Boy howdy, I let time slip up on me. No real good excuse beyond I started reading and fell asleep. The Network Of Time, if you’re curious. Fascinating book but reading about complicated quantum mechanics always turns my brain into mush.
Yes, I’m still pissed off about the state supreme court killing Initiative 65 stone dead for, from I can tell, no real good reason last Friday. The mighty Ashton Pittman of The Mississippi Free Press put together this excellent Twitter thread on just why the death of the initiative process was such a blow to Mississippi voters beyond the elimination of medical marijuana because some mayor of a white-flight town wouldn’t be getting her cut. In any event, medical marijuana in Mississippi – which passed with three-fourths of the vote – is dead until next year.
Along with the thread, Pittman wrote a good article for the Free Press on just why the supreme court’s decision is bad for Mississippians. Essentially, we had an initiative in the works to expand Medicaid through the state to deal with almost out-of-control infant mortality issue in poorer parts of the state, which is most of it. That as much as anything probably explains a great deal of the Supreme Court’s decision. Mississippi was one of the fourteen states that didn’t expand Medicaid with the Affordable Care Act and one of the twelve that continue to fight against it. We’re more concerned with teenagers’ genitals and eliminating any semblance of choice from pregnant women. More on the latter in a bit, though.
I haven’t been able to find any hard numbers on how popular or unpopular Friday’s decision was. Best I can tell, everyone who was for Initiative 65 is pissed off and confused while everyone who was against it is smugly satisfied. A whole lot of folk praising “working with the laws as written,” too, though that’s not always counted in this state. The State Department of Health wasted no time in halting the program, which was supposed to be up and running by July, but they’ve never hidden their distaste for the initiative. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann says he’ll look to make medical marijuana happen for the next election and Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn called on the governor to hold a special session so the legislature can do something about the initiative process they’ve kicked down the road for the past twenty years.
Moving on, the U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it has decided to take up the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case struck down the Gestational Age Act of 2018, which banned abortions after 15 weeks except in cases of danger to the mother’s health or severe fetal abnormality, one of the strictest anti-choice laws in the country. The act was struck down in 2019, along with a dozen other states’ choice bans, as unconstitutional. However, with the addition of three extremely conservative judges during the Trump Administration, the game changes a little bit. Of particular note Amy Coney Barrett, an extremely vocal opponent of choice before she was shoved into the seat vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg mere weeks before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The political make-up of the Supreme Court is 6-3 conservative with all six being very vocal about their dislike of a woman’s right to chose and, particularly, court cases like Roe v Wade and Pennsylvania v Case. For the record, if you ever wondered why Evangelicals supported a moral sinkhole like Trump, this is why. In any event, the outlook from pro-choice advocates is grim. Should the U.S. Supreme Court find in favor of Dobbs, anti-choice advocates say it’ll be the first step in a fight they feel will be the end of a woman’s ability to choose what she does with her body in America, putting that decision under the rubric of the federal government.
The Court’s next term starts in October and runs through to June 2022. It should be noted that regardless of the Court’s conservative leanings, it never pays to bet one way or another how they’ll decide. Dobbs was decided on issues of constitutionality, and Chief Justice John Roberts has regularly pissed off doctrinaire conservatives due to him being a stickler for that silly old founding document. One way or another, time will tell.
Dear Y'all 