Sending the issue back to the [gerrymandered] states, and Congress, and 28-year-old Federalist Society hacks

One of the most delusional assertions made by both full-wingnut and centrist critics of Roe is that overruling Roe woukd take the federal jdiciary out of the business of hearing abortion cases. This was always really stupid, and it’s taken less than a year for this to become undeniable:

The case now before the court undercuts one of the core arguments justices made when they overturned Roe v. Wade in June: that it’s not appropriate for “unelected members of this Court” to “override the democratic process” and set national abortion policy.

“This Court will no longer decide the fundamental question of whether abortion must be allowed throughout the United States through 6 weeks, or 12 weeks, or 15 weeks, or 24 weeks, or some other line,” declared Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. “Instead, those difficult moral and policy questions will be decided, as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the constitutional processes of democratic self-government.”

While the issue currently before the court is a technical one that hinges on judicial and administrative processes and not the merits of the parties’ abortion-rights arguments, it will still have the kind of substantive national impact justices vowed in the Dobbs ruling to avoid.

“The justices were kidding themselves if they thought the decision in Dobbs would somehow get them out of the business of dealing with abortion cases,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “One would have to have remarkable blinders on not to have seen that.”

Kennedy left a void of the justice who writes bat faith concurrences (and sometimes majority opinions) asserting that maximalist decisions are really minimalist, and by gum Kavanaugh is determined to fill in for his mentor.