Supreme Court to Investigate Leak?, Americans Face Criminal Charges for...Posting Memes? Is SCOTUS the Latest Victim of the Culture War? Texas Lets Immigrant Drown. (The Five for 05/03/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
This is…a very heavy issue.
[one]
Unless you’ve been on the side of a mountain for the last 18 hours, you’ve no doubt head about the unprecedented Supreme Court leak, which reveal a still-in-process opinion overturning Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case where the court found a Constitutional right to abortion.
The story has been everywhere, but it’s worth taking a look at the original Politico report on the leak:
The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.
The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.
The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.
Observations:
A. Contrary to what you may have heard, overturning Roe doesn’t outlaw abortion, but instead pushes the issue back down to individual states to decided at the state level.
B. Contrary to the perception in the U.S., most of Europe, (traditionally more political left), bans abortions at 15 weeks, and are far more restrictive than the U.S. (Source: New York Times)
C. Voices on both sides of the political aisle seemed to agree overturning Roe will accelerate “The Great Sort,” with more and more Americans relocating to a new state to live in a place that more closely aligns with their beliefs and ideals.
D. Bari Weiss, a pro-choice, moderate-to-far-left journalist, (she’s lobbied to “Abolish the Second Amendment”) wrote on Substack today that she believes this is the end of the public’s trust in institution of the Supreme Court, another casualty of the culture war.
I called up one of the smartest professors I know at one of the top law schools in the country, and he echoed that: “To my knowledge, it’s never happened before in the modern history of the court. It is the most serious possible breach.”
Serious, severe, shocking, he said. But in the end, not surprising. Why not? Here’s how he put it: “To me, the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing.”
What did he mean by that? “They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.”
He went on: “I’m sure this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.”
[two]
The big question right now is…where did the leak come from?
Most news sources are pointing to a clerk (or possibly even a dissenting Justice) leaking the document.
According to CBS, Justice John Roberts is calling for an investigation, as a leak like this has quite literally never happened in American history.
[three]
The Roe story may dominating the headlines, but a new Biden Administration appointee tasked with fighting “Disinformation” has raised at least circumstanial concerns that Americans could be criminally prosecuted for posting memes.
ABC Traverse City, MI reports:
Resurfaced tweets from Nina Jankowicz, the head of President Joe Biden's new "Disinformation Governance Board," show she is concerned about social media and tech companies allowing "maligned creativity" on their platforms.
"Maligned creativity" is, according to Jankowicz, a sort of code language in which users can hide their racist, sexist, transphobic, or other "harmful" content by use of memes so that such posts can avoid moderation teams and bans.
The Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have mockingly called the "Ministry of Truth," has been criticized as an Orwellian, partisan effort.
In a Twitter thread posted back in Jan. 2021, Jankowicz shared a summary of the results of her team's study on online harassment in a publication called "Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online."
The big question is now…who gets to decide what “coded language” is.
For 200 years, the interpretation of the First Amendment is that the Constitution protects your right to say things others don’t like…so it’s entirely possible we see a high profile court case about…memes.
[four]
After a National Guardsman died trying to save migrants from drowning in the Rio Grande, the Texas National Guard has been ordered not to conduct water rescues. This resulted in a likely preventable death of a 39 year old Nicaraguan man this week.
Llenas said on the Texas side of the river, members of the National Guard were present with rescue boats and life preservers, but they did nothing to try and keep the man from drowning. “A National Guardsman told me they were ordered not to perform any more water rescues in the Rio Grande river” after the death last month of a Texas National Guard soldier who drowned trying to save two migrants.
[five]
Finally, we’ll wra up on a cultural oddity, but one that’s quickly growing in popularity.
The COVID lockdowns led to an increase in plastic surgeries, including an unprecedented number of men getting facelifts and Botox for the first time.
But there’s a much more drastic surgery gaining steam with men—limb lengthening to make men taller.
Surgically lengthening limbs is not new. It has existed in some form for nearly 100 years. People wounded in military service or car crashes would get the procedure, often as a way to correct mismatched length in legs. What is relatively new is the deployment of the surgery for elective and cosmetic ends — that’s only about 15 years old. In other words, people are now choosing to undergo the procedure just because they want to.
Mahboubian nonchalantly described the “minimally invasive” procedure like a man recounting his breakfast. “Through small little incisions, I cut the bone surgically,” he began. “Then I insert a rod — we call it a nail or a rod — that goes inside the bone. The rod is magnetic and it has gears. Then there’s an external device that communicates with the nail. And over time, little by little, it lengthens out the nail.” The lengthening happens gradually. “We usually say about a millimeter a day, until they get to their desired height.”
There is a ceiling on how much height a patient can gain. “The maximum is 8 centimeters, because that's the limit of the nail. Anything beyond 8 centimeters is when we see most of the complications.”
According to Buzzfeed, the number one reason men are seeking the surgery is a limited dating pool for guys under six feet.
Until the next one,
-sth