SCOTUS: We’ve only just begun

By BRUCE LOWITT

In addition to its recently revealed initial draft majority opinion striking down Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court appears to be planning to overturn numerous other long-standing opinions on race, sex and privacy as well as anything else it doesn’t like.

“When I wrote that ‘It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,’ what I was really saying is that we’re just getting started,” Justice Samuel Alito said.

When Justice Brett Kavanaugh was asked how he and fellow justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by former President Donald Trump, could make a ruling completely contradicting the positions they gave during confirmation hearings when they said Roe v. Wade is an accepted precedent of the Supreme Court and was constitutionally protected, Kavanaugh replied, “We’re employing the Marjorie Taylor Greene defense: ‘We don’t remember. … We don’t recall.’

“You want another legal opinion?” Kavanaugh added. “Go f— yourself! We’re also going after Griswold v. Connecticut (1965, the right to obtain contraceptives), Meyer v. Nebraska (1923, the right not to be sterilized without consent), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015, the right to marry a person of the same sex). You think we’re just screwing around here? No one has the right to privacy if we don’t like what they’re doing.”

Justice Clarence Thomas said the demolition of the 1973 Roe decision and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision reaffirming it “makes me feel like we can do any damned thing we want and that’s what we’re going to do, starting with Brown v. Board of Education,” the 1954 landmark decision that invalidated the “separate-but-equal” doctrine.

“What’s wrong with separate but equal?” Thomas said. “When Ginni serves me dinner she separates the peas from the potatoes and both of them from the salmon. Everyone knows it’s gross when foods touch each other, but I consider them all equally delicious. What’s wrong with that?”

Justice Barrett, who said she plans, during the court’s summer recess, to finish filming her role as Serena Joy Waterford in the film version of The Handmaid’s Tale, wrote her own initial draft majority opinion to overturn Leser v. Garnett, the decision which reaffirmed the constitutionality of the 19^th Amendment in 1920 that granted women the right to vote.

“Leser was egregiously wrong from the start. It’s reasoning was exceptionally weak and the decision has had damaging consequences,” Barrett wrote, copying Alito’s draft verbatim, which so pissed him off that he began researching decisions on plagiarism.

Barrett said that “fifty-seven percent of women who voted in the 2020 presidential election voted for Joe Biden. That alone shows they’re incapable of making a rational decision. Without them, Trump would still be in the White House.”

When Justice Kavanaugh tried to introduce his draft, Barrett said, “Wait. I’m not through. There’s also Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which overturned 1883’s Pace v. Alabama decision outlawing miscegenation. And Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, which overturned Bowers v. Hardwick,” a 1986 case in which the court upheld a Georgia law that forbade oral or anal sex between consenting adults regardless of the sexual orientation of either party.

“God knows I’ve seen enough movies and read enough books with all that filth going on,” Barrett said. “And from what I hear from friends in Florida, it’s even in math books down there. Disgusting.”

Portions of several other leaked opinions suggest that the court also plans to make Christianity the United States’ official religion, establish English as the nation’s only legal language, limit voting in federal elections to landowners, and bar women from military service except as nurses and USO hostesses.

Justice Kavanaugh eventually announced he had written an initial draft majority opinion of his own declaring the 21^st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to be unconstitutional.

“Wait a minute,” soon-to-retire Justice Stephen Breyer said, interrupting Kavanaugh’s rant. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Beer,” Kavanaugh said. “I like beer, lots of beer. Lots and lots of beer. And if the government says I can’t have …”

“You schmuck,” Breyer said. “Of course you can. The 18^th Amendment said you couldn’t. The 21^st says you can.”

“Oh, shit,” Kavanaugh said. “I always thought it was the other way around.”