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Throughout the 2015-16 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, I urged conservatives not to nominate Donald Trump. When November 2016 arrived, I did not vote for Donald Trump. Of course, I most certainly didnt vote for Hillary Clinton. I wrote in another Republican instead.

One of my chief concerns was that I could not imagine that Donald Trump, a lifelong pro-choice, playboy, billionaire, obnoxious New Yorker, truly had become pro-life and would nominate pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. I had additional issues with Trump, but that one really stood out. When Trump produced a list of pro-life judges he promised to appoint, I didnt trust him.

In turn, many pro-life conservatives urged me to nonetheless vote for the lesser of two evils when it came to abortion. The Supreme Courtplus countless other court appointments at other levelshung in the balance. If Hillary Clinton was elected, we would lose the courts for at least another entire generation. You would never reverse Roe v. Wade and its companion case of insanity, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Pro-lifers insisted on voting to save the court.

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In that respect, they stand vindicated. I still had much I didnt like about Trump, but the man proceeded to govern as the best pro-life president the country ever had. It was astonishing, and I was shocked every step of the way, but it is indisputably true. A pro-life colleague of mine who loathes Donald Trump insists that Trump did what he did for pro-lifers strictly for political expediency. Even if that were the case (for the sake of argument), it is undeniable that Trump became the most effective pro-life president ever, including more so than my buddy Ronald Reagan.

Most critical and most obvious, of course, were Trumps three Supreme Court picks: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They gave you this reversal of Roe and Casey. Had Hillary Clinton been president, you wouldve gotten three more like Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (even as RBG knew and candidly admitted how flawed Roe was). (For the record, Reagan gave us Sandra Day OConnor, the hugely disappointing Anthony Kennedy, and just one outstanding pro-life pickAntonin Scalia.) Hillary Clinton quickly came forward after the Dobbs announcement to denounce a new day of infamy for America.

That said, what does this decision overturning Roe really mean?

First and foremost, it affirms what numerous constitutional scholarsincluding many liberal scholars and even the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburgalways knew, namely: Roe v. Wade had no basis in the U.S. Constitution. Roe was a constitutional absurdity. It was never constitutional. I heard one news anchor on Fox News report that the Dobbs decision eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. No. There never was a constitutional right to abortion. Thats the whole point.

Roe was preposterously based on a right to an abortion invented and extended from a so-called penumbra or shadow of a right to privacy lurking somewhere in the arcane recesses of the Constitution. In fact, neither abortion nor even the word privacy are mentioned in the Constitutionno, not one timeeven as the rights and protection of life is mentioned three times (in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments).

One can certainly argue that when the framers mentioned life, they were not thinking of abortion. No doubt that is correct. But still, a pro-lifer looking for a right to life in the Constitution clearly has a little more to grab on to than a pro-choicer looking for a right to abortion or even privacy.

Roe v. Wade is a legal absurdity that any jurist not jaded by ideology would concede was utterly without foundation in the U.S. Constitution. The reality is that the Constitution is silent on abortion, which is why the federal government should never have enshrined it. It should have been left to the states. This was something that Judge Robert Bork tried to explain to Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy and feminists and liberals everywhere over 30 years ago, and for which he was called everything from a misogynist to a gargoyle.

And so, abortion now goes to the states. What does that mean?

Despite the hyperbole and hysteria, this certainly does not mean an end to abortion. Not at all. You will now see the emergence of abortion statesthe abortion states of America. Already leading the charge at the state-level are the likes of New Yorks new pro-choice governor, Kathy Hochul, and Governor Gavin Newsom of California.

Vigorously supported by President Joe Biden, Hochul and Newsom are militantly committed to battling the efforts of states like Mississippi and Texas and others to limit abortions to the time of the unborn childs heartbeat. The Texas action outraged Joe Biden, who has promised to throw the whole of government against it. The bill infuriated Govs. Hochul and Newsom, who have responded by offering their states as destination centers for women nationwide to come for abortions.

Abortion access is safe in New York, Hochul ensures, To the women of Texas, I want to say I am with you. Lady Liberty is here to welcome you with open arms. She vows: We will help you find a way to New York.

As for Gavin Newsom, he vows to make California a reproductive freedom state. These are dark days, says a dire Newsom.

Whats happening with states like California and New York is something that many of us have long expected. Which states will be the dominant abortion states? Figuring that out isnt rocket science. The answer is simple and predictable: Go to political maps of presidential elections and look at the blue states vs. red states; that is, Democrat states vs. Republican states. The firmly Democrat states, especially on the West Coast and northeast, will become Americas abortion states. They will roll out the red carpet.

For states like New York and California, this process has already begun. The governors there are eager to fly the Roe flag as premier destination centers for abortion.

That sad reality ought to give some measure of comfort to pro-choice forces. They should be immensely satisfied with that they got from Roe. They got themselves nearly 50 years of legalized abortion. They threw open wide the doors to abortion clinics in every state. This long, insidious period was protracted enough to get them to a crucial hump they needed, namely: chemical abortions, abortions by pill, do-it-yourself-at-home abortions. This was symbolized by the group of young pro-abortion women who stood outside the Supreme Court a few months ago and en masse swallowed down abortion pills.

From here on, countless abortions will be done that wayas well as in the abortion states.

Pro-choicers: your choice will have plenty of options, including altogether new ones.

As for pro-lifers, they should nonetheless celebrate this achievement. Roe v. Wade was a monstrous injustice that produced over 60 million abortions of unborn children. It was a colossal sin and a dark stain on America.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and chief academic fellow of the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College. One of his latest books (August 2020) is The Devil & Karl Marx: Communisms Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration. He is also the author of is A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century (April 2017) and 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative. His other books include The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obamas Mentor and Dupes: How Americas Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

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What reversing Roe really means | | elkodaily.com - Elko Daily Free Press

A former president took a shot at another former president when asked a question on a late-night talk show.

What Happened: In an appearance on last weeks Late Late Show With James Corden, former President Bill Clinton was a featured guest.

The economy, international relations and aliens were among the key topics the duo talked about.

Corden also asked Clinton to take part in a segment called Ask a President, which hadmembers of the audience and staff ask the former president questions.

The show, which aired on Paramount Global PARAPARAA owned channel CBS, saw Clinton answer what makes a good leader, what plant-based milk is the best and if we could see a woman president.

Clinton answered yes that we will likely see a woman president, a Latino president and a gay president over the coming years.

Clinton also shared that he drinks almond milk, but it is vodka that is his favorite plant-based drink.

For a question aboutfictional presidents, he answered: I like Tony Goldwyn, I like Martin Sheen, I liked Michael Douglas, I loved Harrison Ford and Morgan Freeman and Donald Trump."

Related Link: 2024 President Election Betting Odds: Is Donald Trump Or Joe Biden The Current Favorite

Why Its Important: Trump served as the 45th president of the U.S. In the 2016 election, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the wife of Bill Clinton.

There is a long standing feud between Hillary Clinton and Trump, which likely led to the comments by Clinton on the late night talk show. The rest of the names singled out by Clinton portrayed presidents in movies or on television shows.

Hillary Clinton has ruled out another run for president of the U.S. Neither Trump or current PresidentJoe Biden, the last two presidents, have announced their intentions for the 2024 election, but both are expected to run.

Trump owned Trump Media & Technology Group is working to become a publicly traded company with a pending SPAC merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp DWAC.

Photo:Anthony Correia(Clinton) andEvan El-Amin(Trump) via Shutterstock

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Bill Clinton Takes A Shot At Donald Trump: Here's What He Said - Benzinga - Benzinga

Howard Stern is ripping the Supreme Courts decision striking down Roe v. Wade, saying the ruling might spur him to launch a White House bid.

Im actually going to probably have to run for president now, the SiriusXM host told Howard Stern Show listeners on Monday.

The show marked Sterns first public comments about Fridays Supreme Court decision, which overturned the 1973 landmark ruling that had provided a constitutional right to abortion.

Stern, whos long railed against the United States Electoral College system, said of conservative Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch: These appointed judges by [former President] Trump were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. This is where we get into trouble.

If he were to run for office, the 68-year-old radio pro said, I am going to do the very simple thing thatll set the country straight: one vote, one person. No more Electoral College. Im getting rid of it.

The problem with most presidents is they have too big of an agenda. The only agenda I would have is to make the country fair again, Stern said.

Stern slammed Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the 6-3 majority decision, describing him as sitting there like Darth Vader, dormant [and] waiting for other kooks to join the Supreme Court.

Ill give you a couple of examples of why this is so horrible, Stern said, as he mentioned everyday women who go to the doctor and they find out that the baby has horrible birth defects.

A lot of times women are raped. A lot of times contraception doesnt work. And then theres even a more confusing state where a man and a woman want to have a baby, and all of a sudden things go medically wrong, Stern later told a listener.

We were past all of this and we still are. We as a country voted for Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, Stern, who supported the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee over Trump, exclaimed.

We voted for Biden because it was repugnant all this horseshit, Stern continued. But now for life, were stuck.

The other thing is, if I do run for president and Im not f around, Im really thinking about it because the only other thing Im going to do is appoint five more Supreme Court justices, Stern said.

After co-host Robin Quivers questioned whether Stern could make such a change, he replied with a slight chuckle, I dont know. I dont know what Im doing exactly.

Im not afraid to do it. As soon as I become president, youre gonna get five new Supreme Court justices that are going to overturn all this bullshit.

Stern has floated a potential presidential run before. Last year, the Howard Stern Comes Again author said if he were to run against Trump in 2024, he would beat his ass. Trump has not confirmed a 2024 bid.

Stern ran as a libertarian in New Yorks gubernatorial race in 1994, before dropping out after the states Supreme Court upheld a requirement that he would have to disclose his personal finances as a political candidate.

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Howard Stern on Roe v. Wades overturning: Im actually going to probably have to run for president now - The Hill

If theres any doubt about the extremism of the Supreme Courts six Republican appointees, it was on full display with their opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Womens Health Organization, which overrules Roe v. Wade, establishing the right to an abortion. Roe had been the law of the land for almost 50 years.

Even more ominous is Clarence Thomas concurring opinion, in which he argues that the same rationale the court used to overrule Roe should be used to overturn cases establishing rights to contraception, same-sex consensual relations and same-sex marriage. Thomas is pointing the way for the radicals on the court to take in the future.

If the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution doesnt protect abortion, says Thomas, the court should reconsider other cases that rely on the same clause: Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples have a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.

Thomas says the court has a duty to correct the error established in those precedents. Thats not all. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions protected the rights they established, says Thomas.

I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. Also in my class at the time was Clarence Thomas, along with Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

As Ive noted before, our law professors used the Socratic method asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis Latin for to stand by things decided. Its the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights or gay marriage), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. The Supreme Court can change its mind and rule differently than before, but it needs good reasons to do so, and it helps if the justices opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, the rulings appear (and are) arbitrary even, shall we say? political.

In those classroom discussions almost 50 years ago, Hillarys hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarences hand was never in the air. I dont recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. He and five of his colleagues all appointed by Republican presidents, five by presidents who lost the popular vote, three by a president who instigated a coup against the United States are now violating stare decisis. They have not given a clear and convincing argument for why. Thomas wants the court to reverse more than a half century of rights.

The Supreme Court is now firmly in the hands of radicals, eager to throw stare decisis out the window. They are part of the anti-democracy movement now threatening America.

Read more from Robert Reich at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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The shame of the Supreme Court | News, Sports, Jobs - Minot Daily News

Hardly a day goes by in contemporary America without a mass casualty event produced by capitalist reaction. On Monday evening, a semi-truck trailer filled with bodiessome dead, some still clinging to lifewas discovered a stones throw from a busy interstate highway in San Antonio, Texas.

The truck was carrying undocumented immigrants fleeing desperate economic conditions in Central America and the legacy of over a century of US imperialist exploitation. The immigrants were forced to enter surreptitiously due to the anti-immigrant restrictions imposed by the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden.

So far, the official death toll is 46, but this is expected to rise, as local officials say 16 others were hospitalized at varying stages of illness. This is the deadliest such event in US history. It doubles the death toll of the second highest mass immigrant asphyxiation, when 19 people suffocated in a truck trailer in Victoria, Texas, in 2003.

Earlier Monday, temperatures in San Antonio hit 103 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius). It is difficult to imagine how those who perished in the trailer spent their last moments struggling to escape. One individual who lives near the spot where the trailer was found told the New York Times, Now Im hearing there are kids. Families often make the journey together.

After discovering the trailer, police and Border Patrol reportedly deployed military-grade heat-seeking equipment to search for and detain any immigrants who managed to escape.

This social crime is the responsibility of the Biden administration, which was elected on the basis of mass opposition to the fascist Donald Trump, but whose administration has carried out a ruthless attack on immigrants, arresting more in 2021 than Trump detained in any one year in office. Biden is on pace to arrest some 2 million immigrants this year, a new record. Two days ago, Biden ended all previous restrictions on ICE arrests, ordering agents to arrest immigrants regardless of arrest record or how many years they have been in the United States.

The trailer was discovered in Texas hardly 24 hours after Spanish and Moroccan border police carried out a brutal melee attack on a crowd of African immigrants attempting to cross into the Spanish outpost of Melilla on Africas northern coast. At least 36 immigrants died, some after being beaten by police, some hanging from the barbed wire border fence, some in the stampede that followed the police assault.

Both crimes expose the lie that the US and its NATO allies are waging war against Russia in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. If these crimes had taken place in Russia, the imperialist governments would have used them as pretenses to justify further escalation of a war which threatens the world with nuclear catastrophe.

It is already clear that the political establishment in the US will respond to the mass death in San Antonio by using the event to justify a further crackdown on immigration. An hour before the bodies were discovered in his district, Texas Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales tweeted that immigration is incentivizing lawlessness and creating absolute chaos at our southern border.

After the event, Gonzales blamed Democrats for being insufficiently iron fisted. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a fascist supporter of Trump, blamed Biden for the deaths, tweeting: They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.

The corporate media will alternate between demands for a military-style crackdown on the border and denunciations of whichever criminal was driving and abandoned the trailer in the heat.

But the existence of smugglers is a criminal byproduct of the bipartisan border policies of the US government which are fundamentally to blame.

Deaths like these did not occur prior to the militarization of the US-Mexico border initiated by Democratic President Bill Clinton. In the 1990s, Clinton, with the support of Democrats and Republicans, enacted programs like Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold-the-Line, the aim of which was to militarize urban crossing zones and force migrants to cross in the uninhabitable deserts.

In 2006, under the George W. Bush administration, Congress passed the Secure Fences Act, which facilitated the construction of hundreds of miles of border barriers and further militarized the border. Those voting yes for this law included then-Senators Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and Charles Schumer.

In 2010, Obama signed legislation that deployed a fleet of drones to the border and 1,500 National Guard soldiers to block or arrest immigrants. In 2018, the Democratic Party caved when Trump illegally redirected congressionally-apportioned money to fund his deployment of the National Guard to the border. The Biden administration kept pandemic-related restrictions on all asylum applicants and kept Trumps Remain In Mexico policy in place, which barred all refugees from entering the US through Mexico.

The trailer was discovered in southwest San Antonio, barely a mile from where nine immigrants were found dead of dehydration and asphyxiation in the back of a semi-truck trailer almost exactly five years ago, on July 17, 2017. At that time, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:

The world is pulsing with people who are forced to flee their homes under the weight of decades of economic exploitation and war. According to a UN report from 2015, there are 65.3 million refugees in the world, more than the population of the United Kingdom, France or Italy.

The refugee crisis is the product of the capitalist system and requires a socialist solution. Never in history has the contradiction between the ease with which capital flows across borders and the difficulty with which human beings flee across national boundaries been so acute. As the world economy becomes increasingly interconnected through the advent of the Internet, mobile phones and integrated global supply lines, the ruling classes of the so-called democratic countries are increasingly protecting themselves, as Leon Trotsky put it, by a customs wall and a hedge of bayonets.

Socialists reject attempts to reconcile left-wing slogans with nationalist poison. Figures like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US expose their pro-capitalist outlook when they talk about reasonable management of migration (Corbyns Labour Party manifesto) and denounce open borders as a right-wing proposal that would make everybody in America poorer (Sanders interview withVox, July 18, 2015).

Socialists oppose the division of the world into nation-states and call for bringing the geographical organization of the world into harmony with the international character of the global economy.

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At least 46 undocumented immigrants found dead in truck trailer in sweltering Texas heat - WSWS