The current fervor among the beltway chattering class over Roe v. Wade being overturned in the Supreme Court ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) highlights the level of civic illiteracy that permeates our country today. The Supreme Court makes up the Judicial Branch of our federal government, one of three coequal branches established by the United States Constitution, the document that defines (and through unanimous ratification in 1788, legitimizes) our national government.
That same document also states very clearly that the powers not enumerated in the Constitution — and therefore not bestowed upon the federal government by the duly appointed representatives, of we, the people — were “left to the states.” To dispel any confusion, this was again reaffirmed in the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, “Retention of the People’s Rights,” ratified in 1791 and stating with zero ambiguity, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Bestowed upon the Legislative branch was the power to make federal laws, to oversee and to fund government, and to make war on behalf of the nation. Bestowed upon the Executive (the Presidency) was the power to conduct international diplomacy and to execute (or veto) the laws from the Legislative branch, and bestowed upon the Judiciary was the duty and power to ensure that the actions by and laws adopted through all three branches were constitutional and therefore legitimate.
What the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) ruling did was quite simply to right a long-standing wrong, in which an activist court invented a constitutional right to abortion from whole cloth. The current Supreme Court correctly ruled that no such right existed anywhere in the text nor subtext of the U.S. Constitution, and that legislating abortion — absent any legitimate federal legislation — falls back to the states and their local governments. This position is neither pro nor anti-abortion, it is purely well-deliberated originalist jurisprudence that strengthens the rule of law and reclaims some much-needed legitimacy for our modern bloated, fiat-currency-gorged federal government. It neither says abortion is legal nor that it is not, merely — and irrefutably — that such a right does not exist within the U.S. Constitution. That is the end of the Supreme Court’s purview in this matter.
Now, were people to make arguments that overzealous Republican politicians have reacted to this ruling by jamming punitive anti-abortion laws through friendly state legislatures or that overzealous Democrats are similarly jamming overly permissive abortion laws into being in Blue States, well those arguments can and should be aired by the Americans that hold them. Just as both sides of the argument should be making well-reasoned, persuasive arguments for their positions both within their state legislatures and through their federal delegations to the U.S. Congress, that is how our government works. It does not work by shutting down the internet if you don’t like the news being reported nor by amassing enough chess pieces in the Supreme Court to invent rights (or in the case of congressional term limits in 1995, to abolish them). Illegitimacy of government and banana republics that way lies.
Nick McNulty
Windham NH
