Louisiana legislators should not nice followers of the Supremacy Clause, however it’s in Oil Metropolis that the defiant spirit is at its most potent.
Danny McCormick is a Republican state legislator from that tiny outpost, and it clearly caught in his craw to “acknowledge that the USA Structure and the legal guidelines of the USA are the supreme legislation of the land.”
He did so in a invoice that then proposed to abolish abortion altogether whatever the “opinions and judgments of the Supreme Courtroom of the USA in Roe v. Wade.” It went on to allow the state to ignore “any federal court docket choice” that “purports to enjoin” the brand new state legislation. Is he planning to secede?
Generally it could be ignorance that makes states suggest, and even cross, unconstitutional legal guidelines, however it’s apparent from McCormick’s preamble, that that isn’t the case right here.
Giving the feds the finger is evidently an Oil Metropolis trait; a couple of years in the past, McCormick’s predecessor within the legislature, Jim Morris, acquired a invoice previous the Home referred to as the Louisiana Preservation of Gun Rights Act.
It proposed that, if the feds ought to ever impose a ban on semi-automatic weapons, any official imposing it might be jailed for 2 years.
Morris mentioned {that a} futile protection towards the inevitable constitutional problem could be value “each dime” of the taxpayer’s cash.
Thus, on the subsequent election after Morris was term-limited out, it appeared unlikely that the voters may discover an equally unhinged alternative. We underestimated the voters of Caddo Parish, for, when McCormick received the seat, Oil Metropolis had a person in Baton Rouge who averred, when masks have been mandated inside Shreveport companies to fight COVID-19, that residents have been being handled like Jews in Nazi Germany.
Grabbing a blowtorch and chain noticed, he videotaped himself destroying surgical masks.
Give Oil Metropolis credit score for bringing comedian reduction to the earnest enterprise of presidency and serving to Louisiana in what seems to be a quest to reinforce the gaiety of the nation.
U.S. Supreme Courtroom justices do not normally get many laughs, however its latest appointee, Metairie’s personal Amy Coney Barrett, not too long ago had them rolling within the aisles when she declared that she and her colleagues weren’t a “bunch of partisan hacks.”
Justices, being nominated by the president, and confirmed by the Senate, are essentially political animals and could be partisan hacks into the cut price.
Now we now have a court docket that, first, summarily declined to dam a strictly anti-abortion, and thus presently unconstitutional, Texas legislation, by assigning it to a “shadow docket,” the place circumstances are disposed of with out the inconvenience of oral argument.
That clearly presaged the top of Roe v. Wade, and now a leaked draft opinion signifies the court docket is poised to do exactly that.
Whether or not you regard that pretty much as good or unhealthy, no one can doubt that the court docket’s 6-3 Republican majority that made it attainable was the results of cynical, partisan maneuvering.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican from Kentucky who was head honcho of the Senate when it was Republican-controlled, sat on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Courtroom for a yr.
However he was fast off the mark as soon as Trump took over. After ensconcing Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, McConnell accomplished the trifecta that doomed Roe by dashing Barrett’s nomination by days earlier than the election that completed Trump.
If these justices should not partisan hacks, they may as properly be.
Electronic mail James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.