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American women are now legally livestock. I wonder how long it will take before their access to passports and foreign travel is removed.

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From:

philrm

It's certainly a target, but I'm not sure it's the next one, much as Alito would like it to be.

I actually undersold it: Thomas doesn't just want to criminalize same-sex marriage, he wants to criminalize same-sex sex.

And I see that Roberts has joined in, finally abandoning his strategy of chipping away at rights just a bit at a time in order to play-act at not being the partisan hack that he is.

From:

graydon

Rights are what you make up to argue for a greater authority than that of god-kings. They're not real in any material sense.

Look for the material basis of the conflict.

Here, the material basis of the conflict is "Can you own people? Overtly, formally, with the full blessing of the law?"

The most essential step to owning women is stripping citizenship. Need to take away the vote to do that, and it's pretty obvious that women's votes are especially problematic for the dominionist goals.

(Note that the "of course you own your women" position has widespread support.)

From:

philrm

I don't disagree with any of that, but the Supreme Court can't simply declare ex nihilo that the 19th Amendment is unconstitutional; they have to have a case which involves it. That means that some state legislature has to pass a law that either conflicts with the 19th Amendment, or at least gives the right-wing radicals on the Court a fig leaf to claim that it does. I'm not aware of any such case, anywhere. (Although give the howler monkeys in the Texas GOP a couple of more years and I'd say there's a shot.) Meanwhile, Obergefell, Lawrence, and Griswold are just sitting right there on the table, so to speak. So, for that matter, is Loving, which, like Griswold, is barely older than Roe. I wonder how long it will be before Thomas's allies decide he's outlived his usefulness?

ETA: And all three of those cases are directly related to the same establishment of the right to privacy that has just been torpedoed by the Six, as has been pointed out repeatedly.

Edited Date: 2022-06-24 07:01 pm (UTC)

From:

graydon

In the event that the non-voting majority keeps not voting (voting being declasse and icky), they're going to have enough of a majority in Congress to just pass laws. If the Supremes say it's constitutional, it's constitutional, and they can say that in days if so inclined. They've already laid the groundwork for saying Joe is not legitimately elected (thus lacks a real veto) and they've had their practice coup.

Nobody is getting up and doing some variant on "you can't own women" or treating the problem as an access-to-agency general struggle between a "generally distributed" position and a "all the agency is mine" position, either; I do not have a lot of hope for the utility of the response.

From:

philrm

I would argue that it's a bit more complicated than that - except I won't bother, because we're really just arguing about the exact timescale.

If the past couple of days aren't enough to get people to vote this November, then I don't know what will, and in any case, it won't matter: if the Democrats don't expand their hold of Congress in the upcoming midterms, they won't get another chance.

Odds are, though, that the Republicans will take control of Congress, because, evidently, the majority of voters would rather register their anger over $5/gallon gasoline than live in a democracy.