Gonzales v. Carhart

I would concur in part and dissent in judgment from the Court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Carhart.

Justice THOMAS correctly wrote in his concurrence "that the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade [citation omitted], has no basis in the Constitution." Gonzales v. Carhart, Slip at 47 (2007)(THOMAS, J., concurring). This is because the Constitution does not contemplate nor address abortion. Among the litany of powers allocated to the Congress and the federal government in Article I, §8, one mentioning abortion is nowhere to be found.

This is inescapably dispositive to the inquiry. In a system of enumerated powers, such as our own, the government cannot exercise a power that is not expressly granted it. Such is only logical. You would not enumerate specific powers to be held by an entity if you intended them to have powers other than or beyond those enumerated. The framers certainly did not, and for most of the nation’s history this was understood. As Chief Justice Marshall wrote in Marbury, "To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?" Marbury v. Madison, I Cr. (5 U.S.) 137 (1803).

As Madison explained further in the original debate over the Constitution, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." Madison, Federalist 46. The Tenth Amendment simply manifests this principle in legal form, mandating that those "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." To quote from the attorney Charles Cooper, the Amendment was included as the last within the Bill of Rights to warn against a supposition that there were "powers in the national government that were not granted by the original document." Charles Cooper, Reserved Powers of the States, in The Heritage Guide to the Constitution 371, 371 (Edwin Meese, ed., 2005).

If the Constitution does not say the national government has a power then that power is reserved by the individual states, or to the people. The Tenth Amendment controls here. The states, and only the states, have the ability to regulate or not regulate abortion.

Accordingly, there was no basis for the Court to proscribe statutory abortion prohibitions or restrictions by the states in Roe, Casey, Carhart I, etc. As Justice Thomas has explained, "Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so." Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914 (2000)(THOMAS, J., dissenting). Because of this, the Court has not been faithfully applying the Constitution, to borrow from Justice Scalia, it has been creating a "self-awarded sovereignty over a field where it has little proper business..." Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989)(SCALIA, J., concurring).

The same principle is at play in this case. If the Court or federal government cannot prevent a state from statutorily prohibiting or restricting abortion, then neither can the Congress and the President pass and sign into law a statute regulating it in any form. The sword cuts both ways. The Constitution gives no authority to any branch or entity of the federal government to enter a sovereign province of the states.

Granted, the Court’s decision is licitly correct under the premise it was decided within, which was consideration of the Court’s own abortion precedent and jurisprudence. In accordance with Casey, the Court did rightly hold that the statute does not place an "undue burden" on a woman’s ability to receive an abortion, nor is it impermissibly vague or without an adequate exception for the life of the mother, unlike the Nebraska statute struck down by the Court in the preceding Carhart decision.

But this is a false premise. If the Constitution does not mention abortion—and does not permit the federal government to regulate or hinder the individual states’ license to regulate it—then this statute is not Constitutional, regardless of the Court’s erroneous abortion jurisprudence. If respondent’s genuinely sought the invalidation of this statute, then this would be the case to be made. (Of course they did not and would not make this assertion because a Court willing to invalidate a statute on these grounds would not hesitate to vacate Roe and every other bit of its illegitimate progeny.)

Conservatives throughout the nation are rejoicing at the Court’s decision, and in a sense, why shouldn’t they be? The merits of the statute are laudable. Few—conservative or otherwise—could object to a general proscription of a practice that virtually obliterates the line between abortion and infanticide.

But this is ultimately irrelevant. The fact that the statute is the fruits of sound moral and ethical judgment is irrelevant; it was not the federal government’s judgment to make.

For those genuinely concerned with fidelity to the text and meaning of the Constitution, there is little to celebrate in this decision. The jurisprudential house of straw the Court has constructed on abortion still stands and the text and principle of the Constitution remain no less mired in obfuscation than it did before. The Court’s decision is as equally Constitutionally specious as Roe and Casey.

Narrowly tailored to the premise the case was presented and decided in, I would concur with the Court’s holding. But that premise is divorced from the text, meaning, and effect of the Constitution the decision falsely claims to represent. Our founding charter makes no mention of abortion, leaving the questions presented by it to be decided by the respective states. Accordingly, the Congress has no authority to enact the statute considered and it is Constitutionally invalid.