HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

On September 12, Senator Mitch McConnell introduced the Supreme Court's newest and youngest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, at a 30th anniversary celebration of a leadership center named after him at the University of Louisville. "My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks," said the 49-year-old Barrett, who is known for her conservative views. The court, she said, rules based on the law, not politics: "Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties."

 

Her remarks echoed those of one of the court's liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, who at 83 is the oldest member of the court, and wrote in his recent book that "a judge's loyalty is to the rule of law, not the political party that helped to secure his or her appointment."

 

When the nine members of the court begin their term October 4, they will have a chance to prove Barrett and Breyer right -- or wrong.

 

On the court's agenda is a Mississippi case that could enable the conservative majority to throw out Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional basis for abortion rights in America. The court has declined to block a Texas law which deputizes private citizens to file suits against people who perform abortions after as few as six weeks of pregnancy, and other states are preparing similar laws. "Roe's constitutional protection of abortion is in genuine peril," wrote Joshua Prager, author of a new book, "The Family Roe."

 

"The last time it was in such danger was 1992, when the Supreme Court took up the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a Pennsylvania case focused on how and when a state may regulate abortion. At the time, abortion rights advocates feared the court would overturn Roe. But as is well known, one of the junior justices on the Court, David Souter, secretly struck an alliance with Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor to rescue Roe." Prager obtained a copy of a law clerk's pivotal memo that helped tip the scales in favor of saving the Roe precedent.

 

"If Roe is overruled," the law clerk wrote, "the public will understand that the Court's reversal is explainable solely by reason of changes in the composition of the Court." Thus, he concluded, "The damage to the public understanding of the Court's decisions as neutral expositions of the law ... would be incalculable." The same argument could apply today, given Barrett's appointment to the court as a replacement for the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which McConnell expedited in the closing months of President Donald Trump's term.

 

The law clerk's reasoning proved influential. In a joint opinion partly read aloud by Justice Souter, members of the court warned that reversing precedents could be seen as "a surrender to political pressure" and "subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question."

 

For more:

 

Keith Magee: Texas doctor could be what real allyship on abortion rights looks like

Last Sunday, police found the body of missing "van life" blogger Gabby Petito, and this week authorities began a search for her fiancé. As Holly Thomas noted, a huge online community followed every step of the mystery: "The couple's August 12 encounter with the police in Utah during which Petito described a fight between herself and Laundrie that morning. The TikTok-er who claimed that she and her boyfriend gave Laundrie a ride on August 29 in Wyoming. The odd text message from Petito's phone on August 30, which her family doubts was written by Gabby herself."

 

Thomas noted that "everything has been combed over again and again, the public obsessing over theories, the media racing to deliver each new tidbit of information. It feels impossible that something horrific could have happened to a young woman whose life and relationship -- documented on her beautiful Instagram grid -- appeared to be perfect."

 

"Yet while all women face the threat of violence from men, the steps taken by the authorities meant to protect them differ radically, especially depending on their race," said Thomas. "A recent report from the Violence Policy Center found that in 2018 Black women were murdered by men at a rate nearly three times higher than White women. And yet their deaths aren't reported in the press nearly as regularly."

The scenes at the US border were wrenching. Patrice Lawrence called it a "human-rights catastrophe" and noted that "it has happened on the Biden administration's watch." On Monday, "the nation saw horrifying images of Border Patrol officials appearing to chase and confront asylum seekers, who were largely Haitian, near the international bridge between Coahuila, Mexico, and Del Rio, Texas."

 

As Jill Filipovic wrote, there were "families, some with young children, desperately waiting in squalor for help -- only to find that their imagined safe harbor refuses to welcome them and is instead sending them back to homelessness, instability and a bleak future." By week's end, some of the thousands camped under the bridge in Del Rio had been deported to Haiti, with others released into the US to await asylum hearings.

 

"The Biden administration was supposed to be better than this," Filipovic wrote. Instead, he presided over "a humanitarian disaster and a moral failure. And people who were enraged and heartbroken by Trump's immigration policies should be taking a hard look at Biden's choices right now and asking whether such egregious behavior is acceptable -- just because the President had a D next to his name on the ballot."

In another embarrassment for the supporters of Donald Trump, a draft report ordered up by the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate essentially confirmed the obvious: Joe Biden won in Maricopa County.

 

Stephen Richer, the county official who oversees elections, wrote for CNN Opinion that the choice of the company that did the review, Cyber Ninjas, was strange. "Prior to Arizona, Cyber Ninjas had no elections experience and had done zero election audits. Zero. And the company's actions have raised questions about it being partisan."

 

Olivia Troye, who served as Vice President Mike Pence's homeland security adviser, wrote that "while Trump and his supporters failed to overturn the 2020 elections, charges of election fraud have already become a dangerous blueprint for the future, threatening to undermine our free and fair elections and stoke the potential for violence throughout the country."

 

The new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, "Peril," revealed a post-election memo written by John Eastman, a Trump-supporting lawyer, that laid out a scenario for Pence to overturn the legitimate 2020 vote and hand Trump a second term. The memo "begins with a lie and then descends into madness," legal analyst Elie Honig wrote, and "is at once rife with falsehoods, childlike in its reasoning and deadly dangerous in its proposed application."

 

For more:

 

SE Cupp: We are watching the death spiral of America's GOP

 

Michael D'Antonio: How we can repair the damage of the Trump presidency

 

From the moment he lit the Olympic cauldron at the 1996 Atlanta Games, Muhammad Ali "became a virtually sanctified figure, embodying the movements for civil and human rights that he came to symbolize in America and around the world," Peniel E. Joseph observed. Now, a new Ken Burns documentary is giving viewers a much fuller account of Ali's extraordinary life, including his brash entry to the world of sports, his athletic achievements and all of the controversy around his social and political stances.

 

He was a "a man full of paradoxes," Joseph wrote. "A freedom fighter who abandoned one of his early mentors, Malcolm X, in favor of a group that would take advantage of him for over a decade..."

 

"This documentary's greatness lies in how it reminds a new generation of audiences that Muhammad Ali's athletic excellence and political rebellion mutually defined not only his time, but also our own era of racial and political reckoning."