IS THE SUPREME COURT SERIOUSLY ABOVE THE LAW ? By Thom Hartmann
For decades , conservative justices have openly flaunted judicial ethics by participating in politics and taking millions in gifts from billionaires with business before the Court .
And now , for the first time in a big way since its 1896 Plessy v Ferguson “ separate but equal ” ruling , the Court is preparing to take away a right Americans have taken for granted for generations .
But is the Court really and truly above the law ?
Once upon a time , now-Chief Justice John Roberts asserted that Congress could pass laws to “ regulate ” the Supreme Court , limiting and making “ exceptions ” to what rights and laws they could rule on .
He made the argument as a lawyer for President Reagan , who was looking for ways to reverse Roe v Wade without the consent of the Court , which was then firmly in the camp of it being settled law . His logic could , today , be used by Congress to pass a law allowing abortion across the nation , and , for good measure , adding a requirement that the Court adhere to the same standards of judicial ethics already set in place for all other federal courts .
How Congress could “ court-proof ” abortion legislation — and John Roberts ’ role in evaluating its possibility — is an amazing and almost entirely unknown story .
The original anti-abortion movement started just before the Civil War , when in 1858 the American Medical Association ( AMA ) launched a movement to criminalize abortion among white women and place the occasional 40 x The Trial Lawyer medically necessary abortion procedure exclusively in the hands of doctors .
In this , the AMA — which was entirely made up of white men at the time , and probably even 100 percent Protestant — was part of a WASP male structure in America that saw their power endangered by a growing population of non-white people , combined with a threat to male control from a growing women ’ s suffrage movement .
As researchers Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay wrote for a 2004 paper published in the American Sociological Review :
“[ T ] he nineteenth-century politics of abortion were simultaneously racial and gender politics . Claims that physicians played on fears of independent women miss what was at stake : Anglo-Saxon control of the state and dominance of society .”
Doing a deep dive into the publications , literature , and history of the anti-abortion movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries , they found :
“ While laws regulating abortion would ultimately affect all women , physicians argued that middle-class , Anglo-Saxon married women were those obtaining abortions , and that their use of abortion to curtail childbearing threatened the Anglo-Saxon race .”
They noted that the legally favored “ white race ” in that era was so tightly defined that it didn ’ t include Jews or Catholics , and even explicitly defined Celts ( mostly Catholic Irish ) and Teutons ( mostly Germans , many of them Catholic ) as “ other than white ,” and that more than 500,000 “ white ” men of Anglo-Saxon ancestry had died in the Civil War , giving an instant boost to nonwhite populations .
To help the white population catch up with the non-whites , the AMA and their white supremacist allies succeeded by the 1890s in putting into place laws that forbade abortion in virtually every state ( as I documented last week ).
The laws were largely ignored in “ non-white ” communities so they could continue to get abortions , but were rigorously enforced against “ white ” women .
Beisel and Kay wrote :
“ Anglo-Saxon political control in northern cities and states depended on numerical dominance at the polls , which led to concerns about the reproductive prowess of Anglo- Saxon women . In other words , reproduction of an aspect of