The apex of the tendency to play fast and loose with the letter of the Constitution came on June 7, 1965, when the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a law prohibiting contraceptives.
The focus of the case made it difficult for many to see the implications of what the High Court had done.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Even many of those who thought contraceptive use was immoral did not think that contraceptives should be illegal, and so they did not realize that the Griswold case had implications far beyond the matter at hand.
In his ruling on the case, Justice William O. Douglas, an appointee of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, discovered in the Constitution:
[A] right of marital privacy, [explaining away the absence of this phrase in the Constitution by claiming that] specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.
This essentially meant:
[E]nterprising and politically motivated justices could find anything they wanted in the Constitution, as long as they could argue that it was an ’emanation’ of a ‘penumbra.’
By the nature of the case, an “emanation” of a “penumbra” could be found anywhere and could be anything an enterprising justice wanted it to be.
Douglas had opened the door to the total disregard of the letter of the Constitution, in favor of whatever legal fantasies, however flimsy their reasoning was, could gain a majority on the court.
The other shoe dropped seven and a half years after Griswold v. Connecticut.
The most notorious of the constitutional “emanations” the Supreme Court had begun to find in the Constitution was the Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973.
[In this decision] the Supreme Court voted 7–2 that there was a right to abortion in the Constitution and struck down all state laws that restricted the practice.
The left fanatically defended this decision, asserting it was the centerpiece of equality of rights for women and ignoring the biological evidence that abortion actually involved putting a human being to death.
Yet there was no right to abortion in the Constitution.
Justice Harry Blackmun found it in an “emanation” of a “penumbra” of the right to privacy.
Roe v. Wade corrupted the judicial landscape so thoroughly that by June 2022, when Roe v. Wade was finally overturned in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, leftists insisted that it was Dobbs, which actually respected the Constitution, that was “extreme,” not Roe.
In his statement on the decision, Old Joe Biden called it “extreme” seven times.
This was in line with the Liberals’ general strategy of portraying all opponents of their radical far-left agenda as violent racist rednecks who pose an imminent threat to ‘our democracy,’ by which they meant ‘leftist hegemony.’
Serial liar Biden started off his statement with yet another whopping lie:
Today is a—it’s not hyperbole to suggest a very solemn moment. Today, the Supreme Court of the United States expressly took away a constitutional right from the American people that it had already recognized. They didn’t limit it. They simply took it away.
That’s never been done to a right so important to so many Americans. But they did it. And it’s a sad day for the Court and for the country.
In reality, no right was taken away, as the states were still quite free to keep abortion legal. Nor was abortion ever a genuine “constitutional right.” as the Constitution does not mention it at all, much less guarantee a right to it.
Roe v. Wade was an interpretation of the Constitution
—a bad and poorly reasoned one—
which is one principal reason why it was overturned.
Biden had affirmed:
I believe Roe v. Wade was the correct decision as a matter of constitutional law, an application of the fundamental right to privacy and liberty in matters of family and personal autonomy.
But that was not always his opinion. In 1973, when Roe was first decided, Biden said that it went “too far.”
In 2022, by contrast, he said:
Make no mistake. This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law. It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view.
The decision, Biden said:
[Was] so extreme that women could be punished for protecting their health. So extreme that women and girls who are forced to bear their rapist’s child—of the child of consequence. It’s a—it just—it just stuns me. So extreme that doctors will be criminalized for fulfilling their duty to care.
He complained:
[E]xtremist governors and state legislators who are looking to block the mail or search a person’s medicine cabinet or control a woman’s actions by tracking data on her apps she uses are wrong and extreme and out of touch with the majority of Americans.
Yes, he really said that “extremist governors” were “extreme.” And to repeat further:
This is an extreme and dangerous path the Court is now taking us on.
And another:
With this decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country.
The Court in Dobbs v. Jackson was respecting the actual words of the Constitution. That, for the Left in 2022, was “extreme.”
