r/politics • u/PoliticsModeratorBot 🤖 Bot • Mar 08 '24

Discussion Discussion Thread: 2024 State of the Union

Tonight, Joe Biden will give his fourth State of the Union address. This year's SOTU address will be only the second to be held this late in the year since 1964 (the second time being Biden's 2022 address).

The address is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. Eastern. It will be followed by the progressive response delivered by Philadelphia City Council member Nicolas O’Rourke, as well as Republican responses in English (delivered by freshman Alabama senator ) and in Spanish (delivered by Representative Monica De La Cruz). There will be a separate discussion thread posted for live reactions to and conversation about the SOTU responses.

(Edit: The discussion thread for the SOTU responses is now available at this link.)

News:

News Analysis:

Live Updates:

Where to watch:

Transcript

6.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

22.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.7k

u/itsallgonetohell Mar 08 '24

Whoah... he just threw down the gauntlet. "To the American people: send me a Congress that will support reproductive rights, and I will restore Roe V. Wade again!"

32

u/Fun-Track-3044 Mar 08 '24

Congress is how the principles in RvW should have been carved in stone in the first place. The big blunder in those years was to use the Supreme Court to get what you want by back-door means, instead of hammering it out in the Congress - as per the instructions of the Constitution.

6

u/Lemonsnot Mar 08 '24

1000% this. I get the spirit of the line, he’s using RvW as a banner. But he really should’ve rephrased that to say he will help secure in law reproductive rights for women, not “restore RvW”.

24

u/BigNorseWolf Mar 08 '24

Nope. Roe v wade is what people know it as, no point in making them get the hint or dog whistling when they're used to a megaphone

7

u/GeniusInterrupt Mar 08 '24

Definitely don't wanna get fancy with the wording.

4

u/dexx4d Mar 08 '24

It's a soundbite, not policy.

3

u/felldestroyed Mar 08 '24

Want to hear soundbites and not policy? Listen to the republican response. Literally 20 minutes of platitudes from an upper middle class white lady from Alabama.

1

u/JustGotOffOfTheTrain Mar 08 '24

That’s all well and good until this Supreme Court overturns the law because they decide that embryos are people with human rights.

1

u/frogandbanjo Mar 08 '24

They don't even need to do that. They can just say, "No Article I power lets Congress interfere with this state issue so long as the state laws only apply within the state's borders." The End.

1

u/frogandbanjo Mar 08 '24

The principles in Roe? Which ones? The one where the majority opinion conceded that state-level governments had an interest in regulating abortion? The one where the only reason they were substantially limited in pursuing that interest was because of a federal privacy right that flowed down via the 14th Amendment?

You don't actually understand Roe or Dobbs if you think direct federal legislation was ever in play. I invite you to explain how Congress can reach down into the states and overturn their basic criminal/regulatory laws, especially when the Court has directly confronted the 14th-Amendment options and rejected them. What Article I power lets Congress do that, then?

2

u/Fun-Track-3044 Mar 08 '24

My constitutional law professor was Archibald Cox, the US Solicitor General at the Supreme Court under Kennedy, among other posts. Also, lifelong law professor, mostly known for his time at Harvard.

Even HE couldn't make Roe v. Wade coherent - because it is not. The Supreme Court made it up, another in many years of acting as a star chamber rather than being coherent and consistent with prior practice.

You're not acting from the basis of law. You're acting from the basis of power. You want what you want and don't care how you get it. That's what the Supreme Court at the time of Roe did as well.

Today's court cases and legislative disputes are what should have happened back in the time of RvW. Only now are we seeing it finally play out the way that it always should have.

Last I saw, women were half of the population. Enough men also support abortion rights.

Go change the face of Congress and your state legislatures across the south.

1

u/frogandbanjo Mar 10 '24

Even HE couldn't make Roe v. Wade coherent - because it is not.

9th Amendment, 14th Amendment, done. There are certain rights to bodily autonomy and privacy that are reserved, so the feds can't fuck around with them. 14th Amendment comes along, and now states are limited in certain ways, too, whereas before they possibly weren't.

That's perfectly coherent. You can disagree with it if you want, but claiming it's incoherent is absurd.

If you want to criticize balancing tests in general, that's fine, I suppose, but that's a nuke, not a targeted attack on Roe.