Today you’ll be seeing three more cartoons about the Supreme Court and Abortion and when I was working at the Kansas City Star I couldn’t draw about the same subject four days in a row because I had pretty much the same audience every single day and after about the third cartoon everyone would say:
“We get it…you think the Supreme Court screwed up. Tomorrow, could we get something funny about the weather?”
But now I’m drawing for King Features Syndicate and they send my work to client newspapers which means I have no idea what paper might run a cartoon or when they’ll run it or who’s reading my stuff, all of which means I feel free to draw about the same subject for a week straight because most of my cartoons are based on somebody’s hypocrisy and the Supreme Court’s decision means there’s a lot of hypocrisy to draw about.
That being the case, let’s get started.
How to interpret the Constitution
OK, there are at least two ways to look at the Constitution (actually, there might be three or four, depending on what drugs you take, but let’s stick with these two for now):
1. The Constitution was carved on stone tablets and can only mean what the Founding Fathers meant it to be at the time it was written.
2. The Constitution is living document and should be interpreted to reflect the changing norms and understandings of an evolving society.
Time out for some highly-inconvenient information
Not knowing when to leave well enough alone, I Googled “what is the opposite of a constitutional constructionist” and was directed to a series of articles, one of which claimed there were three ways to interpret the Constitution and another that claimed there were actually four ways and a third that listed eight ways and just in case you were wondering and even if you weren’t, here they are:
1. Textualism.
2. Original meaning.
3. Judicial precedent.
4. Pragmatism.
5. Moral reasoning.
6. National identity (or “ethos”).
7. Structuralism.
8. Historical practices.
(BTW: I was under the mistaken impression that “ethos” was the Greek God of Love – which would definitely make Constitutional debates way more interesting – and Number 8 might be a typo because in the case of this Supreme Court and Abortion, “hysterical practices” might be more accurate.)
And now that I have that out of my system…
The fact that we can’t agree on what’s in the Constitution or how we should interpret it reminds me of a story I heard about a small town lawyer who was going broke until a second lawyer came to town and now the first lawyer had someone to argue with and the two lawyers could find clients to sue whomever or whatever pissed them off and after that the lawyers were both doing OK even though the town was definitely doing worse because now everybody had legal problems, which is probably why William Shakespeare had a character in Henry VI say:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Make the mistake of Googling that line and you’ll be directed to a bunch of articles saying that people have misinterpreted the “kill all the lawyers” quote and it really doesn’t mean what it seems to mean and for the most part those articles are written by…waaaiiit for it…
Fucking lawyers.
All this stuff about lawyers reminds me of my All-Time Favorite Monty Python sketch, The Argument Clinic:
Word of advice; if you can’t afford to pay for a half-hour session in an Argument Clinic, just go ahead and marry a lawyer and you’ll be set for life.
And now back to the Supreme Court
So the Court Conservatives got together and decided to go with Number 1 on The List of Ways to Interpret the Constitution and just in case you’ve forgotten what that is because I spent too much time insulting lawyers, it’s:
1. The Constitution was carved on stone tablets and can only mean what the Founding Fathers meant it to be when it was written.
And since the Founding Fathers didn’t specifically mention Abortion the right to an Abortion doesn’t exist.
But before the Supreme Court announced their decision, a draft was leaked and it made that very argument and back on May 4th, The New Yorker ran an article by a woman named Jill Lepore who is one of their staff writers and also a history professor at Harvard which you might think would be an advantage if you’re going to talk about what the Founding Fathers meant back in 1787, but as I’ve discovered through a series of Family Arguments, being tethered to actual facts is a disadvantage when your opponent feels free to make stuff up and defend their right to an AR-15 based on the Martian Invasion of Nantucket, Massachusetts back in 1847.
(See how awesome making stuff up is? Feel free to try it in your own life and if someone calls bullshit on you, say the right to make stuff up was included in the Magna Carta royal charter of rights written in 1215 and people have been making stuff up ever since. And yes, I definitely made that up.)
Ms. Lepore (who sounded even more pissed off than me and that’s probably because she appears to be an actual woman who might have to deal with this Supreme Court bullshit) pointed out that you’d be hard pressed to find a reference to Abortion in the Constitution because the men that wrote it didn’t include anything about women and didn’t consider women to be included when they wrote the opening line:
“We the People…y’know…the People with Penises.”
(And, yeah…I also made up that thing about penises, but let’s face it, that’s exactly what they meant even if they didn’t have the balls to say so.)
As Ms. Lepore points out; there were no women delegates at the Constitutional Convention, no women judges, no women legislators and no women participating in the states’ ratifying conventions. At the time the Constitution was written, legally, most women did not exist as people.
Now here’s a quote from the leaked draft:
“The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text.”
So according to the draft, if a right isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution it can only be a right if you can show it’s “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”
But what if your Nation has a Deeply Rooted History and Tradition of Sexism?
According to the legal geniuses on the Supreme Court, that means the Sexists of Today can use the Sexists of Yesterday to justify being the Sexists of Tomorrow.
If you want to read what Jill Lepore wrote for yourself (and it’s well worth your time) here’s the article:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-there-are-no-women-in-the-constitution
And here’s another article written by yet another woman (boy, seems to be a pattern here) making the same point. Here’s what Susan Matthews wrote for slate.com:
“The right to abortion is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution because the Constitution does not concern itself with the rights of women. As originally written, the Constitution did not even guarantee women the right to vote—it endowed no one with that right aside from propertied white men. The omission of abortion, then, says less about the issue itself than about who the Founding Fathers considered people.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/roe-decision-constitution-wasnt-written-for-women.html
Let’s end today’s diatribe by giving the last word to Jill Lepore who summed up the situation like this:
“Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself, so I won’t even try.
Thank you Lee. This last week has been devastating. But we will still be at Planned Parenthood in Overland Park tomorrow. Those womb sniffers have a fight on their hands.
Absolutely great piece. Thank you!