Thread by @poet_economist

Samuel Alito is attempting to use the power of the Supreme Court to erase the personhood of women in the United States. He is attempting to void the right to remedy & redress. He is declaring war on American democracy & the right of all Americans to be free from arbitrary abuse.

When Alito argues that unenumerated rights are not protected by the Constitution. The #9thAmendment—which explicitly protects unenumerated rights—says Alito is absolutely unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.

Samuel Alito testified under oath in his confirmation hearings that the Roe decision “deserves to be protected”. This was clearly a lie under oath. That lie was used to take a seat on the Court. That crime is currently ongoing.

In the state of Missouri, anti-democracy misogynist extremists are attempting to ban women from crossing state lines, from speaking to their friends & relatives, from even leaning on someone for emotional support. Alito knows this & sees it as either welcome or not his problem.

Ask yourself this: If Missouri is allowed to implement this totalitarian law & take control not only of women’s bodies, but also their human relationships, their conversations & their right to freedom of movement… how would they know who is doing what?

In order to obtain the information they would use to persecute women in this sadistic, totalitarian police-state way, they would do what police states do & criminalize every human being & every human relationship…

They would—as Alito does—behave as if the 1st, 4th, 5th & 9th Amendments do not exist, selectively voiding basic rights they find inconvenient given their quest to command & control the sacred spirit & free will of each person within their borders…

But the Missouri extremists go even further than that: They claim the right to nullify the personhood & void the basic rights of anyone who interacts with anyone in Missouri & also with people who *might have* conceived while in or near Missouri…

Again: How would they know what they need to know in order to do any of this? The #4thAmendment itself explicitly makes it illegal for them to access most of the information they would need. But Alito’s draft is so extreme, it reminds us to read the #3rdAmendment…

The Constitution’s framers were rightly worried about a new imperial invasion or forced military occupation. So, the #3rdAmendment guarantees all Americans that they cannot be forced to allow military occupation of their homes. By extension, we are protected from ensuing abuses.

What Alito claims—that there is no private space in the Constitution & no unenumerated rights exist—means the Missouri extremists could ignore the need for cause-based judicial warrants & set up a kind of forced occupation of residents’ lives.

This is what happened under the Warsaw Pact during the Soviet Union’s decades-long reign of terror. Anyone could be spied on at any time; no one’s body, thoughts, relationships or talents were their own. This is what the Missouri extremists want to achieve: the end of democracy.

Alito knows he is empowering this hostile takeover of American life. He knows this is not about legal technicalities or putting 1,000 miles between a woman & a clinic. He knows it is about authoritarian theocracy. His draft reads like a diatribe grounded in personal obsession…

Chief Justice Roberts knows all of this too. As much as I have disagreed with Roberts on issues of major consequence, he has come to understand that the Court can play its stabilizing, liberating role only if it is credible & aligned with protecting against abuse of power.

The current Court maintains credibility & therefore legitimacy only because the 5 Justices in the leaked majority have NOT done what they now try to do, after having testified under oath that they believed Roe “deserves to be protected” (Alito’s own version of the lie)…

When we consider all of these things together, it becomes evident that Alito & those who might join his extremist anti-democracy opinion 1) want to void parts of the Bill of Rights, 2) want to make room for authoritarian theocracy, 3) want to corrupt the Court for their aims…

The Missouri extremists & the Texas bounty-hunter law both attempt to claim primacy over the jurisdiction of other states. Like the Fugitive Slave Act, they claim to nullify personhood in other states & seek to limit the rights those states can protect.

This authoritarian secessionist reasoning is obviously against the Constitutional order & even seeks to subvert the Supreme Court’s own proper authority. In the 1860s, this led to civil war. The #14thAmendment’s equal protection clause is partly about avoiding that.

Alito knows this as well. The Constitution cannot hold if some states can make some people’s bodies property of the state & erase their human rights by legislative fiat. That was true before the #13thAmendment was adopted & it is true now.

Every Supreme Court Justice, like every Senator & Member of the House of Representatives, has sworn an oath to the Constitution. That Alito makes perverse claims & cites a murderer of witches does not empower him to ignore or subvert the Constitution’s safeguards of our rights.

By writing this cruel, obsessive, anti-Constitutional draft, Justice Alito has made his tenure on the Court untenable. He has revealed himself to have lied under oath, to have little understanding of basic legal principles & to have no ethical code whatsoever.

What Alito proposes, were it adopted as law, were it feasible in practice, would open the door to arbitrary power dehumanizing & expropriating not only women, but also men, children, ideas, businesses, private property, the right to form associations & faith institutions.

All of those other freedoms require an active & committed defense of the sovereign humanity of the individual, including their right to make choices about their bodies, about where to be, where to travel, about health & with whom they associate.

Article III of the Constitution says Justices may serve only “during good Behaviour”. This unbelievable act of malice toward the Constitution & the American people, laden with such craven contempt for the primacy of rights over power, fails the “good Behaviour” test.