The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States (1-6-25)

https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158502 * As the Los Angeles Times editorialized [in 1942], “the theory that an alien invader has civil rights is absurd on its face.” * Before the United States entered the war, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), the justices voted 8 – 1 in the government’s favor. The case was brought by a family belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination whose beliefs proscribed saluting the flag. Felix Frankfurter’s majority opinion exhibited little sympathy for them. “National unity is the basis of national security,” Frankfurter declared. “The flag is the symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences.” He concluded that if the government thought unity could best be achieved by a compulsory flag salute, the courts had no business saying otherwise. * Furman v. Georgia [invalidating the death penalty] would be the farthest the Court would go in reinventing criminal procedure. The backlash was immediate. The day after Furman was decided, legislators in five states announced they would introduce bills to bring back the death penalty. Within a few years, thirty – five states and the federal government had new statutes authorizing capital punishment. Popular support for the death penalty skyrocketed. Fifty percent of respondents favored capital punishment in a Gallup poll conducted a few months before Furman was decided. A few months after Furman , the figure had grown to 57%, and within a few years it reached 65%. In every part of the country, the death penalty became more popular than it had been in many years, as people who had not given much thought to capital punishment now decided that the Supreme Court was wrong to abolish it. * The right of privacy in matters of childbirth was a new constitutional right, but so were most of the constitutional rights the Court had recognized over the past two decades, such as the right to attend integrated schools, the right to advocate communism, the right to an attorney during questioning by the police, or the right to a vote that was worth as much as the votes of the people in the next county. When Roe v. Wade arrived at the Court, it looked like it would be just another in a long line of cases applying recently established rights in new contexts. Indeed, the district court in which the pseudonymous Jane Roe filed her suit had already anticipated this outcome. The district court relied on Griswold to rule that Roe was entitled to obtain an abortion because the Texas law prohibiting abortion infringed her constitutional right “to choose whether to have children.” In Roe ’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton , another district court likewise invalidated parts of Georgia’s abortion law on the ground that Griswold established “a right to privacy which apparently is also broad enough to include the decision to abort a pregnancy.” 62 To the extent Roe would involve any change in the law, the heavy lifting seemed to have already been done. Unlike contraception, however, abortion was still illegal in most states in most circumstances. And while some of these state laws were quite old, others were not. https://odysee.com/@LukeFordLive, https://rumble.com/lukeford, https://dlive.tv/lukefordlivestreams Superchat: https://entropystream.live/app/lukefordlive Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/lukeford/ Soundcloud MP3s: https://soundcloud.com/luke-ford-666431593 Code of Conduct: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=125692 http://lukeford.net Email me: [email protected] or DM me on Twitter.com/lukeford, Best videos: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143746 Support the show | https://www.streamlabs.com/lukeford, https://patreon.com/lukeford, https://PayPal.Me/lukeisback Facebook: http://facebook.com/lukecford Book an online Alexander Technique lesson with Luke: https://alexander90210.com Feel free to clip my videos. It's nice when you link back to the original.