Tea at Trianon: Unsafe, Legally...

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 15, 2020

Unsafe, Legally...

From The Federalist:

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in its first abortion case since the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. While outside the high court Sen. Chuck Schumer stoked the anger of abortion apologists by threatening the newest justices, inside the courtroom the lawyers representing the abortion providers cemented a new reality: that the abortion industry doesn’t want “safe, legal, and rare,”—it wants “unsafe, legally.”

That reality became clear in an exchange with Justice Kavanaugh about the Louisiana law under review in June Medical Serv. v. Russo, Sec. LA Dep’t of Health. That law requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

A lower court had struck the Louisiana law, holding the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt controlled. That decision held a Texas law requiring abortionists to maintain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic was unconstitutional. But on appeal, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals set aside Hellerstedt, reasoning that unlike the situation in Texas, the Louisiana law would not create an unconstitutional burden on a women’s “right” to abortion.

On appeal to the Supreme Court, the abortion providers argued that the Louisiana law, like the Texas law, placed an undue burden on women’s ability to access abortions. But Kavanaugh pushed their attorneys in a different direction: “If a state passed an admitting privileges law there, and suppose a state had ten clinics and two doctors for each clinic, but all 20 doctors could easily get the admitting privileges, so that there would be no effect on the clinics, no effect on the doctors who perform abortions, and, therefore, no effect on the women who obtain abortions,” Justice Kavanaugh hypothesized, “would a law be constitutional in that state?” (Read more.)