Kavanaugh cites landmark gay rights cases in argument about abortion restrictions

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed to suggest earlier this week that landmark LGBTQ cases could support overturning federal abortion rights.

The Supreme Court heard 90 minutes of oral arguments Wednesday concerning a Mississippi law that would ban almost all abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A majority of the court’s conservative justices appeared prepared to uphold the law and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision holding that women have a constitutional right to have an abortion before fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks.

The crux of Wednesday’s oral arguments centered around whether the justices should preserve or walk back on precedent, a court decision that is considered authority for subsequent cases involving similar or identical circumstances. The court’s liberal justices warned that reversing a decades-old ruling would politicize the country’s highest court.

However, citing two landmark gay rights cases — Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state laws criminalizing consensual same-sex activity in 2003, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States in 2015 — Kavanaugh suggested that overruling the court’s previous opinions was standard procedure.

“If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent,” Kavanaugh said. “If we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn’t the history of this court’s practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality and — and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn’t?”

The lawyers who argued in favor of gay rights in the landmark LGBTQ cases offered differing views on the validity of the argument by Kavanaugh, who was appointed in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump.

Mary Bonauto, who argued on behalf of same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges and now serves as the Civil Rights Project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD, challenged Kavanaugh’s analogy.

“It’s a pretty thin interpretation of a reversal,” she told NBC News. “The reversals that Justice Kavanaugh is citing were about righting wrongs. They were centered on the rights of individuals and expanding constitutional protections to more individuals, not about taking rights away.”

When the court ruled in favor of same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges, it effectively overturned its prior decision in Baker v. Nelson. That ruling centered on Jack Baker and Mike McConnell, who in 1970 were blocked from obtaining a marriage license. The high court rejected the men's case in 1972 without ever hearing oral arguments.

Bonauto argued against Kavanaugh’s comparison of reversing Baker v. Nelson to the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade.

“There was no briefing, there was no argument. They just essentially utterly dismissed the case for basically: ‘There’s no way same-sex couples seeking to marry have claim under the Constitution.’ The end,” she said.

LGBTQ advocates largely agreed with Bonauto, saying that the landmark gay rights decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas “reflected the growing societal understanding of our common humanity.”

“To that we say, NOT IN OUR NAME,” Sharon McGowan, legal director of the LGBTQ advocacy group Lambda Legal, said of Kavanaugh’s argument in a statement Wednesday. “Those landmark LGBTQ decisions EXPANDED individual liberty, not the opposite.”

But Paul Smith, who argued in favor of LGBTQ rights in Lawrence v. Texas — which overruled the court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick — suggested that Kavanaugh’s comparison was valid. Smith said that in order to win Lawrence v. Texas, he also had to bolster the argument for the court overriding precedent.

“We really, actually made those arguments ourselves in Lawrence because that was the whole point — we had to get rid of Bowers v. Hardwick,” Smith, who is now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said. “It is certainly one of the most prominent examples of an overruling that’s happened in the last 20 years.”

“People talk about stare decisis when they like the prior decision and not when they don’t,” Smith added, referring to the legal term for following what the court has ruled previously.

But during the oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised the question of whether overruling Roe v. Wade could open the floodgates for the court’s 6-3 conservative majority to overrule a broad swath of previous opinions it does not agree with.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/kavanaugh-cites-landmark-gay-rights-162938336.html

The Jan. 6 Committee Is Promising It Has the Goods. We’re About to Find Out

The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been busy.

In the five months since the probe was launched, the committee has issued dozens of subpoenas to high-profile members of former President Trump’s circle, as well as a smattering of other MAGA-affiliated figures involved in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The process has been fraught for a number of reasons, but revelations that have emerged from Rolling Stone’s conversations with cooperating sources indicate the committee could be sitting on a mountain of material — material that could clarify what happened on Jan. 6, and who’s to blame for it.

“We are making rapid progress,” the committee’s vice chair said at a House Rules Committee hearing on Thursday. “We anticipate next year, we will be conducting multiple weeks of public hearings, setting out for the American people in vivid color exactly what happened, every minute of the day on January 6th, here at the Capitol and at the White House, and what led to that violent attack.”

Cheney’s announcement signals a new phase of the investigation, in which the committee will push the machinations behind what happened on Jan. 6 into public view. The makeup of these forthcoming hearings is unclear, but the fact that they’re public and will last for “several weeks” should cement Jan. 6 as a key issue throughout the 2022 campaign season.

One figure of interest who seems open to testifying publicly is Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and pal to Rudy Giuliani who allegedly participated in the now-infamous Jan. 5 meeting at the Willard Hotel. At that meeting, Giuliani, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, and others discussed how to overturn the election results. Politico reported on Thursday that Kerik won’t provide documents unless he’s allowed to testify publicly. He’d previously said he’d comply with his subpoena but demanded the committee apologized to him for making “false statements.”

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who reportedly helped plan the rally at the Ellipse, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official whom the committee on Wednesday night recommended be charged with contempt for defying his subpoena, have also indicated they’d be open to testifying publicly. The committee probably won’t be interested, though. Public testimony makes it easier for witnesses to coordinate their stories, which would make it more difficult for the committee to piece together what actually happened on Jan. 6, rather than what a bunch of Trump allies want people to think happened.

Signaling a willingness to testify publicly makes it seem like a witness want to comply, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t effectively obeying Trump’s directive to stonewall the committee. Trump has done so himself through his likely doomed effort to prevent the committee from getting ahold of White House documents from the National Archives. Bannon did so extremely publicly in refusing to show up for his deposition and was subsequently charged with criminal contempt. Mark Meadows has agreed to cooperate, reaching an agreement with the committee this week after first refusing to comply. It’s unclear to what extent Stephen Miller, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and other high-profile Trump allies will play ball, but it wouldn’t be surprising if many of them follow Trump and do what they can to stick it to the committee.

It’s easy to focus only on the big names and what they’re doing to make the committee’s work more difficult, but Cheney promising weeks of “vivid color” recounting of what happened is a reminder that the committee has been in touch with an untold number of other figures who were swirling around Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Chairman Bennie Thompson (R-Miss.) said on Thursday that they’ve interviewed 250 people, most of which have cooperated voluntarily. The committee seems confident they’ve already drawn enough to paint a clear picture of why, how, and at whose direction hundreds of Trump supporters were able to break into the Capitol in a violent attempt to overthrow American democracy. We’ll see next year.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/jan-6-committee-promising-goods-143342387.html

>>15128712

Thought they gave HIV + AZT, so it didn't turn into AIDS, which was the result of the Drug(s) itself.

HIV didn't turn into AIDS, they lied. It was the Meds.

Sound Familiar?

>>15128729

>bitcoin will replace their ability to enslave us.

Any ONLINE shit IS the Entrapment.

Shitcoin & Craptocurrency are cons.