You have made it abundantly clear what the goal of the last forty years of reactionary politics is really all about.
Mr. Justice Samuel Alito,
I want to thank you for confirming everything I have ever said about the reactionary movement in America and the party of reaction, the so-called Republican Party. I really cannot call you or the rest of your movement conservative because you really aren’t; you all haven’t been since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. A basic principle of being conservative had been, before that, was that once a right or privilege was established it should never be repealed. That is not my interpretation; it is almost a direct quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. You should know that book; it was the basis of conservative thinking from 1790 until you reactionaries took over the discussion and falsely called yourselves conservative. Burke was almost as upset by the idea of revoking rights and privileges as he was horrified of the idea of revolution. Oh, traditional conservatives were always willing to violate people’s rights in order to achieve their primary goal of protecting the status quo but they never really advocated repealing them. That is how we got Jim Crow laws and yellow-dog contracts and redlining and blacklisting, voter suppression, and Gerrymandering, and, well, every repressive bit of legal gymnastics and legislation to keep our fellow citizens in their place. To actively repeal rights was never conservative; it is reactionary. And it is direct contradiction to the social contract laid out in our founding documents.
And for the last forty years, implicitly and explicitly, your party has proven time and again that they are not republican in the sense of our constitutional, democratic republic so I will no longer use the term Republican Party. It is only republican in the sense of a government without a monarch more akin to the Islamic Republic of Iran or the People’s Republic of China. That is what Reagan really meant when he said that government was the problem — he meant the idea of a democratic republic. That is why he so often spoke about doing an “end-run” around Congress, the elected representatives of the people charged with making laws. That is what former Attorney General William Barr meant when he spoke of a unitary executive, a theory first proposed by Thomas Hobbes to justify the absolutist power of a monarch. Such examples of your movement’s indicating their disdain for a democratic republic is almost endless.
The leaked draft opinion overturning Roe V. Wade was the most revealing thing I have ever read about your and your movement’s reactionary principles and just how far you all will go to fulfil them.
But what you, Mr. Alito, wrote in that leaked draft opinion overturning Roe V. Wade was the most revealing thing I have ever read about your and your movement’s reactionary principles and just how far you all will go to fulfil them. Not that there was much left to reveal about your false “originalist” ideas of the law except to make just how false they were apparent. We already knew that reactionary politicians like yourself (for you have shown us you are just another partisan like Sen. Mitch McConnell and the former president and insurrectionist Donald Trump) would lie, cheat and steal to achieve your ideological objectives. You lied, as did your four fellow partisans on the court, about respect for precedent to get your position. Mr. Justice Neil Gorsuch was even willing to benefit from McConnell’s theft of his seat on the court. You could have done what reactionaries have always done with the rights of the people you don’t like: restrict them to such an extent that exercising them becomes impossible. That’s what Mr. Chief Justice John Roberts wanted on family planning rights. That’s the tactics used by the architects of Jim Crow.
But, no, Mr. Alito, you came up with a specious argument to do what no so-called conservative ever tried before: to eliminate long standing rights of the people simply because you don’t like them. No one has ever gone that far. As I am trained in the study of history, I will assail your arguments from that grounds.
Your supposed doctrine of “Originalism”, the idea that the Constitution must be read only using the intentions and understanding of the Founding Fathers, is the foundation of your draft opinion. And that “system of interpretation” led you to conclude that only rights enumerated in the Constitution or “of long standing tradition” can be considered valid.
But the Founders did NOT believe that natural, sometimes referred to as unalienable and now generally called human, rights had to be enumerated. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century natural rights theorists always qualified their ideas suggesting there were others NOT enumerated. That is why the Declaration of Independence reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men….” And that is why James Madison proposed the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution which clearly states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The idea of unalienable, natural rights included, going all the way back to John Locke, was that if you could reasonably assert that a right was essential to being human then it could be claimed and upheld. It is highly probable that the Founding Fathers would be shocked and dismayed that, as you claim, there is no unalienable right to privacy especially around family planning.
So much for your false originalism.
Historically speaking, your second test — long standing tradition — also seems to be flawed. Clearly, a half century and the support of a supermajority of Americans does not seem to fit your ideas of established tradition. Even though most Americans alive today never knew a time without this right. Perhaps it needs to be longer than your lifetime. Well, two years before you were born the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a committee headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, was passed by the United Nations and signed by the United States. It included a clause about a human, unalienable right to plan your own families. Nearly eighty years apparently isn‘t long enough. No, you reached back to Matthew Hale of the Seventeenth Century to talk about “long standing tradition.” So long standing tradition must be more than a century before American Independence.
And the Founders, as active participants in the Enlightenment, thought any appeal to tradition to be at best a weak argument and at worst the epitome of unreasonableness.
But your inclusion, Mr. Justice Alito, of Hale is more telling than you realize. It reveals everything that you and your fellow partisans really want for America in the Twenty-First Century. And no, I am not speaking about Hale’s support of witch trials, or his belief that a wife was essentially the property of her husband, or, even, his belief that it was a crime to abort a quick baby and that any prosecution for an unquick baby should only be allowed is extraordinary circumstances. A quick baby, for those not well versed in archaic English, is one that has started to move. No, it is not Hale’s horrid views about women that is most telling for what you want, Mr. Justice Alito.
In 1649, Matthew Hale swore an oath of fidelity to the new English Commonwealth. That is the thing that is most telling about your choice of sources. The Commonwealth was an attempt by the Puritans, a zealous religious minority, to force the entire nation to live what they considered a “Godly life.” A little later, Oliver Cromwell, another Puritan zealot, became Lord Protector of England; this is the man who made Hale a judge. Cromwell was a essentially a military dictator known for his ruthlessness. He ruled England with an iron fist inside of a steel gauntlet; he often used brute force to enforce Puritanical strictures on everyone else. It is considered by every English historian I have read as the most repressive time in English history.
And that, Mr. Justice Alito is what you and your fellow reactionary partisans really want, isn’t it? A zealous religious minority ruling over everyone else, where human rights that do not fit with your minoritarian views will not only be violated but repealed, where no one except those who agree with you can ever feel secure in their liberty, rights, or safety.
We have gotten used to you and your fellow partisans lying, cheating, obstructing, and generally undermining every institution, tradition and principle of our democracy. We, who oppose you, had been complaisant, however, because we never imagined that you had so much disregard for the fundamental principles and ideals of our republic. Nor did most of us realize just what you and your fellow partisans had in mind as an objective. Most of us just thought you all were merely power-hungry folks interested in nothing more than greed and “owning the libs.”
So thank you, Mr. Justice Alito for revealing what the right truly wants: a 17th Century theocracy. We are fully awake to you and your fellow partisans and your goals now.
A Citizen.
Coda: One thing I wish people, on all sides of the destruction of our unalienable, human right to family planning, would stop saying is that this issue only affects women. It does not. Every pregnancy involves men as well. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, things got very complicated medically. My daughter ended up being delivered a month early by emergency c-section. We were told that having another child would be highly risky, if not fatal. Contraceptives are not 100 percent effective, as we unfortunately discovered despite all our care. So when my wife became pregnant again, we terminated the pregnancy. My wife is alive today because of that. Had Mr. Justice Alito had his way earlier, she would be dead and my world would be a dark, grief-filled place.
So, the one question I have for Mr. Justice Alito is this: Why do you want my wife to be dead?
