“It’s not some sort of automatic deal where you can just say, ‘Stare decisis,’ and then turn off your brain.”
That’s the reasoning that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas explains was why the faulty Roe v. Wade precedent that fabricated a constitutional right to abortion had to fall.
Also, the Chevron ruling that used to give, but no longer does, great weight to bureaucrats’ decisions on how the American government should be running.
It is in a report at Courthousenews that explains Thomas’ defense of the court’s “purge of longstanding precedents.”
Stare decisis is the legal concept of upholding precedents that exist.
He was speaking at Catholic University Law School.
Thomas described those precedent-following decisions like cars in a train. New cases are new cars and they simply following wherever the train goes.
But that can provide problems.
“We never go to the front to see who’s driving the train or where it is going, and you could go up there to the engine room and find out it’s an orangutan,” he explained.
The court also has made significant changes to standards for affirmative action, ruling that universities cannot use race as an admissions qualifier, and changing up requirements of the Voting Rights Act.
Now pending is Humphrey’s Executor, which dates to 1935 and addresses presidential authority over regulatory board members.
This, of course, was triggered by President Donald Trump’s decisions to cut government expenses by eliminating federal jobs and changing up the managers who are running a lot of government operations.
He also wants those running various government processes to be aboard with his Make America Great Again agenda, not a holdover from Joe Biden’s administration who would do everything possible to stop the president’s success.
The report said Thomas pointed out that some rulings have been “disregarded,” even though they’ve never been formally abandoned, such as a 1927 ruling affirming forced sterilization that was used to support eugenics.
“Do we believe that you can go around sterilizing people just because the case has been decided?” Thomas asked.
He said, “I do give respect to the precedent, but the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition and our country and our laws and be based on something,” Thomas said.
The Roe decision was overturned because it based its power on “implied” rights, also described as “substantive due process,” those that judges perceive could be suggested in the Constitution, but are not actually there.
Due process is there, not “substantive due process.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently addressed that issue.
The case used to overturn Roe, Dobbs, “laid out the evidence to demonstrate that Roe was incorrect to say that a right to terminate a pregnancy had been deeply rooted in the history and tradition of the American people,” said Barrett.
That same argument now is expected to be presented to the high court again, this time in a fight over same-sex marriage.
A county clerk, Kim Davis in Kentucky, was jailed within days of when the high court, then filled with leftists who no longer are on the bench, created “same-sex marriage” nationwide.
That decision also was based on implied rights.
Davis not only was jailed for refusing to sign marriage licenses for homosexual duos, she was sued by those duos, and while one jury cleared her of wrongful behavior, the other ordered her to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars damages.
But her state quickly created a religious exemption for county clerks, in the law, and Davis had not discriminated because she withheld her signature from ALL marriage licenses, planning to wait until the dispute was resolved.
At the time the Obergefell case allowed the then-majority liberal justices to fabricate same-sex “marriage,” there were warnings the ruling could be used against people of faith, those the values of family that have endured for millennia, and more.
All of those warnings were rejected by progressives and other leftists as likely not to exist, or be extremely rare.
Now that those observations have been proven wrong, there is a new movement, a new sentiment, that the precedent fabricated in Obergefell, a precedent that even dissenters on the Supreme Court warned was unrelated to the Constitution, should be overturned.
It’s in a report in the Federalist that experts now confirm, “We can either recognize gay marriage or recognize children’s right to their mother or father. We can’t have both.”
That’s according to Katy Faust, of Them Before Us, an organization that advocates for the right of children to their biological parents.
“Marriage has, throughout our country and nearly every other culture throughout history, been the pathway to secure that right. But as every one of the 38 countries which have legalized gay marriage has learned, when you make husbands and wives optional in marriage, you make mothers and fathers optional in parenthood. The problem is, from the child’s perspective, their own mother and father are never optional. Not in terms of their identity, their development, their safety, or their rights,” she said.
The report in the Federalist warns the “tentacles” of the decision now are “in media, schools and curricula.”
“The decision has left in tatters the single most important institution in society — marriage and family — while ushering in an LGBT indoctrination agenda, annual state-enforced homosexuality, a boost to the rent-a-womb industry, and a burgeoning acceptance of eugenics to service the rent-a-womb industry,” the report warned.
The backlash has been developing for some time already. The report noted support for “gay marriage’ among Republicans has dropped 14% since 2021, when it reached its high.
Thomas, at the time Obergefell was released, said, “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [right of married persons to obtain contraceptives], Lawrence [right to engage in private, consensual sex acts], and Obergefell,” he wrote.