After 49 years of legal arguments, protests and political battles over the composition of the Supreme Court, the court has finally overturned Roe v. Wade.

No matter how you feel about abortion, this should be welcomed as a healthy development for American democracy and for the rule of written law made by the people’s representatives. Roe was a legal mistake that played a large role in driving our national politics crazy. Now the democratic process gets to decide what happens to abortion. //

The Supreme Court’s job is to read the law, not write it. Nothing in the Constitution mentions abortion even indirectly, and nobody before the 1970s thought the Constitution made abortion legal. At the time, even pro-abortion legal scholars thought Roe was shoddy. Its trimester framework reads more like a piece of legislation than like judicial reasoning, yet it foreclosed the democratic process from the kinds of compromises and changes over time that usually go into popularly enacted laws. //

The undemocratic nature of Roe produced a backlash that left the pro-life movement in politics much stronger than it had been in 1973. It revolutionized how political conservatives thought about constitutional law. It mobilized opposing factions in national elections, polarized along religious and cultural lines. It turned Supreme Court nominations into a circus. It occasionally triggered violence.

Mice are breeding machines. They have a gestating period of 19 to 21 days. A female mouse gets pregnant about 5 to 10 times each year and can give birth to a litter of 3 to 14 pups. On average, the litter size ranges from 6 to 8 pups. On average, you are looking at least 32 to 56 pups each year from one female mouse.

The mice reproduce each year, and the mother can mate immediately after giving birth. So you could be looking at a new litter within 25 days. To make matters even more complicated, the female baby mouse is capable of reproduction at 6 weeks. So, they can start producing pups of their own and have about 10 litters of their own per year.

In a theoretical situation, two mice that sneak into your home could give birth to 60 in a year. Of these new mice, about 21 to 30 are female mice capable of having their babies within a month, which can theoretically lead to 5,082 mice in just one year. One mathematician calculated it to be 5 million mice per year, that is if it were a perfect world for mice. //

The average lifespan of a mouse is about 12 months in the outdoors. But when they take refuge in your house, they can live up to 2 or even 3 years.

thidwick markvol
3 years ago edited
" the Bill of Rights was enacted primarily to entice the following territories to join the Union. In other words, Of Course the eighth is incorporated!"
Not actually. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights was not considered to apply to state action. The Bill of Rights was in fact demanded by most of the states for agreeing to the Constitution as a limit on federal power, because while they recognized the need for a more vigorous and cohesive central government than under the Articles of Confederation, they also wanted to make sure the federal government would be constrained in various critical ways - those they could then enumerate (the first 8) and those they could not just yet (9 and 10). The Fourteenth Amendment imposed equal protection and due process limits on the states. After a few decades, the courts began interpreting the right to due process under the Fourtheenth Amendment as including various parts of the Bill of Rights. That is what 'incorporation' means in this context. Generally, states have not recognized that an amendment applies to them until the federal courts say so. Often they have parallel provisions in their constitutions, so it did not come up all that often. My recollection is that 'excessive fines' had been incorporated, but in the contexts of direct criminal penalties and punitive damages, not asset forfeiture.

But in looking through the Bill of Rights to make this reply, I noticed something I have not heard discussed before. Only the First Amendment says "Congress shall not..." The rest just say the rights of the people as to various things (be armed, not house soldiers, have jury trials for amounts over $20, etc.) shall not be infringed. It seems to me the difference reflects that only the First may have been intended to apply only to the federal government, allowing the states to have their established religions (as several did at the time), or make their own provisions as to press and speech. In any case, Marbury v. Madison (which said it was the courts' job to declare whether an Act was constitutional) was not issued until 1803, a generation after the Bill of Rights was ratified, and the legal establishment of the time may have simply forgotten that only the First was so limited to Congress's acts, and so when issues about state action arose, everyone just accepted that the Bill of Rights did not apply to them. This paragraph is largely speculative.

One of the evils of the criminal justice system that we at RedState have editorialized against over the years is civil asset forfeiture. This Orwellian process involves law enforcement confiscating property they allege to be the product of a crime without the inconvenience of either specifying the crime, charging a criminal, or even showing that a crime happened. This is from Heritage Foundation’s Civil Asset Forfeiture: 7 Things You Should Know:

https://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/03/civil-asset-forfeiture-7-things-you-should-know

https://dailycaller.com/2015/01/30/the-7-most-egregious-examples-of-civil-asset-forfeiture/

//

A trial court judge ordered the Land Rover returned as it was clearly bought with proceeds from a life insurance policy and it was excessive. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that that silly old Eighth Amendment had never been incorporated, that is, made applicable to the states and because of that, the Indiana cops could do as they damned well pleased.

At the Supreme Court arguments, it was pretty clear that Indiana was on very unsteady ground with five justices very skeptical about the state’s arguments. No one knew just how skeptical the Supreme Court was until earlier this morning:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that states may not impose excessive fines, extending a bedrock constitutional protection but potentially jeopardizing asset-forfeiture programs that help fund police operations with property seized from criminal suspects. //

The court also held that the Eighth Amendment did, indeed, apply to the states. This is the decision.