"conservative" Supreme Court

[easyrider16]

So I was reading an article about how the current Supreme Court seems much more centrist than what people were expecting. The article cites questions and comments made by judges during recent oral arguments. Regarding Obamacare, for example, Gorsuch observed that the argument that taking away the tax penalty makes the statute unconstitutional doesn't make a lot of logical sense when the tax penalty was the only enforcement mechanism for the mandate. Without that, there's nothing Congress is forcing anyone to do, so how does that impinge on anyone's rights? There were a couple of other similar examples in the article where conservative judges questioned the logic of the legal arguments being propounded.

It seems to me that this article misses the point in saying the judges are centrist rather than conservative. I don't think it's about left vs right politics in a lot of these cases. I think the problem is that a lot of these supposedly right-wing arguments are not logical legal arguments. Lawyers are trained in logic and to put their personal feelings aside to analyze the case objectively. If you want a judge to strike down a law, you need to give him or her a logical legal argument as to how it is unconstitutional. I do think the Supreme Court is still dominated by conservatives and we will get much more conservatives opinions out of it by and large. What they will not do is become activist, striking down laws based on politics instead of sound legal arguments.

For example, I don't see this court striking down Roe v. Wade. I think that's a pipe dream. The decisions on abortion rights are, at this point, pretty settled law and the Supreme Court isn't going to overturn that without a really good, logical legal reason to do so, and I don't see what that would be. Maybe you personally don't think an abortion ban is unconstitutional, or you feel that abortion is immoral. Those are not logical legal arguments. To overturn Roe v. Wade you need to get the Court to overturn the doctrine of substantive due process, which has since become well-settled law. Overturning it would mean undoing a whole host of decisions based on the concept, and I don't see very many judges, even conservative ones, looking to do something that drastic. What you will likely see instead is some nibbling at the margins - maybe rulings upholding bans of abortion funding or some of the inane regulations surrounding abortion in the Bible belt.

Article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/ ... d=msedgntp