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Showing posts from July, 2022

Abortion and Constitutional Legislation

  By Robert Katz In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and take away a woman’s constitutional right to choose to have an abortion, there’s been a lot of talk about Congress codifying abortion rights. That is not politically possible at the moment. But it is a worthy objective to anyone who believes that a woman’s constitutional entitlement to liberty should not be limited by the prejudices of an earlier time when women were third class citizens. In pursuing that objective, we have to break the habit of thinking that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution means. It isn’t. Specifically, we need to revive the tradition, subscribed to by Jefferson and Lincoln, of “departmentalism” – that each branch of the government decides constitutional questions. As President Thomas Jefferson wrote in response to Abigail Adams’ complaint about pardoning those who had been convicted under the Sedition Act of 1798 for printing “foulest falsehood