Roberts Court May Be Defined in Second Term (Greenhouse Effect)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — If Year 1 was the transition for the new Roberts court, Year 2 is likely to be the test.

During the first term under the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the justices were able to find common ground with some regularity by agreeing not to decide much. By the time the term ended in late June, the extent to which the members of the newly configured court were prepared to confront either precedent or one another remained unclear.

Chances are high that the new term, which begins on Monday, will be different. The cases that the court has agreed to decide — 38 so far — offer few off-ramps, requiring instead that the justices proceed to rulings that will define the new court in both substance and style.

Less than six weeks from now, for example, the court will hear the Bush administration’s defense of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. While there are some secondary issues, there is no escaping the fact that at the end of the day, the Supreme Court will have to declare whether the federal statute is constitutional. In doing so, it will have to grapple with the meaning of a 5-to-4 decision that struck down a similar state law six years ago. The administration will argue that if the federal statute cannot coexist with that precedent, the court should overrule the earlier case.

This is the reporter with no credibility after her very partisian speech a few months. Such is the old gray hag fishwrap. Now see without the internet I would have never known this. I would however never had read anything the NYT ever printed. The NYT did not exsist for me. Who in the rest of the contry even reads the NYT. They are very arrogant thinking they control much of anything.

Hey Linda Spleenhouse, why don't you digest this and then stop catterwalling and spewing false talking points as if they were "news":

"When you're a doctor who does these abortions and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and go on network news and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances, how do you think that makes you feel? You know they're primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses, and it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret. I think we should tell them the truth, let them vote and move on. In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along. The abortion-rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else." - Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, in "An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure", New York Times, 2/26/1997

"One of the facts of abortion is that women enter abortion clinics to kill their fetuses. It is a form of killing, you're ending a life." - Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, "An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure", New York Times, 2/26/1997

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