Precedent or plaything: Roe v. Wade

I had been in D.C. for just a couple months when I met a Supreme Court justice. I was awe-struck. As I led William O. Douglas to the TV studio where we’d film a show with the congressman I worked for, I could only think of how special our country was, how much the Supreme Court building itself meant as a symbol of our democracy.

Today, the court’s behavior about Roe v. Wade, turns that hallowed hall into a hollow one. Leaks from someone within, a justice’s wife intruding, precedent turned into passing fancy, make me weep.

I regularly took constituents to the court. The adults were silent as they looked; the kids didn’t jump around or pole at each other. I wish the present Republican appointed judges were as dignified as those kids.

They aren’t. They have made mockery of their own words delivered in response to Republican senators’ during their confirmation hearings.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, in 2017, asked Neil Gorsuch, “Can you tell me if Roe was decided correctly?” A non-ambiguous question got a non-ambiguous answer:

“I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. … It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So, a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”

In 2005, another Republican senator, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, asked nominee and now Chief Justice John Roberts “In your confirmation hearing for circuit court, your testimony … has been widely quoted: ”Roe is the settled law of the land.“ Do you mean settled for you, settled only for your capacity as a circuit judge, or settled beyond that?”

Here's Robert’s answer: “It’s settled as a precedent of the court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis. And those principles, applied in the Casey case, explain when cases should be revisited and when they should not. And it is settled as a precedent of the Court, yes.”

What has happened since to change their minds, or at least their mouths? When does precedent become irrelevant?

Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues have turned an awesome place of democracy, the Supreme Court chamber, into a bowling alley, more noise than substance.

What effect will the conservative attack on Roe mean for us, both men and women, in Iowa? Abortions would likely be totally banned, unless the state Supreme Court holds the line. That means directly affecting several thousand women who now have abortions annually here, 4,000 in 2020.

An abortion denied means a life sentence, unwanted at birth, probably raised as more a burden than a pleasure, possibly the permanent victim of limited love, if any.

We will have about 20 states, many of them our larger ones, permitting abortion. The trip from Ottumwa or Cedar Rapids or a solitary farmhouse is expensive and lonely, but many Iowans will make the trip. Some will die, when the present court, without shame, destroys what once they described as precedent.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”