Abortion Supporters Pretend To Care About Woman Judges To Hide Anti-Woman Legal Goals
January 11, 2018 | Published first in The Federalist
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards is right: Courts matter. They matter because liberal judges long ago stopped interpreting the law and started inventing it.
It’s the judges, stupid. Cloaked beneath claims of sexism, that message headlined the year-end social media feed of Cecile Richards, president of the nation’s largest abortion provider Planned Parenthood: “81 percent of President Trump’s judicial nominees are men. If confirmed, they could reshape the judiciary for years to come. Courts matter.”
Richards is right. Courts matter. They matter because liberal judges long ago stopped interpreting the law and started inventing the law. They matter because activist judges ignore clear constitutional mandates while conjuring up imaginary constitutional rights. They matter because liberal judges no longer judge—they pontificate according to their political proclivities. It shouldn’t be this way in a constitutional republic. But it is.
We’d Rather Do Identity Politics Than Debate the Issues
Liberals found this framework favorable, until they didn’t, which is to say when they discovered President Trump intended to keep his campaign promise of appointing men and women in the mold of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was renowned for sticking to the law instead of making law fit his personal politics.
“Women, what women?” they scoff, finding sexism a sturdier basis of attack than judicial philosophy—or at least more easily translated into a midterm campaign theme: The War on Women II. But Richards cares nothing about the sex of the judicial nominees. It’s all about judicial philosophy. Natch. It’s all about abortion.
Just one month ago, Richards penned an op-ed for The Hill targeting Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Why target Barrett if Richard’s complaint is the lack of female nominees to the federal bench? Well, Richards finds Barrett problematic because Barrett “has been a vocal opponent of Roe v. Wade, and she has publicly said that employers should be able to deny their employees access to birth control.”
What Richards wants, then, is a double standard. Judges get props for being women only when they agree with Richards’ politics. She also wants to professionally delegitimize judges based on biology rather than qualifications when she doesn’t like how that judge tends to rule. Heads she wins, tails her opponents lose.
