On March 4, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case involving an anti-choice law in Louisiana that requires physicians performing abortions to have hospital visiting privileges. In case you were wondering if simply replacing the president* will be enough to wring the extremism out of the Republican Party, think again. Thirty-nine Republican senators, and 202 Republican members of Congress in total, have signed onto an amicus brief asking the Court to use the case to reverse both Roe v. Wade and Casey. This is going for broke. This is about tossing the privacy rights of 51 percent of the American people overboard. They want abortions made illegal, every one of them.

Critical to their argument is the notion that the protocol set down in Roe is “unworkable.” Of course, after doctors get shot, clinics get bombed, judicial vandalism, and SLAPP suits fall like iron rain, almost any system will be rendered “unworkable.”

The Fifth Circuit labored to do the best it could with the vague and opaque “undue burden” standard on which the Court has relied since Casey. Amici respectfully suggest that the court’s struggle—similar to dozens of other courts’ herculean struggles in this area—illustrates the unworkability of the “right to abortion” found in Roe and the need for the Court to take up the issue of whether Roe and Casey should be reconsidered and, if appropriate, overruled.

That’s been the whole point all along.

The senatorial amici include such noted libertarians as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah. Also my new friend Joni Ernst, famous moderate Rob Portman from Ohio, thoughtful conservatives Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, and famously-open-to-deep-concerns Young Ben Sasse from Nebraska. The crew from the House is completely hopeless and, sadly, it includes two Democrats: Collin Peterson and Dan Lipinski. And this lawsuit would’ve been brought, and these people would’ve signed on, if Donald Trump never had been born. There should be much remembering in Novembering on that score.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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