Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, April 8, 2023

The Dog That Caught The Car

 The continued disintegration of Republican electoral prospects in the post-Dobbs world continues apace. They can try and claim it's a messaging problem, the way Defund the Police was a messaging problem, but that won't work any better than it worked for the ACAB crowd.

Part of the problem is that the GOP project of thwarting democracy by packing the Courts with lifetime appointments is that you get unhinged lunatics like Matthew Kacsmaryk's deciding to pull the morning after pill off the market in an act of incomprehensible judicial overreach. But why should he care? He will never have to answer to voters. He's simply an arrogant ideologue foisting his Opus Dei shit on the American public.

Luckily - I think - a different judge in Washington state issued an almost immediate contravention of that decision. So, now the FDA has two rulings that are completely contradictory. This will have to go to the Supreme Court. Kacsmaryk's decision is so unhinged that it's not out of the question that even the Assembly of Religious Experts will overrule him. There's no way Roberts goes along with it, as he has to see the damage Dobbs has done. The assumption is that Kavanaugh won't either, by assuming his opinion in Dobbs actually means what it means. 

Kacsmaryk has issued what is quite literally a lawless opinion, in that it is backed by no precedent or case law. It should be laughed out of the Fifth Circuit...but it won't.  It should be laughed out of the Supreme Court...but who knows.

Combined with the expulsion of the Tennessee legislators, this is a banner week for the GOP's utter and complete contempt for American democracy.

UPDATE:  Ooof.  This is...a gut punch.

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