Why the hell would lefties want to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction over abortion *after* Roe has been overturned? The time to take the issue away from them was before Dobbs, no?

All they’d accomplish by carving abortion out of the Court’s purview now is ensuring that a future liberal majority won’t be able to reinstate Roe down the line.

Ocasio-Cortez has spent the weeks since Dobbs was decided contriving “she fights!” displays for the edification of progressives. Last month she accused the Court’s three Trump appointees of having committed impeachable offenses by “lying” to the Senate about their views on Roe. But they didn’t lie. They did the same rhetorical dance conservative judges always did when queried during confirmation hearings about Roe, acknowledging that Roe is a precedent of the Court, that precedent deserves respect, and that no precedent is inviolable. If it were, the rulings in Plessy and Korematsu would be on the books forever.

Still, “they lied” is a useful political play for lefties insofar as the accusation adds an element of corruption to the outcome in Dobbs. If you’re infuriated by the decision and frustrated by your powerlessness to change it, delegitimizing it as being the product of fraud is one way to channel that rage. Earlier this week, AOC and her colleague Ted Lieu sent a letter to the Senate asking them to make a formal determination on whether Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied during their hearings.

We cannot allow Supreme Court nominees lying and/or misleading the Senate under oath to go unanswered.

Both GOP & Dem Senators stated SCOTUS justices misled them. This cannot be accepted as precedent.

Doing so erodes rule of law, delegitimizes the court, and imperils democracy. https://t.co/yZW6BKnqFG

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 11, 2022

As tends to happen when the fringes of each party go into “fight” mode, their main targets are the establishmentarians in their own party more so than in the other. Fulfilling the request from Ocasio-Cortez and Lieu would be no-win for Schumer and Senate Democrats. If they acknowledge that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh didn’t lie, the left will be outraged. If they agree that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied, the left will be outraged anyway when Schumer declines to act on that finding by calling for their impeachment by the House.

If Dems want to raise a stink about the Trump appointees, they’re better off cutting ads that showcase how betrayed the centrists in the Senate feel, or claim to feel:

Susan Collins, who was a key vote to confirm Kavanaugh and has been critical of Kavanaugh/Gorsuch after they voted to overturn Roe, says to @jessicadean about whether she regrets her YES votes: “I made the best decision I could based on the information I had at the time.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 11, 2022

Her letter with Lieu has gone ignored thus far so AOC and the Squad returned with a new petition last night. They want abortion — but not just abortion, notably — yanked out of SCOTUS’s hands before the conservative majority can do further damage to substantive due process rights like contraception and gay marriage. Congress does have authority under the Constitution to make exceptions to the Court’s appellate jurisdiction. It’s time to use it, say House lefties:

That’s why AOC wants the Court stripped of abortion jurisdiction post-Roe, the weird timing notwithstanding. It’s merely step two in a two-step plan to protect abortion rights nationally, the first step being passage of the House’s “abortion on demand” legislation. There’s at least some chance that the Court would strike down that bill if it were enacted, potentially ruling that Congress lacks power under the Commerce Clause to regulate abortion nationally and therefore the Tenth Amendment delegates authority on the subject to the states. *If* congressional Dems could get something passed on abortion then it would make sense for them to play hardball with the Court on jurisdiction. But they can’t, so it doesn’t.

But it does make sense in an insane, and insanely ruthless, way for them to try to take away the Court’s jurisdiction over matters like contraception, gay marriage, etc, at a moment when those rights are treated by the Court as constitutionally protected. The goal of jurisdiction-stripping as imagined by Ocasio-Cortez is to “freeze” certain precedents by depriving SCOTUS of the power to overturn them. All of the relevant precedents in those cases currently go the left’s way, making this an opportune time to “freeze” them.

Question, though: If the Court no longer had jurisdiction over substantive due process cases, who would? The Squad has a solution.

What do we think of that idea, handing off substantive due process cases to a lower court because you don’t like the way a conservative SCOTUS would be apt to rule on them?

It seems to me that it’d be Court-packing by another form, with all of the same tit-for-tat hazards that would ensue from traditional Court-packing. Shifting abortion cases from SCOTUS to the D.C. Circuit would ensure a more evenly balanced partisan split among the deciding judges, neutralizing the GOP’s current advantage on the Supreme Court. Naturally, though, Republicans would move quickly to restore that advantage once they regained total control of government, either by returning abortion cases to the jurisdiction of SCOTUS or designating an even more lopsidedly conservative circuit court as the supreme judicial authority on the subject instead.

From there it would be a race to the bottom, with each party carving off chunks of jurisdiction from the Supreme Court and handing them off to “friendlier” courts whenever they had the numbers in Congress to do so. Controversial legislation might even pass with jurisdiction-stripping provisions attached, depriving the courts of any opportunity to rule on the legislation’s constitutionality down the road. Before long, jurisdiction would become a pure partisan football, with the judiciary left in chaos as Congress went about delegating the power to rule on different policy subject matter to different federal circuits based on how politically favorable they appeared to the congressional majority. Respect for the institutional legitimacy of the courts would collapse utterly as the public came to view judicial review of key legislation as a process rigged in advance by the ruling party.

If Congress is going to go to all that trouble to try to game the courts, they might as well just stoop to Court-packing. It’s less complicated, with the same institution-destroying bang for the buck.

You would think lefties might have internalized by this point that bold gambits that upend judicial norms tend not to work out for them — and maybe they have, as the Squad’s letter above has only 10 signatories. Who knows if even AOC et al. mean what they say in the letter. Being an ideologically pure populist radical often means pushing dumb ideas which you know would cause chaos if enacted but which nonetheless earn you brownie points from your base due to their “boldness.”

Exit question via Nate Hochman: If Dems want to do something productive to protect substantive due process rights, why don’t they start moving legislation in the few months they have left? A federal bill legalizing gay marriage would be a tricky vote for Republicans before the midterms.