Justice Scalia: Women Have No Constitutional Right Of Privacy To Use Contraception

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says that the pivotal decision which reversed a law that prohibited women from using contraception is not supported under his interpretation of the Constitution. During an interview on Sunday, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Scalia why he believed that it is a “lie” that women have a Constitutional right of privacy to choose to have an abortion and to use contraception.

At the top of the video Justice Scalia and Wallace discuss the so called strict constructionist originalism and textualism constitutional argument that only the exact words written in the constitution, rather than an understanding and application of the principles, within the modern world context, that the framers were attempting to define, may be considered by the American judicial system. Later (9:15-11:30) they discuss Scalia's view that women have no constitutional right of privacy to choose to use contraception or have an abortion.

Many people today do not remember that the sales and use of contraceptive products, even by married couples, were against the law in many states until the mid-1960's.

Even the distribution of books and pamphlets about contraceptive products and practices was illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled such state laws unconstitutional in its 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision. The court based its Griswold decision partially on the grounds that such state laws violated a married couple's right to privacy in making their own private family planning decisions.

Social conservatives hold the Supreme Court's Griswold “right to privacy” declaration with contempt because it is the foundation of the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Citing the Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird decisions, which were based on justifications of privacy, the Justice Burger Court extended the right of privacy to include a woman's right to have an abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Justice Scalia told Fox News host Chris Wallace during the interview:

“Nobody ever thought that the America people voted to prohibit limitations on abortions,” the 76-year-old conservative justice explained. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that.”

“What about the right to privacy that the court found in 1965?” Wallace pressed.

“There’s no right to privacy in the Constitution — no generalized right to privacy,” Scalia insisted.

“Well, in the Griswold case, the court said there was,” Wallace pointed out.

“Yeah, it did,” Scalia agreed. “And that was wrong.”

Florida Republican Admits Voter Suppression Agenda

Salon

Florida’s former Republican Party chairman Jim Greer claims Republicans have made a systemic effort to suppress the black vote.

In a 630-page deposition recorded over two days in late May, Greer, who is on trial for corruption charges, unloaded a litany of charges against the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” in his party, including the effort to suppress the black vote.

In the deposition, released to the press yesterday, Greer mentioned a December 2009 meeting with party officials. “I was upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting,” he said, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Texas A.G. Abbott Says Dead People Are Voting, Again

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, defending the state’s voter photo I.D. law, said in a Fox News interview on July 15, 2012: "What we have proved in Texas is that voter fraud exists. We have more than 200 dead people who voted in the last election -- and we proved that in court in addition to the fact that the voter ID law will have no disenfranchisement effect on the voters in the state of Texas."

The Texas Voter Photo I.D. case currently before a federal Washington D.C. Circuit Court will decide whether Texas can enforce its year-old voter photo I.D. law. The three-judge panel composed of D.C. Circuit Judge David Tatel, and District Court Judges Rosemary Collyer and Robert Wilkins heard testimony in that five day trial earlier this month.

PolitiFact: To recap trial testimony pointed to by Abbot: An elections official testified that after comparing a list of 50,000 dead registered voters -- where’s that headline? -- to records of voters in the recent primaries, "we believe" that 239 "folks voted in the recent election after passing away," meaning 239 voters cast ballots using voter registrations of dead Texans. According to his testimony, the state then took the best matches and sought death certificates "for as many of those as we could round up in a short time."

Ten death certificates came back and, the official testified, four names, birth dates and Social Security numbers completely aligned on the lists and death certificates.

Read the full story @ PolitiFact

So the 200 dead people Abbott says voted in the last election boils down to four who may or may not have "voted after they died." In follow-up of other, similar, allegations over the last several years, further investigation has shown that:

• The person who's dead isn't the same person listed on the voter rolls.
• The person who's listed as voting didn't actually vote due to a clerical error at the polling place.
• The person who's listed as dead isn't actually dead due to a clerical error at the vital records office.
• The person who's dead mailed a vote by mail ballot before death.
• There was actually a fraudulent vote by mail ballot cast.

In other words, dead people are not voting and there is no "dead voter" impersonation fraud.

Last January, the DMV Director of South Carolina claimed in a sensational hearing that 950 dead people had voted in an election in that state. He made the claim to explain that South Carolina desperately needs a voter photo ID law to stop voter impersonation fraud. The South Carolina attorney general's office gave the State Election Commission six names off the list of 950 allegedly dead voters, and this is what they found:

In a news release election agency spokesman Chris Whitmire handed out, the agency disputed the claim that dead people had voted. A review of the six "dead voters" by the South Carolina State Election Commission revealed:

• One was an absentee mail ballot cast by a voter who then died before election day;
• Another was the result of an error by a poll worker who mistakenly marked the voter as Samuel Ferguson, Jr. when the voter was in fact Samuel Ferguson, III;
• Two were the result of stray marks on the voter registration list detected by the scanner – again, a clerical error;
• The final two were the result of poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter listed either above or below on the list.