The US Supreme Court ended its most explosive term in decades this week deeply split along ideological lines, surfacing two different visions of America and the Constitution.
The nine justices, in the cases that most captured the country’s attention, mirrored the rest of the nation at a perilous moment as they issued opinions with irreconcilable views on reproductive health, religion, gun rights and the environment.
As news of the decisions swept through the states, the reaction was predictable. Red states rejoiced, especially in the area of abortion, as some raced to ban or further restrict the procedure. Blue states, on the other hand, set out to digest stunning new implications that will change the way Americans live.
For their part, liberals believe that the court’s majority, made possibly by Donald Trump’s presidency, is rewriting the rules, decimating precedent and destabilizing the court.
Conservatives, on the other hand, believe the justices in the majority are correcting the course of constitutional jurisprudence. They realized a 50-year dream to upend what had been a constitutional right to abortion, while also bolstering a right to keep and bear arms for the first time in a decade.
“The competing sides have entirely different visions of the law and of American society generally,” said Daniel Epps, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.
He said that the conservative wing of the court “looks backwards to what it sees as history and tradition.”
Meanwhile, Epps added, “the liberal wing is sounding the alarm about what the conservatives’ project means for the future and how it represents a radical change, not a restoration of the past.”
Caught in the middle is the country and court as an institution. It is lost on no one that the building itself — the marble palace — is currently crouched behind high security fences and closed to the public.
Abortion politics
The divide between the two sides was the starkest when the court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that the court went astray in 1973 when it recognized a federal constitutional right to abortion in a landmark opinion.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” he said in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”
For Alito, Roe and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision never solved any questions, they only “enflamed debate and deepened division.” He emphasized that “no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional protection” and that the decision belongs in the political sphere.
Liberals, however, see the issue from an entirely different prism, starting with women’s rights.
“One result of today’s decision is certain,” the three liberal justices wrote together in a rare joint dissent, “the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”
Now that Dobbs is on the books, the dissenters said a state can transform “what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare.”
Central to their thinking was that the Constitution will no longer provide a shield despite its “guarantees of liberty and equality for all.”
While conservatives see no right in the Constitution, liberals counter that it is grounded in the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty. The liberal justices said that the framers of the Constitution “understood that the world changes” and that rights could be defined “in general terms, to permit future evolution in their scope and meaning.”
For conservatives such as Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, a group that supported Trump’s nominees, liberals are the ones guilty of not following precedent in other areas, including the Second Amendment.
“The left has always tried to create a different set of rules for cases involving abortion, and this is just another,” she told AWN
A week after the opinion published, abortion care was banned or severely restricted in a dozen states, according the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that tracks abortion laws across the country and supports abortion access. Five states, including Alabama, Arkansas , Missouri, Oklahoma and South Dakota, enforced total bans. Others state began enforcing six-week bans — barring the procedure before most women even know they are pregnant.
Liberal-leaning states are working to secure funds to protect clinics, as well as help fund travel and lodging for women coming in from states hostile to abortion.
On Friday, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey signed into law two bills protecting out-of-state residents seeking reproductive services and reproductive health care providers. The laws will shield health care providers from other state’s inquiries and prohibit the extradition of any woman who comes to New Jersey seeking legal abortion services.
The measures will “explicitly protect the rights of out-of-state women to an abortion in New Jersey,” Murphy said Friday.