Dear Leader Goes Down on the Dominion

If he can't have a crony he'll have a Scalito.

The AmeriTaliban feel much better being able to hate the 21st century all together again instead of sniping at Cheneyburton.

Billmon has a good take-down on this.

Having finally tracked down and read Judge Alito's 3rd Circuit dissent in Planned Parenthood v Casey, I certainly hope that over the next several weeks pro-choice voters in Maine (Snowe, Collins) Rhode Island (Chafee) Ohio (Voinovich, DeWine) and the other haunts of "moderate" Republicans are made aware of the fact that Bush's nominee believes husbands have a vested property right in their wives' uteruses...

...the fact that Justice O'Connor -- whose various balancing tests Scalito relies heavily upon in his dissent -- basically slapped him down cold ("Section 3209's husband notification provision constitutes an undue burden, and is therefore invalid." full stop) suggests she at least thought he was full of it.

True, there are no "gotcha" lines -- Little Scalia apparently doesn't share Big Scalia's tendency to showboat -- but his legal reasoning in Casey can easily be reduced to a few viscerally offensive points, suitable for 30-second ads:

* Scalito equates Pennsylvania's spousal notification laws with the parental notification requirements upheld by the O'Connor court. Women are children, in other words, and stand in relationship to their husbands as minors stand to their legal guardians:

"Justice O’Connor has also suggested on more than one occasion that no undue burden was created by the statute upheld in H.L. v. Matheson . . . which required parental notice prior to any abortion on an unemancipated minor . . .These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209 (the PA spousal notification requirement.)"

* Because the vast majority of married women tell their husbands before they have an abortion, those who don't are not worthy of the law's protection:

"In the trial testimony on which the district court relied, the plaintiffs’ witness stated that in her experience 95% of married women notify their husbands. Second, the overwhelming majority of abortions are sought by unmarried women. Thus, it is immediately apparent that Section 3209 cannot affect more than about 5% of married women seeking abortions or an even smaller percentage of all women desiring abortions."

* The risk that a husband might retaliate against a wife with psychological torment -- or by hurting her children -- is too insignificant to qualify as an "undue burden," even though plaintiffs established that such behavior is frequent in spousal abuse cases:

"The plaintiffs . . . do not appear to have offered any evidence showing how many (or indeed that any actual women) would be affected by this asserted imperfection in the statute."

* The fact that pregnancy notification has been documented as a flashpoint for spousal abuse is also irrelevant:

"This proof indicates when violence is likely to occur in an abusive marriage but provides no basis for determining how many women would be adversely affected by Section 3209."

* It's OK if some women get beaten up by their husbands, because others wouldn't:

"Of the potentially affected women who could not invoke an exception, it seems safe to assume that some percentage, despite an initial inclination not to tell their husbands, would notify their husbands without suffering substantial ill effects."

Scalito's reasoning becomes even more of an exercise in the defense of masculine property rights when he tries to determine if the state of Pennsylvania has a "legitimate" state interest in requiring spousal notification...

From this, he concludes:

"It follows that a husband has a “legitimate” interest in the welfare of a fetus he has conceived with his wife."

Got that guys? You own the sperm, you have parental rights over the child, ergo, you've got a miner's claim on the missus's uterus, too. So have a cigar on Little Scalia...

having sampled Scalito's intellectual wares in the Casey case, I think I can say unequivocally that this is a battle that has to be fought to the bitter end -- up to and including nuclear war. Little Scalia has to be attacked with any and every legal tool at the left's disposal, and for my money, Casey is a pretty good place to start.

And if that be Borking, let us make the most of it.

May this attitude spread out everywhere.