I'm still reading the opinion and what I'm seeing is Alito finally reminding the country that Congress, not the courts, make laws, and Roe/Casey was the worst type of legislating from the bench ever. I think Alito, et al., are throwing down the gauntlet, saying that from now on, we return to the court having a limited role in the country. Bravo.
So now that the Constitution has been restored, expect the left to burn the country down.
Bravo, indeed.
While I wish the majority opinion didn't engage so much with the dissent's political arguments, Alito just became my second favorite living justice with this:
"We do not pretend to know how our political system or
society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and
Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we
would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our
decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the
law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.
We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a
right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the
authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives."
THAT is what the Constitution and our country's very deliberate division of powers stand for.
Edit to add: I just got to the point in the opinion where Alito announces the standard that the court will use in the future for determining whether state laws on abortion are constitutional: Rational review. This is the lowest standard and the right one. As long as a state can rationally explain why it is limiting abortions, it's constitutional. So protecting human life, or potential human life, will become the only reason any state needs to ban or otherwise regulate abortion.
This truly is a revolutionary decision.
