Chuck Schumer and judicial activism
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on an abortion case out of Louisiana. The law in question mandates that an abortionist have access to a hospital in case something goes wrong.
Abortions go wrong more often than we are led to believe. Federal Law does not require clinics to report abortion complications and deaths to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) where most statistics are collated. Cheryl Sullenger, vice president of Operation Rescue, has written extensively on how abortions are often unsafe for the women seeking them. Yet, abortion advocates will fight tooth and nail against even the most common sense protections for women undergoing abortion.
While arguments were taking place inside the Court, protesters were speaking outside. The most famous of these was Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader. He tried to intimidate the two Trump appointees to the High Court: “They're taking away fundamental rights. I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind! And you will pay the price! You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
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In a rare rebuke, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Senator Schumer referred to two Members of the Court by name…Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”
The next day, Schumer gave a quasi-apology, excusing his threat because, after all, he’s from Brooklyn, and they tend to “speak in strong language” up there.
Meanwhile, another liberal senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, from Rhode Island, rebuked the chief justice, stating: “As the architect of an 80-case barrage of partisan, 5-4 decisions for big Republican donor interests, Chief Justice Roberts has zero credibility playing umpire in any political squabble.”
Here is the bottom line: The Supreme Court has been doing the dirty work of the liberals for decades, and only slowly is it nearing a stop, or so it would seem.
Read the Constitution, including its 27 amendments, and tell me: Where, exactly, is a “woman’s right to choose” in there?
Roe v. Wade, which is sacrosanct to the left, admits: “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however…the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.” The Roe court claimed this guarantee is found in:
•“the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action,”
•“the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people.”
This privacy right, Roe claims, “is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” You can read these amendments until you’re blue in the face, and it doesn’t take long to see that the Supreme Court invented a right out of whole cloth and called it “constitutional.”
Conservative critics note that for decades now, the U. S. Supreme Court has often engaged in judicial activism – of which Roe v. Wade is a quintessential example.
Justice Byron White, appointed by JFK, gave a great dissenting opinion in Doe (Doe v. Bolton was a companion decision of Roe, both decided the same day, January 22, 1973): “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers…and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.”
With the bang of a gavel, White notes, the justices had overturned virtually all laws dealing with abortion in what he called “an exercise of raw judicial power.”
I once interviewed Robert Bork, a former Yale Law School professor, who had been appointed to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court, until he was “borked.” So many lies were told about him that it sank his nomination. Bork went on to write some important books against judicial activism – of which Roe is a prime example.
Bork told me, “The Constitution is being rewritten by judges.”
When I asked Bork about Roe v. Wade, he commented, “[I]t’s a very interesting opinion. It’s about 51 pages or something of that sort…There’s not an ounce of legal reasoning in it….It’s a terrible opinion.”
Judges should not be making law, only adjudicating it. If they had not been making law, the 1973 Court would not have divided the country and spilled the blood of 60 million unborn babies. That Chuck Schumer is so invested in abortion — even to the detriment of the mother’s health — that he’s willing to issue implied threats of violence against Supreme Court justices, is quite telling.
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the senior producer and an on-air host for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written/co-written 32 books, e.g., The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, American Amnesia: Is American Paying the Price for Forgetting God?, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (w/ D. James Kennedy), and the bestseller, George Washington's Sacred Fire (w/ Peter Lillback) djkm.org @newcombejerry www.jerrynewcombe.com
