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Owing partly to travel schedules that prevent our normal and proper Friday evening happy hour to debrief the week, combined with the shocking leak of the prospective Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs case, we decided to declare a special mid-week happy hour with Scott and John joining in the libations, along with a special guest, the noted Whisky-McRibb pairing expert, John Yoo, coming to us from outside his favorite squash court in San Francisco—all recorded before a live audience on Zoom (and thank you to everyone who tuned in).
We begin by revisiting several predictions we made about the Dobbs case in our podcast of December 10, where we not only nailed the dynamic of the likely decision based on how the oral argument went, but also discussed the probability that the opinion would leak, in an unprecedented attempt to blow up trust and public esteem for the Supreme Court. In fact, as the show notes for that episode record:
We also speculate on whether there might actually be leaks from somewhere inside the Court ahead of the decision—something that rarely or never happens—because the liberal justices are desperate to do anything to derail an overturning of Roe (which, Steve argued to John, is the “McRibb sandwich of modern jurisprudence: a compressed confection of offal cuts slathered with sauce to disguise its true awfulness”).
Now I had forgotten this since Lucretia uses her Will Smith "Men in Black" neuralizer flashy thing on me after every episode.
Our perspectives on the legal analysis and political fall out are all over the map and quite unpredictable, so settle in with a single-malt or other substitute, and enjoy.
Steve Hayward
John Hinderaker
"Lucretia"
Scott Johnson
Discussion (10)
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There's nothing wrong with taking the Catholic position on faith, i.e. trusting the Catholic Church to get it right.
However, the Catholic position is that when human life begins is a question of reason.
And so it is. From the moment of conception, it is an organism, and of the human species. Human life begins at conception. The biology is unambiguous.
One may, of course, take a philosophical or a religious position that not all persons have rights, or that not all humans are persons.
Or one may take the Aristotelian, Augustinian, Thomistic position on the soul, in which case the soul also is indeed present from the moment of conception.
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I don't see why it would make a difference whether people at the time of the 14th Amendment would agree with a federal action banning abortion.
What does make a difference is what exactly the word "person" as originally used in the 14th means.
If it means the same thing as it does now, it looks to me like a federal action to prevent states from giving unborn persons unequal protection is a go based on the second sentence of the 14th. All we need is to recognize that all humans are persons, and we're good to go. (Or recognize that all conscious humans at least are persons, and we're good to go for federal late-term abortion bans. Or whatever.)
Good to go legally. Not politically.
But if "person" had some other meaning then or has some legal meaning that doesn't come to my mind easily, then we're not good to go. Then I guess we need laws to state what personhood is, and only the states can do that.
Anyway, states doing that is a whole lot better than Roe. Alito is the man.
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Warning, Will Robinson - danger! Danger!
As long as Francis is Pope, I'd be leery of such blind trust in the Catholic Church.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Catholic, I'm an Anglican Church of North America Anglican, for pretty much the same reasons as Andrew Klavan.
This was a terrific podcast - the Gang of Five - I wanted to hear more from each of them.
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I think the iffy aspects of Francis are the ones where trusting the actual teachings of the Catholic Church helps to inform us of their iffyness.
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The last Ted Cruz podcast goes through the court's security procedures pretty thoroughly.
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