Before I present the contents of a very good article about the two opposing views on the Supreme Court, I have a story to tell.

This morning I received an email from my Congressional Representative, Andy Levin (yes, he is a member of the same family that produced Senator Carl Levin, and Representative Sander Levin.)  It concerns abortion and is, in my opinion, being used as a fund raiser for Mr. Levin. Here’s part of it. Notice the phrase ‘people who can get pregnant’, and I fail to understand how it impacts the LGBTQIA+ people:

Dear Friend,

I am infuriated that the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed extremist Justices have stripped away the right to abortion care for an estimated 36 million women and people who can get pregnant. The decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will harm all of us who value personal freedom and bodily autonomy, but those who already face barriers to health care, especially Black and Brown women, rural communities, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people and those struggling to make ends meet will face devastating consequences. I want to share some of the actions I’ve taken since the decision came down.

My answer to this email:

You know very well that the Supreme Court has not “stripped away” any rights. Those ‘rights’ are now up to the states to decide, as they should be. Abortion is still legal in your state and, if that is what the people of your state support, they will continue to be legal.

Please stop using a serious issue as a fund raiser. It’s disgraceful.

I got another form letter about abortion, and I answered him finally:

Calling something reproductive rights doesn’t change the fact that at least one person dies in every abortion. That is considered a successful procedure.

Would you support murder of children if that made a mother’s life easier? Of course you would not.

But that isn’t even the point here. The Supreme Court followed the Constitution when it returned the responsibility for making law (if they desire to do so) regarding abortion back to the states, where it belongs. When Roe and Casey were decided, it was judicial activism for the Court to MAKE LAW rather than interpreting the Constitution as it was written.

You may not agree with my beliefs regarding abortion, but you should agree with me regarding the Supreme Court and the Constitution. The state of Michigan and its people can now decide what is best for its citizens.

As it should be.

Now, what this is really all about. Excellent opinion piece in the Manhattan Contrarian:

All three cases were decided 6-3 along ideological lines. These cases involved the most basic issues of what the Constitution is and how it is to be interpreted. On those issues there is virtually no hope of one side ever convincing anyone from the other side. There just are two fundamentally irreconcilable visions of how this should work. The two visions can be summarized in just a few sentences each:

• Vision 1. The Constitution allocates powers to the three branches of government, and also lists certain rights entitled to constitutional protection. The role of the courts is (1) to assure that the powers are exercised only by those to whom they are allocated, (2) to protect the enumerated rights, and (3) as to things claimed to be rights but not listed, to avoid getting involved.

• Vision 2. The Constitution is an archaic document adopted more than 200 years ago, and largely obsolete. The role of the courts is to implement the current priorities of the academic left and then somehow rationalize how that is consistent with the written document. If a right is enumerated in the Constitution but disfavored by the current left (e.g., the right to “keep and bear arms”), then the courts should find a way to uphold enactments that minimize that right down to the point that it is a nullity. If a right is not enumerated in the Constitution, but is a priority of the left (e.g., abortion), then that right can be discovered in some vague and unspecific constitutional language (“due process”).  [. . .]

Of the three decisions discussed, the one likely to have the most far-reaching impact is West Virginia. During his first days and weeks in office, President Biden issued one Executive Order after another instructing every part of the bureaucracy to figure out any way it could to implement the “climate” agenda. Statutory authorization? Who needs that? Now, not only is EPA’s most expansive regulatory initiative getting shut down, but multiple other agencies have comparable gambits likely to fail in the courts. Most famously, the SEC is now out with 100 pages or so of new proposed regulations, mandating corporate disclosures of “emissions”; and the Federal Reserve supposedly is adopting saving the climate as a third of its missions (the other two being price stability and full employment). More such dubious initiatives are under way in agencies from the Department of Energy to the Department of the Interior.

A major transformation of the economy requires specific legislation duly enacted by Congress. Who could have thought of such a crazy idea?