Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – official guest host Grant Henry discussed the fear-mongering and the politicization of the Supreme Court.
GRANT HENRY:
You just heard Joe Biden talk about there that this has become a standard talking point for some of the now-leaked Roe v. Wade opinion, which has been verified as authentic now by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Of course, they have also launched an investigation as to who was the leak. But this Biden talking point now is meant to lead into what I think you’re going to be hearing over the next couple of weeks, and certainly, as we get much closer to these midterms general [election]s in November.
That idea being that this will just be the precursor to a litany of other things that are going to be struck down by this conservative Supreme Court.
Let me pause for a second and say, I don’t even like the idea of terming a Supreme Court as conservative. There is no such thing. There should be no such thing at all as a liberal or conservative Supreme Court. This is a very modern construction development.
It used to just be justices. When Justice Scalia was asked how he feels about being the last remaining originalist or textualist, or one of the best originalists or textualists in the Supreme Court, his answer was, typically, “I don’t know how to respond to that because everyone just used to be a judge or a justice. There was no such thing as an originalist or textualist. We all were that. Everybody in the judicial branch used to just read the four corners of a document and that was it.”
To some extent – not entirely, but to some extent, this idea of a partisan court is a fairly recent development within the last 50, 60, 70 years, maybe. Now, of course, this analysis that Joe Biden gave that it’s going to knock out – I don’t know, what did he say here? – that there are changing laws in that children who are LGBT can’t be in classrooms?
Look, I don’t know. I don’t know where he’s getting that from. I understand the talking point in general that you think this is going to lead to knocking out other constitutional rights.
But of course, this analysis is textbook fearmongering. It’s almost malicious with how misleading it is. And I say that to some extent, too, because if any of these people commenting on the opinion would take the time to read the 67 pages – it’s only 67 pages, man.
It’ll take you like two hours at most, maybe three. All right. Just get through it. Even if you give it a really strong read and you have to reread paragraphs a couple of times, it’s not going to take you that long.
Even within that opinion, however, Alito is explicitly clear that this ruling applies only to Roe and Casey. It has nothing to do with Obergefell v. Hodges and the homosexual marriage rights.
It has nothing to do with Lawrence v. Texas, which is other LGBT rights, I think even brings up contraceptives and a few other things.
I think they know that this ruling won’t actually really change anything and the way the Democrat states operate. The strategy, for the time being, is to sort of fearmonger and push as many people to the polls as possible.
But what we must be careful about here – and what I want to harp on, maybe even for the next two segments here, if I can, what we must be careful of is the societal precedent that some of these strategies will set.
We are more divided now than we have been in at least the last 50 years. Go check this out. Pew Research has been taking a data poll. They asked incoming House freshmen members 10 different questions that are meant to map your feelings across this ideological spectrum.
If you’re far right or far left, they have been asking the same 10 questions to these incoming House freshmen members since like the late ’70s or early ’80s. And you can literally see, since about the late ’70s or early ’80s, it’s about a three- to four-point difference.
And that difference stays intact all the way up to about, I don’t know, the middle to late ’90s. And in the early 2000s, we see a little bit of separation, and then on into about 2005, 2010, and then where we are now, we see this exponential divergence.
Now, admittedly, the Left is going far, far left and the right is starting to go a little bit further right. But it’s not just me saying that we’re more divided than we ever have been before. You can statistically back this up and some of these tactics that are being used by political operatives now, this stuff is just simply unsustainable.
In particular, I’m talking about the leak itself. Here’s a headline from Fox News: “Fox journo scorched for cheering ‘hero’ Supreme Court leaker [saying]: ‘Let’s burn this place down.'”
Fox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser took major flack on Monday after tweeting praise for the person who leaked the alleged draft of the Supreme Court opinion signaling the end of Roe v. Wade.
As a, quote, “hero.” He first tweeted this: ‘The draft row opinion appears to be as bad as expected. But I’m glad it leaked because the leak will foster anger and distrust within the irredeemable institution that is the Supreme Court of the United States.’
Are you kidding me right now? I mean, it’s irredeemable now. Maybe he then tweeted, ‘Serious shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said, expletive, let’s burn this place down. Several other prominent liberal hosts took to social media to praise this anomalous individual that leaked this as well.
MSNBC Rachel Maddow said late on Monday, “It’s just a remarkable thing. It’s a remarkable thing. As we started discussing here, it’s shocking.
Both in substance and also shocking in terms of what it means for the court and what it means about the stakes here that someone was willing to do this, but it’s just a remarkable thing.”
Brian Fallon, he’s the executive director of the liberal group Demand Justice, said, ‘It’s a brave clerk taking this unprecedented step of leaking a draft opinion to warn the country what’s coming in the last-ditch hail-Mary attempt to see if the public response might cause the court to reconsider.
And that’s what’s going on. Just so everyone realizes, okay? You had five people sign on and now even the SCOTUS blog – I’m talking about the go-to blog that usually gives you a fairly decent neutral take of what is happening to the Supreme Court.
Now, even the SCOTUS blog is fully recognizing that, yes, you had five people that were recognized as the majority, but they never really actually said that they had fully signed on to the majority opinion.
And in particular, everybody is thinking that there is one squishy justice. There is one justice that still might flip. Now, he’s not going to flip to a dissenting opinion, but the word is that the person that didn’t sign on to the thing, primarily Roberts, might try and pull off a Kavanaugh or a Barrett to concur in other areas.
Now that gets into … legalese, and weeds that we don’t have time to get into this morning. But suffice it to say what they’re trying to do is take that five-person majority right now and mess around with that one way or another.
Conservatives on Twitter didn’t find this historic breach of protocol admirable or heroic. And several accused this Fox person here – whoever this Fox person is, a senior correspondent – several accused him of insurrection.
Now the comparison to January 6th thing, I don’t know, maybe that’s a false equivalency if you want to go there, but whatever. This is what they say: ‘I wonder if the January 6 Commission will now be looking into these leftist calls to insurrection.’
This tweet will prove wise and prudent when a mob literally tries to burn down the Supreme Court within the next couple of weeks. Trump’s tweets are a threat to our democracy. Also, they say burn it all down when we don’t get our way.
I think what they’re drawing attention to here is, in my personal opinion, I have a little rant. I want to go in here after we get off, done with this next break. In my personal opinion, what this individual did was politicize the court in a manner that we have not seen in modern history.
It’s highly likely that whoever this person is, they leaked the opinion in order to influence the final outcome of whatever this vote is going to be.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
