Posted on 07/27/2011 7:01:25 PM PDT by ejdrapes
Rick Perry Categorizes Abortion as a States' Rights Issue Despite holding personal pro-life beliefs, Texas Gov. Rick Perry categorized abortion as a states’ rights issue today, saying that if Roe v. Wade was overturned, it should be up to the states to decide the legality of the procedure. “You either have to believe in the 10th Amendment or you don’t,” Perry told reporters after a bill signing in Houston. “You can’t believe in the 10th Amendment for a few issues and then [for] something that doesn’t suit you say, 'We’d rather not have states decide that.'” The 10th Amendment reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
July 27, 2011 8:32 PM
ABC News' Arlette Saenz (@arlettesaenz) reports:
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.abcnews.com ...
Bachmann, Cain, and Perry are my VP choices, and that's because they're in the running or soon will be. My first choice for Sarah's VP is Allen West, but he's not running.
The problem with finding a great strict constructionalist constitutionalist is that then they are strict construtionalist constitutionalists, even when we don’t want them to be.
If you look back over the Fred Thompson threads in 2008, we had some of the same arguments, especially regarding a federal marriage amendment.
It would seem that the 14th amendment should cover cases of a state killing people; not sure about people killing other people.
Oregon allows assisted suicide, which is in essense a person killing another person. Should that be a state issue, or should be pass a federal law making it illegal for any person in the united states to assist in the death of another person?
I think yes, but I don’t know if that view is consistant with my opinion on state’s rights.
When it comes to abortion, I don’t care — when the day comes, I’ll support a federal abortion ban. Unfortunately, that won’t come for a long time; long after the next president has come and gone.
The first step is at least one replacement supreme court judge, maybe two, to firmly destroy Roe-v-Wade.
Is the child a human person?
If your answer is "yes," they clearly must be protected by all, and afforded the equal protection of the laws by every state. It's not optional. It's imperative.
If your answer is "no," you agree with the Blackmun court and the rest is all moot anyway.
There is no legitimate power to alienate the God-given, unalienable rights of the people. There is only sworn constitutional duty to protect those rights, equally.
The point is that there’s a question about whether a mother has a right to decide whether their unborn child should live or die.
The first question is legal - who should decide?
States or the Feds.
Life is an unalienable HUMAN right, which some states violate every time they decide to use the death penalty. Each state decides.
As far as what our federal constitution allows, you cite the relevant part of the federal constitution - ‘ . . . without due process of the law.’
Obviously, the founders didn’t think Life to be all that inalienable.
There’s nothing in the first nine amendments which casts some sort of shadow over any one state’s ability to decide such an issue for themselves, and in fact the 10th amendment underlines this.
The death penalty and abortion are similar issues, in that each state should be able to decide for themselves what their society requires in order to secure all those other blessings for everyone else.
In some states, there’s no death penalty, and in others there is.
If abortion were such, it would be A LOT easier for conservatives to show that abortion is just another form of racial discrimination, for example. There would be data from states that don’t allow it, for example.
Some states would have better adoption data: better data on how many abortions were actually necessary to save the life of the mother, better data on abortions due to rape or incest (in Bible belt states, I would wager there’d be more survivors, for example).
Abortion is evil, and I don’t think God’s going to forgive the United States for it. It’s worse that slavery, in that at least you can escape or be granted your freedom.
Now that its a FEDERAL law, and not a matter for each state to decide, there’s no chance of developing the critical mass of ‘Free States’ and ‘Infanticidal States’ like there was in before the Civil War.
More to the point, sicne R v W, there is no ability to decide you are going to live in a more moral state. It has turned father against daughter, and mother against son, and made every taxpayer an accessory to murder.
Repealing R v W on CONSTITUTIONAL GROUNDS would be far better than criminalizing abortion for everybody, because it forces EACH STATE to make a moral decision, providing moral sanctuary to people that believe strongly enough in the national mortality of that sin.
Were the states still in charge, I believe that a minority of states would still legalize it. MA, CA, FL, WA, OR, and a few others, but the rest would criminalize it as a form of birth control or family planning.
R v W is now federal precedent, so good luck now trying to count states in terms of each unique state’s cultural position on the question.
You follow now?
10th amendment grounds are the only way you are going to get R v W tossed - ever.
From there, AT LEAST you’d get to choose a new place to live where infanticide isn’t the law of the entire land.
SCOTUS has been a giant failure as a branch of government, and only Mark Levin really had the guts to show it for the failure it truly is.
The only way I can really sleep at night on the abortion issue is by reminding myself that the blood of all those children is on their heads, and not mine, since I couldn’t cast a vote for any of them.
In some states, it is legal to kill a person if they are in your home without permission. In other states, it is illegal.
In most states, it is illegal to help a person kill themselves. In at least one, it is legal.
Criminal law is primarily a state issue, and different states have different rules about manslaughter and murder, just as they have different rules about many things.
We also have the 14th amendment which was supposed to stop the south from mistreating blacks who were now free. It provides all people with the same rights.
But states are allowed to consider circumstance -- hence the "kill inside door=LEGAL, kill in front yard=ILLEGAL" that some states have. A state might decide that a baby inside a womb is in a special circumstance that they make it legal for the mother to terminate the pregnancy.
I wouldn't agree with that, but I understand the logic of it.
>> My first choice for Sarah’s VP is Allen West
Agreed. They’d make a great team.
Let’s hope Palin decides to run.
Thank you for posting.
The power and elegance of the writing is breathtaking. It is so tragic to see that this was the dissenting opinion.
Let Perry issue an Executive Order that forbids abortions in the State of Texas until the State Legislature decides whether or not abortions are legal in Texas. Until then, it's a lot of noise. As long as Roe v Wade stands it doesn't matter what the Tenth Amendment says because the Court has ignored that Amendment and made abortion a Federal issue. It'll take a State fighting the issue on Tenth Amendment grounds and winning or action by Congress to stop it. Is Perry going to start that fight any time soon when he'll have to use State tax dollars to do so? We'll see, I suppose.
To Republicans:
The pro-choice for states position is a repudiation of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and the making of common cause with the ideology of folks like Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and RINO Gerald R. Ford.
Stephen Douglas was pro-choice for states on slavery. Lincoln obviously was not.
Gerald R. Ford said abortion should be “up to the states.” Ronald Reagan fought him on that. That’s why twenty seven years ago the personhood, Fourteenth Amendment Reagan plank was inserted into the GOP platform, where it remains to this day...though, sadly, most of the GOP couldn’t care less.
The Constitution is a document that limits the power of the Federal Government. All powers not given to Federal Government by the Constitution reside in the laws of the individual States.
If this were not so, it would be illegal for some states to have the death penalty and other not. What made this nation great is the fact that the Constitution is a document limiting the powers of the Federal Government.
I shall now don my flame proof underwear.
The child is a human person. But we have laws now that make it less of a crime to kill a 1-day-old than to kill a 20-year-old. I don’t agree with them either, but I haven’t seen the pro-life crowd pushing for mandatory penalties for women who kill their newborns.
The point isn’t that Perry, or others who support states rights, want abortion to be legal. It’s that the structure of our government allows the states great leeway in deciding which acts of killing will be punished, and in what way.
This means that some states have made it a minor crime for a distraught woman to kill her husband if he’s been abusive; other states allow you to kill an unarmed intruder if he has broken into your house.
None of those variations depend on whether the husband or the burglar are considered persons or not — they are all considered persons. The question is simply whether the unborn should receive special protection under federal law.
I would note that federal employees have that protection, hence killing a federal judge is a federal crime, and is prosecuted equally in all 50 states. Should the feds pass a law that all unborn are considered federal wards, and therefore killing them will be prosecuted under federal law? I’d support that law, but I think it would violate constitutional principles.
Which I don’t really like doing, but 30 million kids are dead, and I don’t think states will act quickly enough.
You know that when we overturn Roe, a lot of states are going to allow abortion until some point in the pregnancy. A lot or going to allow the illogical “rape/incest” exceptions. I favor banning all abortions after implantation, but don’t think that will be the law in most states, nor do I think we’d get a majority of the people to approve such a law at a state or federal level.
BTW, I’d like to add that I alway appreciate your strong, consistant, and unwavering/uncompromising position on the subject of abortion.
Thank you.
In my opinion, how we deal with these questions will largely determine whether or not this republic will survive.
You are right. Abortion, like all murder has always been a state issue. There wasn’t even a federal law against killing the president until after Kennedy was killed.
A federal law against abortion would create a situation where it is a federal crime to kill an unborn baby but not a federal crime to kill the same baby 2 seconds after he is born.
Just because there are variations in how murder is prosecuted, it doesn’t mean that murder can be “legal.”
Every state must defend the life of every innocent person within their jurisdiction. They must provide for the equal protection of the laws.
The Fourteenth Amendment simply leaves no wiggle room on this. It is in no way optional.
I think you misunderstood my point, which is a more practical one. The issue I was raising was that the Supreme Court took it upon itself to determine what is human life and when does it begin, and then stretched it out farther and farther to cover health of the mother and other cases.
I am in agreement that Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional and should be overturned for the same reasons you give. The challenges, however in the practical world, do not end there. Just as been the case with capital punishment, the 8th amendment always is used to challenge sentences handed down by the states, but the laws are ultimately made by the states, much closer to the people. Still, life of the condemned is given far more protection than that of an unborn baby.
We may argue on and on about God-given rights but if we do not have the control over right to life very close to us, they are stolen from us by rogue courts as was done in ‘72.
I said “murder,” not “kill.”
Perry is right. I have said that for years.
Different states have different morals and should make their own laws without big brother overlords.
I want Roe overturned, but the states majorly came together to provide a common defense with each retaining their own government.
Interesting idea. Here is the relevant section of the 14th Amendment:
"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
I do not see how the bold text applies to abortion, unless the State is committing the abortion. The portion in italics recognizes rights of persons but does not define persons. Abortion supporters would argue a baby is not a person until it is born. (Of course, by that logic, they could also claim blacks are not persons.)
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