Susan Collins Is Shocked! Shocked! Claims Gorsuch And Kavanaugh Betrayed Her

Hours after the Supreme Court issued its Friday ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and, with it, the constitutionally protected right to an abortion, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) sat down with the New York Times to voice her surprise that we’ve ended up here.

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It’s Time To Get Focused on a 2022 Election Pledge

Sens. Warren and Smith have an op-ed in the Times today in which they say at the bottom of a lengthy and quite good article …

Ask every Senate candidate to commit to reforming the filibuster rules, so that the chamber can pass federal legislation protecting the right to reproductive freedom. If voters help us maintain our control of the House and expand our majority in the Senate by at least two votes this November, we can make Roe the law all across the country as soon as January.

Great. But for any of this to happen you are going to need at least a few senators to get the ball rolling. And getting the ball rolling means making a clear bumper sticker-like pledge and goading colleagues to sign on. It has to be at the top of the article not at the bottom of a laundry list at the end.

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Providers Stop Offering Abortions As Red States Pounce To Ban Procedure

With trigger laws banning abortions long waiting in the wings, abortion providers in red states are already, hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, being forced to stop offering the procedure. 

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Welcome Back To A Pre-New Deal America

From a longtime reader and top echelon DC lawyer:

Agree with what you just wrote.  But don’t separate what the Court has done on guns and Roe—and what’s surely coming on affirmative action in the cases already granted for next term and what Justice Thomas is foreshadowing on other constitutional rights—from the Court’s decisions on federal agency authority.  And the long series of rulings whittling away at individuals’ ability to obtain relief in court when injured by violations of the Constitution and federal law—rights don’t mean much when there is no remedy for violations.

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The Current Court is Sunk in Corruption, Just Like Fox News

The modern conservative judicial movement always had abortion and the reversal of Roe v Wade as its central empowering goal. Many intellectuals and activists had different political and goals. But those often esoteric and complex goals were never what powered the politics and the appointments. That was always abortion. When white evangelicals made their pact with the scofflaw libertine Trump, it wasn’t about “takings” or delegation or “originalism.” It was about abortion. So today represents a victory for the conservative judicial movement, later embodied in The Federalist Society, that was five decades in the making.

There are many observers who despise the results but yet still grant the legwork. There was a liberal Court that made all sorts of liberal decisions, the story goes. Conservatives didn’t like that. So they got organized and changed it. Liberals did it first and then conservatives did it.

But that story was never really quite right.

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Thomas Calls For SCOTUS To ‘Reconsider’ Rights To Same-Sex Marriage, Contraception

Much of the 213-page decision overturning abortion rights is concerned with what the justices are really saying. 

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Congress Passes Modest Gun Reform Bill After SCOTUS Hands Down Anti-Regulation Opinion

The House passed a bill aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people Friday, a day after the Senate did so in a break from the usual Republican obstruction of even the mildest gun reform measures.

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