic term.
00:28:03.320Alito did what he had to do to get five votes, right?
00:28:06.080And so, you know, Thomas didn't get anyone to join his concurrence, which, you know, shows you, you know, where people are on the court right now.
00:28:13.760Alito wrote what he had to write in order to get five votes.
00:28:18.220And I think that's, you know, working within settled kind of, for the moment, jurisprudence to get to the right outcome.
00:28:25.180That's what you have to do to be prudent, to be a statesman.
00:28:55.020Yes, you're the host, so I can't, you know, come out with the hook and get rid of you.
00:28:58.740But yeah, I mean, he wanted to say, let's just uphold the Mississippi law, but not overturn Roe and Casey.
00:29:05.280And, you know, what, what the majority points out in the response to that is that this means that next year we'll be back with another case.
00:29:10.520Because if we're going to have a 10-week case or an eight-week case or Texas's six-week case, like, why not just once and for all admit we got it wrong than doing this piecemeal?
00:29:19.800So, so I, I don't see any, um, prudence in what Roberts wrote as his, um, concurring in the judgment opinion.
00:29:27.700Um, it did leave me scratching my head.
00:29:30.240It did leave me, because I, I felt it wasn't persuasive.
00:29:34.240And I felt it didn't even do that thing that Roberts is always so concerned with doing, which is protecting the integrity and stability of the court.
00:29:42.380I thought really, in, in many ways, uh, leaving the overruling of Roe as a 5-4 decision, it kind of undercut that.
00:29:49.220So, I, I don't really know what he was thinking.
00:29:50.960I share your bemusement at, at his, uh, opinion.
00:29:54.180What do you make of the, the liberals?
00:29:56.500I, I tried to read the liberals' dissent as charitably as I could.
00:30:01.480And I, I thought it was embarrassing, particularly compared to Alito's opinion of the court and Thomas's concurrence.
00:30:09.220I thought it was, it was just frivolous and a sort of silly dissent.
00:30:14.180I mean, you, you would call it sophomoric, but I think that would be an insult to sophomores.
00:30:19.220I mean, this is, this is like literally, um, we're just going to repeat a bunch of mantras that, you know, liberal jurists have been telling ourselves for 50 years without actually addressing any of the counterarguments that the other side has been advancing.
00:30:32.760Uh, and so anyone who knows, um, uh, anything about this area of the law, anyone who's read Alito's opinion, and then you read the dissent and you're like, we're just living in different universes.
00:30:42.600You're not actually talking about the constitution.
00:30:44.780You're just keeping, you keep citing other court rulings.
00:31:08.240What value does the child who is killed has, right?
00:31:12.640What value, I mean, what value are you assigning there?
00:31:16.320And how do you think it is that you as judges or the constitution as a document settles that balancing?
00:31:22.160Um, and this is Kavanaugh's point where he says, I, look, I just think the constitution is silent on this.
00:31:27.640I mean, that's a more respectable position than, uh, the argument of the three dissenters where it's just that, you know, these vague notions of, um, privacy and autonomy, uh, somehow justify lethal violence in the womb.
00:31:41.480I can't help but notice that, uh, Joe Biden, the, the currently sitting president, I'll tell you, maybe he's been a crypto conservative all along.
00:31:51.520His Catholicism is coming out wittingly or unwittingly as sort of a providential that the second Catholic president manages to preside over the overruling of Roe v. Wade, although he was fighting against a tooth and nail.
00:32:03.260But because Joe Biden doesn't really believe in anything and he just kind of blows, blows with the political winds in 1982, Joe Biden proposed a constitutional amendment that would have done exactly what this court ruling today did.
00:32:17.900And, and yet now he comes out against the ruling.
00:32:22.040Um, political opportunism, um, that people have, you know, put their eternal soul at risk for the sake of winning an election, which is just really sad.
00:32:35.180I mean, I, I think, you know, in the book that Alexandra and I have coming out on abortion, we have a chapter on how abortions corrupted our political parties.
00:32:44.280And we just go through kind of chapter and verse, all of these pro-life Democrats, who, as they grew in office, discovered they were more willing to be an elected Democrat than being pro-life.
00:32:55.880Um, Catholic Democrats used to be a thing.
00:32:58.700Pro-life Democrats used to be a thing.
00:33:02.180And you, you have to ask yourself, like, for what?
00:33:05.640Especially as some of these elected officials are nearing the end of life.
00:33:09.100Um, you know, you pray that they have a deathbed conversion because it's, um, it's just, when you ask, you know, how do you make sense of it?
00:33:21.020It's tragic for the political process and, and tragic for them.
00:33:24.100You think what you, so you've, you've thrown away your principles, you, your beliefs, hundreds of thousands of babies per year, upwards of a million and possibly your souls.
00:34:17.100I mean, there are, there are too many people to name.
00:34:19.820All of the activists who have worked tirelessly, often behind the scenes, for years in the pro-life movement, who have not been discouraged, starting in 1973, with the huge gut punch of Planned Parenthood v. Casey in the early 90s.
00:34:35.720And on and on and on and on, they've continued to work tirelessly.
00:34:40.540Obviously, the courage of the justices.
00:34:42.820These are justices who, at this very moment, are having their lives threatened by wackos and lunatics and left-wing political activists.
00:34:51.860But I repeat myself, there are people passing out palm cards right now with the personal home addresses of the conservative judges.
00:35:01.380Someone tried to assassinate Rhett Kavanaugh.
00:35:03.800I know that disappeared from the news.
00:35:06.320And so you probably haven't heard about that if you've been listening to shows other than this one and a handful of other conservative shows.
00:35:12.560But there have been threats against Alito, against Amy Barrett, against Kavanaugh and the rest of them.
00:35:19.420But the two people that we really have to thank are Mitch McConnell.
00:36:36.180He made a promise to appoint a conservative constitutionalist judge vetted by the conservative legal movement from that shortlist that he had announced.