Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

Court says “Yes” to guns. “No” to abortion.

edited June 2022 in Off-Topic
Either our founding fathers had a strange and convoluted sense of values, or the SC has things all wrong.

Yesterday’s decision to overturn NYC’s gun laws (along with other jurisdictions around the country) made it easier for anyone in Manhattan to carry concealed weapons. Now - Have you ever been in Times Square? Just imagine what that might be like if a substantial number of people crammed into that area were armed and a gunfight broke out. I’m not sure I’ll ever visit NYC Again.

Comments

  • Either our founding fathers had a strange and convoluted sense of values, or the SC has things all wrong.
    I would say both of those statements perversely are true.
  • More school age children for target practice.

    It struck me that my life might have been during the period of time that women had the most respect, even if that level of respect was still inadequate. It also struck me that, despite separation of religion, the Catholic church was positioned with power to destroy more than half the population as it always has tried to do.
  • Hey, guns for everyone! Maybe the Catholic church should update Baptism to include a free gun for every newborn. When they grow up and find that their family really didn't want them that will help even things out.
  • +1 anna You could argue that women had the most rights from 1973, Roe v. Wade decided until today, Roe v. Wade reversed ! And with my 16 years of Catholic school education, I'm unfortunately too aware that the wall separating church and state in the US has always been paper-thin !
  • Also having been raised as a Catholic I really agree with that. I believe that religion may just be the most destructive single factor affecting human existence, now and throughout history.
  • The sad thing is that this group is poised to remove the rights of other citizens the Catholic church hates. A shrinking minority of Americans will be left whole. (Example - unmarried professed straight Catholic priests aren't touched but gain as in the Bangor, Maine Supreme Court decision allowing religious schools to dip into public funds. Who knows what is next?)
  • edited June 2022
    Larry Summers unloaded on the SC in his commentary on Wall Street Week Friday. I can’t do him justice except to say he finds it “alarming” that a SC can break with long established prescient in such an abrupt manner (on both the gun issue and abortion). He wondered aloud whether this will have an impact on investing with future adherence to long standing regulatory / legal precedents cast into doubt. If you get a chance, the show should be available for online viewing within 24 hours. Last 7-10 minutes definitely worth the effort.

    Ancillary to all of this is the harsh criticism from heads of state of virtually every free world nation. Even Boris Johnson (of all people) had scathing remarks for the abortion decision. As someone who has followed current events since a teenager, I’ve never seen such rancorous divisiveness on the Supreme Court as is evident in the statement of the 3 dissenting justices. To borrow a line from The Music Man - “They really don’t like each other.” (Albeit, they would deny it.)

    Wall Street Week for June 24 is now posted in “Other Investing”. Larry Summers appears at 33:30 .

    LINK

  • Thomas takes the cake as the most extreme, writing a separate opinion that the court should revisit same-sex marriage and the right to contraception; https://politico.com/news/2022/06/24/thomas-constitutional-rights-00042256
  • Thomas is also a complete hypocrite, since his marriage wouldn't have flourished without the Loving v. Virginia decision (1967).
  • As outlined in today’s NY Times, Alito had been plotting the overthrow of Roe since his service the Reagan administration. We are dealing with fanatics (Thomas particularly) who have no qualms about lying to get on the Court (Thomas and Kavanaugh for sure) and who have spent their lives serving false idols (Koch Industries and their like). Their apparent reverence for the Founders, precedence, and idiotic originalism have been shown to be smoke screens for judicial activism of the worst kind. I don’t know how the country gets out of this mess. Even if Roberts were decent enough to resign from a court he can no longer restrain, that would still leave five fanatics whose life expectancies are long.
  • I am afraid the damage will long lasting... What I most disappointed that many voters did not participate in 2016 election just because they disliked Hillary Clinton. The flip side is the nightmare that unfolded that resulted to have 3 new justices on the Supreme Court while tilted toward the conservative side.

    On the medical care side, this created a mess for the healthcare providers.
    Physicians take an oath to "do no harm" as part of their medical training. They learn about how to stay up to date, throughout their careers, on the best standards of care for treatment. And they learn about patient privacy and safety, and how patients should have a say in their care based on their values and lived experience.

    "The goal is for a patient to make a decision for themselves about what's right," says Dr. Stephanie Mischell, a family physician in Dallas who is a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health.
    https://npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/24/1107316711/doctors-ethical-bind-abortion

    Lewis B rightly pointed out what is coming on the next phase of SC ruling - contraception and same sex marriages.
  • edited June 2022
    Warren Burger, former conservative Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, on the 2nd Amendment in 1991.



    If there’s a hidden agenda here (I hope there isn’t ) it could be to embolden / strengthen militaristic right wing factions to pursue their eventual goal of overthrowing our democratic government and replacing it with some sort of ill-defined autocratic one. At least we can take solace in that none of the Justices were in any way connected to the January 6th insurrection.
  • edited June 2022
    @hank- re "January 20"... surely you meant January 6th? And if so, don't you realize that "Ginny" Thomas was involved in that up to her eyeballs?
  • edited June 2022
    @Old_Joe,

    My bad. Should have checked date. As to your 2nd point, yes - I served up a softball for you to hit out of the park. I generally despise conspiracy theories. Yet, having trouble making sense of the whole situation. These justices should be free of any prior obligation being lifetime appointees - so why in hell would they want to upset the apple cart to this degree? Seems to me “Something’s rotten in Denmark.”

  • "These justices should be free of any prior obligation being lifetime appointees"

    @hank- Well, one would certainly think that they would feel less pressure to hew to any particular "prior obligations". And that certainly has been true in the past- remember the major transition in the perspectives of Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican appointee.

    From following the court, I'm wondering if something similar is now occurring with Chief Justice Roberts. His recent opinions seem to be reasonably free of obvious political coloring.

    From what's going on now though, it sure appears as if there's a group of justices who have such strong personal feelings about certain types of cases that they are going to vote predictably every time such a matter appears before them. I'm not sure that this equates to having "prior obligations" (ie, hewing to a particular political party), but in the end the results are pretty much the same thing.

    In any case, I think that it's a very sad day for the Court. My suggestion for a possible fix:

    • Maintain the present system of nine judges hearing any particular case, with the Chief Justice sitting as one of the nine in every case.

    • BUT: increase the number of actual judges on the court so as to create a pool of judges numbering maybe 12 or 15. Each case would then draw eight judges by random choice from that pool, to form the panel of nine. That should go a long way to insure a panel of judges who are reasonably open minded on most issues.

    Of course nothing like that will ever happen, because the elected politicians who run this country would never allow their influence in "shaping" the Supreme Court to be in any way diminished. "Power corrupts... absolute power corrupts absolutely." How very true.

  • On the abortion issue perhaps they harbor some deep seated religious compunction. I was just thinking of how careful JFK was to distinguish between his own personnel religious beliefs and relationship with the Catholic church and his obligation to country. Admittedly, a tight-rope to walk.

    But on the guns issue I can see no reason to upset / overturn over 100 years of NYC regulatory precedent and accede to the demands of the NRA. Have any of these dudes ever set foot on a crowded Manhattan street? I doubt it. That decision doesn’t make sense from any perspective I can imagine.
  • I dunno... seems to me that Thomas and Alito have never seen a gun restriction that they didn't hate. Must be something of a personal bias working there.
  • Old_Joe said:

    Also having been raised as a Catholic I really agree with that. I believe that religion may just be the most destructive single factor affecting human existence, now and throughout history.

    You might very well be correct, OJ. Yet that's like asserting that poison is bad. Or that the human condition is real: the fact that we just cannot get out of our own way. Or that people will always institutionalize what's important to them--- even when they've misconstrued the whole business from the get-go.
  • Sven said:
    Oh, boy! I'd LOVE to see someone make a stink about THAT. Frikkin' tool. "Regulate DICK, not Jane!" That's only a little bit funny, given the reversal of Roe vs. Wade.
  • Guns: my RGR is falling, but not so far as the rest of the Market in general.
    POWW, anyone?

    https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/rgr/research-ratings?mod=quotes#subnav
    https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/poww?mod=searchresults_companyquotes&mod=searchbar

    Teaching the kids to shoot at summer camp in 1974 was a whole different thing than it has become today. It might make an interesting investigation: why so many religious dead-head fundamentalists are also gun fundamentalists.
  • And KUDOS to Sam Jackson!
Sign In or Register to comment.