By Chris Powell
How, some people ask resentfully, does the Supreme Court get to tell states they can restrict or even outlaw abortion but not guns?
The question is misleading.
The court didn’t make up the law on abortion and guns. Rightly or wrongly, the court construes the law already in place, the Constitution, and the Constitution itself answers the question.
That is, gun rights have their own amendment in the Constitution even as the Constitution never mentions abortion. This doesn’t mean that a case for abortion rights can’t be construed from the Constitution’s provisions about liberty, just that a constitutional right to abortion is a stretch.
From that point on the abortion issue is entirely a matter of policy preferences and political posturing.
For example, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong denounced the recent abortion decision, charging that it “carves our nation in two” — as if the original carving was not done by the court’s first abortion decision 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, which its supporters hoped would stifle argument. It didn’t. That first carving is still OK with Tong.
Tong, a Democrat, thunders that he will defend Connecticut’s abortion law against any attempt by Republicans in Congress to nullify it through a federal law prohibiting abortion throughout the country. But the attorney general overlooks that the abortion legislation recently pressed by Democrats in Congress, the Women’s Health Protection Act, [ITALICS] also [END ITALICS] would nullify Connecticut’s abortion law, canceling its prohibition of abortion after fetal viability, [ITALICS] requiring [END ITALICS] the state to allow it.
Indeed, insofar as they have endorsed their party’s legislation in Congress, Connecticut’s leading Democrats — Governor Lamont, the state’s seven members of Congress, and Tong himself — are extremists, supporting post-viability abortion, even abortion at the moment of birth.
Insofar as leading Republicans in Connecticut generally favor allowing abortion before viability and prohibiting it afterward — the position articulated by the Roe decision, Connecticut law, and, according to polls, supported by most people nationally and in Connecticut — Republicans in Connecticut are the moderates.
Tong says he will defend Connecticut law against Republican legislation that has not yet even been formulated in Congress. Will he defend Connecticut law against his own party’s legislation already pending in Congress? Or does Tong want only to generate partisan hysteria?
The political left, which dominates Connecticut, asserts that the new abortion decision oppresses women. But any oppression here is done not by the court but by states with highly restrictive or prohibitive laws, and these states would not have such laws if many if not most of their own women did not support them. So far those women seem to oppose abortion more than they feel oppressed.
In any case claims of gender oppression are weak now that the political left imagines not only that men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports contests but also that men can get pregnant and have abortions as well.
The Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the New York state law that long has virtually prohibited citizens from carrying guns also has sparked some hysteria among Democrats in Connecticut. Some people say the decision will turn New York into the Wild West, as if, despite its virtually prohibitive law, New York hasn’t had plenty of gun crime anyway.
The law has prevented people from obtaining permits to carry guns unless they could show they faced a specific and serious threat. A general desire for self-defense wasn’t enough. Thus the law nullified Second Amendment rights, and the New York Legal Aid Society said it was used for discrimination against Blacks.
Now New York may have to follow Connecticut’s practice of presuming that an applicant should get a permit unless he is deemed a special risk.
It is hardly noticed but Connecticut’s own Constitution is more explicit about gun rights than the federal Constitution, declaring: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”
Can Attorney General Tong be trusted to defend that right against his own party’s hysteria?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 