What Does the Magic 8-Ball Say?
The overturn of the quinquagenarian ruling in Roe v. Wade is done. What comes next? Can Americans be retrained to handle federalism and individual freedom?
So much has been wrapped up in the fight over Roe v. Wade, it is difficult to unpack it all, largely because both the initial Roe decision and its undoing represent more than a changing culture, it is emblematic of a battle between two distinctly different cultures and/or civilizations.
It also supremely (no pun intended) illustrates the difficulty of meshing together, not just differing perspectives, but totally different value and religious belief systems. And aren’t the methods by which that melding is accomplished always the issue in maintaining a civil society?
Knowing such difficult exists, perhaps it is important to consider why we even endeavor to create an entity to oversee such a difficult task.
The answer is found in these words of John Locke from Chapter 19, Section 222 of his 1689 Second Treatise of Civil Government:
“The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they chuse and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society, to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society: for since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society, that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure, by entering into society…”
To limit power of one over another means people need to be able to settle their own differences rather than imposing their will through government.
Americans have been bred out of the ability to settle issues on their own at the local and state level, preferring to skip the steps of persuasion based on logic and reason in favor of having their beliefs, values and motivations officially codified and sanctioned by an all-powerful central government, dispensing with the messy process of convincing others of the wisdom of those positions.
It is the process equivalent of petitioning the Pope for a papal dispensation that when granted allows for individuals to be exempted from a specific Canon Law (which, for the purpose of this writing is the Constitution of the United States of America).
The cumulative result of these dispensations was the birth of a bone-crushing, self-perpetuating Leviathan, one belching smoke as it rolls unabated across the fruited plains, consuming everything in its wake and demanding unwavering fealty and tribute from those it chooses to bypass – this time.
This Leviathan exists as the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. It consumes, produces, and is constructed of the complications, complexities, and contradictions we manufacture as we deal with others in society every passing day.
The issue is that when we create complications, they beget more complications, until we approach a point of incomprehensibility. The only sure result is the Leviathan, when ineffectively challenged, grows a little larger and more insatiable each day.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is also always in play – and when we attempt to patch over one such consequence, we inevitably create another, perhaps dozens, hundreds, or thousands more. There is not a single decision made by government that has a positive impact for some that doesn’t have a negative impact for others.
America has had a semicentennial since Roe became “settled law” to evaluate its impact.
We now enter an entirely new period where what was “settled” is no longer.
One thing that is getting missed in the anger of the left and the satisfaction of the right with the overturn of Roe and Casey is the SCOTUS reintroduced the idea that its power is limited, it cannot be the vehicle for social and cultural change as it has been used for over a half century.
One wonders if the past week may well be remembered as the beginning of the end of the "living constitution" perspective, as well as termination of the use of the Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter for everything under our yellow sun.
Is a turn toward Justice Anton Scalia’s perspective that “the Constitution says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say” simply a blip on the continuum or does it represent a full-fledged shift in America’s direction?
Could it also the beginning of a debate for the massive centralization of government that has paralleled the use of the Supreme Court as a political vehicle?
If there are limits on which the Court might be invoked, and that is recognized by the Court itself, perhaps similar limits exist for the legislative and executive branches as well.
There clearly are enumerated limits in the Constitution.
As the Tenth Amendment unambiguously says:
"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."
I think it is quite amusing how the Democrats have been screaming about "democracy dying in darkness" for the past several years, and when something as controversial as abortion is returned to the people, most certainly a very democratic move, they simply can't deal.
In my observation, America has gravitated from a state where, at our beginnings, government was seen as a necessary evil, one designed to be specifically constrained and a seldom invoked arbiter engaged in only the most dire, serious and intractable of situations (as initially described in the original Constitution) to a culture where power is achieved by a party petitioning government to officially sanction their positions even in the most mundane of situations (as when administrative law is created/invoked to extend federal power to the management of puddle of water on private land).
That seems to be changing.
Whether that change is sustainable is the question.