Abortion and Last Night’s GOP Debate

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4 responses to “Abortion and Last Night’s GOP Debate”

1. 

   Gary Huber

   August 24, 2023

   Could the Civil Rights Act be invoked to protect the unborn? Perhaps Congress would have to define what is a human being and a citizen. Not that it will happen in the next decade.

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2. 

   Vito B. Caiati

   August 25, 2023

   “The precise question is: How is a federal abortion restriction consistent with the states’ right to decide the abortion laws?”
   Like you, Bill, I am no expert in connotational law, but I believe that such a restriction would not be consistent with the right of the states to determine the law on this matter. The confusion of Pence and Scott appears to arise from their understanding of the wording of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs Case, in which the majority held: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives” (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf). Specifically, they seem to interpret the phrase “returned to the people and their elected representatives” as one that permits the federal legislature, the Congress, to establish a national ban on abortion during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy, save for unusual cases. However, I think that such an interpretation contradicts the Tenth Amendment, which decrees that “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.” Of the enumerated or expressed powers granted to the United States, i.e., the federal government, none include that of regulating abortion, nor is such regulation proscribed to the states; therefore, such power resides with the latter. Moreover, an attempt to utilize the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects the rights of individuals granted by the Constitution, would not permit federal intervention, since the Court found in Dobbs that it does not grant such a right.

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3. 

   Vito B. Caiati

   August 25, 2023

   Spell checker error in first line that I failed to catch: “connotational” should obviously be “constitutional.”

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4. 

   BV

   August 25, 2023

   Vito’s comment above is a model of how a good comment is constructed.
   Note that he deals directly with the question I raised. He does not go off on a tangent, or change the subject to a topic that interests him but is not germane to my entry. He engages what I said and he let’s me know whether he agrees or disagrees. As it is, he agrees.
   He then supplements what I said in two ways. He points out the relevance of the Tenth Amendment to the question I posed. That had occurred to me, but I failed to mention it. Governor Burgum alluded to it near the end of that segment of the debate when her whipped out his pocket Constitution.
   But what I found most useful in Vito’s comment is his explanation of the confusion of Pence and Scott. Vito: >>Specifically, they seem to interpret the phrase “returned to the people and their elected representatives” as one that permits the federal legislature, the Congress, to establish a national ban on abortion during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy, save for unusual cases.<< So the mistake that Pence and Scott made was to confuse the people of the U.S. with the people of a particular state. Here is 10A again: “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.” Now I don't think one has to be a Constitutional scholar to know what that means. "The people" refers to the people of a given state, such as North Dakota or Massachusetts, not to all the people of the U.S.

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