Stephen Cobert blasts the fascist majority on the Supreme Courts' draft decision to overturn Roe and Casey. Colbert's outrage got him two bleeps from the censors on his CBS show.
His anger was palpable, and he saved some of his harshest for Susan Collins of Maine.
Grab your morning coffee and strap yourselves in, you educated and under-loved millennial ladies.
The entire opening monologue is below.
Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair:
Yes, Alito literally quoted this guy, who was born in 1609, as a defense for ending Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale,” Alito enthusiastically writes, “described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision.’ See M. Hale, Pleas of the Crown.” As Jezebel notes, The History of the Pleas of the Crown “is a text that defended and laid the foundation for the marital rape exemption across the world” and reads: “For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” Again, Alito used the arguments of this man to bolster his case
As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the draft—which could change before a the final ruling, as could the various justices’ votes—doesn’t just lay out the case for why Roe should be overturned, it goes full scorched earth. Alito, Stern writes, “does not seek out any middle path. He disparages Roe and its successors as dishonest, illegitimate, and destructive to the court, the country, and the Constitution. He quotes a wide range of anti-abortion activists, scholars, and judges who view abortion as immoral and barbaric; there’s even a footnote that approvingly cites Justice Clarence Thomas’s debunked theory that abortion is a tool of eugenics against Black Americans.” The opinion is an appalling, heinous attack on people who have relied on Roe for nearly half a century, and the most sickening part is that the conservative justice clearly doesn’t give a shit that obliterating the landmark ruling will ruin countless lives. In fact, one might argue, that’s all part of the plan. And if you needed further proof that Alito is pure evil and wants to take the U.S. back to a time when women’s bodies were property for men to control, know that one of the people he cited in his opinion was an English jurist who defended marital rape and had women executed for “witchcraft.”
And, from one of my favorites Umair Hague:
I’ve been wrong — but it doesn’t happen often. Most of what I talk about? The cycle goes like this. It can’t happen here. Disbelief, anger, mockery, and so on. And then, when it does? Shock. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve lived it, studied it, and thought very, very hard about it.
This is American democracy’s last chance. Code red. There will not be another one.
I said this once before — and that was one of a handful of times I was wrong. But I wasn’t that wrong. I said it before the coup attempt. That was a year and a half ago. To history, it won’t be a failure. I was “wrong” in a weak sense — meaning that it was sheer dumb luck the coup didn’t lead directly martial law, as we now know was the plan, thanks to a handful of brave Capitol police officers. Otherwise? Curtains for American democracy. It’s just a year and a half later, not even that. And we are right back to the coup.
What is happening now? Another coup.
There are many kinds of coups. Fascists don’t give up. They just keep on attempting coups. When soft ones fail, they resort to hard ones — that was what happened on Jan 6th. And when hard ones fail, the pattern repeats itself.
America now faces a judicial coup. What is really happening? That’s what’s really happening. This understanding is too slow to dawn, because of course figures like me, Sarah Kendzior, a long list of others who’ve studied and lived all this have been marginalized — in favour of largely liberal centrist male pundits who form a kind of fraternity of ignorance.
You saw this coming, if you’re a woman, a minority, or both. And yet they kept on saying it can’t happen here. It can’t happen here. There’s a man who’s allegedly a serial sexual abuser — sneering at the nation’s women in rage as he’s appointed to the Supreme Court. There’s a woman who’s a member of a strange fundamentalist cult where women are to literally submit to men as. “handmaidens”…being appointed to the Supreme Court.