> If the 9th amendment is interpreted to mean the courts can declare anything they think is a right, it allows unlimited power.
No, that's not true. The court can't just decide anything it wants. It can only decide cases that come before it. Before the court gets to decide anything there is a very long drawn-out process that filters out a lot of crap. Furthermore, the court has to decide on the basis of the arguments and evidence presented to it. The court can't just invent a new right out of whole cloth; it has to be on the basis of evidence that it is a right "retained by the people" who are, after all, the ultimate authority on everything, at least in theory.
> Overturning Roe v. Wade wouldn't require much legal logic, except the precedent has been upheld several times.
You undermine your own argument in the second half of this sentence. That's like saying, "Tearing down the pyramids at Giza wouldn't be very hard, except for moving all the stones." To overturn Roe you have to figure out why the original conclusion was wrong, and why all of the subsequent confirmations were wrong. That is not so easy.
> To overturn Roe you have to figure out why the original conclusion was wrong, and why all of the subsequent confirmations were wrong. That is not so easy.
It's obvious. The case was decided that way in the first place because the courts are political; they were "legislating from the bench".
OK, but I thought we were talking about legal arguments here. If you're going to maintain the illusion of the legitimacy of the court you have to at least dress the rationale up as something more convincing than, "We're overturning Roe because we were appointed by Republicans."
That's true but easier than arguing the previous precedents are wrong. Or so wrong, it would override the weight of them being a precedent.
The idea that the right to privacy implies the right to perform abortion seems like the weakest point to me. That argument only seems plausible if the right to privacy implies we can do anything to ourselves in private.
That's a ridiculous amount of power for a right which isn't even explicitly mentioned and way outside the Federal government's mandate. Not to mention inconsistent with many laws.
No, that's not true. The court can't just decide anything it wants. It can only decide cases that come before it. Before the court gets to decide anything there is a very long drawn-out process that filters out a lot of crap. Furthermore, the court has to decide on the basis of the arguments and evidence presented to it. The court can't just invent a new right out of whole cloth; it has to be on the basis of evidence that it is a right "retained by the people" who are, after all, the ultimate authority on everything, at least in theory.
> Overturning Roe v. Wade wouldn't require much legal logic, except the precedent has been upheld several times.
You undermine your own argument in the second half of this sentence. That's like saying, "Tearing down the pyramids at Giza wouldn't be very hard, except for moving all the stones." To overturn Roe you have to figure out why the original conclusion was wrong, and why all of the subsequent confirmations were wrong. That is not so easy.