Jamelle Bouie’s New York Times column defending Roe v. Wade is progressivism in its purest form: contemptuous of democratic self-government, incredulous at the very concept of the rule of law, utterly incapable of stating a principle with any limits, unable to see the weaknesses in its proposed methodology, unwilling to acknowledge tradeoffs or address counterarguments, and promiscuous with changes to the meaning of words themselves in order to obtain the desired results.
Bouie sets out to respond to the argument that Roe was anti-democratic by removing the regulation of abortion from elected state governments and having it dictated by seven unelected Supreme Court justices. The core of that argument, of course, is that the justices have the power to take decisions away from the elected branches only when a supermajority of the people, through the Constitution’s text, have empowered them to do so. Naturally, Bouie does not give even the slightest nod to the idea that whether the Constitution actually authorized this might be relevant to the question. Instead, he attempts four arguments for why it’s supposedly not democracy to give the decision back to state governments.
Comments