Live By The Court, Die By The Court

Well, this SCOTUS leak about Roe v. Wade has really livened things up. I think we might even have a new Current Thing on our hands, and will now be moving on from Ukraine, which of course became the Current Thing right after … well, I can’t quite recall … but it was very important.

It remains to be seen, of course, what the Court will do. If the Nine have in fact already decided the case, and were just fussing with drafts of the majority opinion, it seems unlikely that they’ll change their minds just because the leaked ruling happened to start a civil war, which it might well do. (With John Roberts in charge, however, you never know.)

As a detached observer, I have to ask: If the two most important things in the moral universe are Democracy and abortion law, why is it a catastrophe when the Court decides that abortion law should be determined democratically? All that the Court has said in the leaked opinion is, in effect, this:

“You folks seem to care a very great deal about the sovereignty of the people. Very well, then — if you really are fit to rule yourselves, here is a vexatiously difficult question upon which the Constitution is silent, and which, therefore, must be decided by the sovereign power of the nation. (That’s you, the People, in case you haven’t been following along, you knuckleheads!) We were wrong to take this sovereign power away from you back in ’73, and so now we’re giving it back to you.

Happy Democracy! Mind how you go.”

The response to all this, however, from the ironically named Democrats, has been to explode with anger that such an important issue might actually have to be worked out in a democratic fashion, by things like debating and voting. And perhaps that’s reasonable, because we don’t do any of that very well at all anymore; it seems that we are actually rather farther along in the great cycle of Polybius than the people running things would care to admit.

So, here we are, America: you’ve been doing a lot of yelling about “MUH DEMOCRACY” lately, and now it looks like you’re about to be served up a heaping helping of it. If you don’t really want it after all, that’s, fine — but in that case I think we’d be glad if you would please shut the hell up about it.