Guns and abortion: Contradictory decisions, or consistent?

Guns and abortion: Contradictory decisions, or consistent?

SeattlePI.com

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They are the most fiercely polarizing issues in American life: abortion and guns. And two momentous decisions by the Supreme Court in two days have done anything but resolve them, firing up debate about whether the court’s conservative justices are being faithful and consistent to history and the Constitution — or citing them to justify political preferences.

To some critics, the rulings represent an obvious, deeply damaging contradiction. How can the court justify restricting the ability of states to regulate guns while expanding the right of states to regulate abortion?

“The hypocrisy is raging, but the harm is endless,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday after the court released its decision on abortion.

To supporters, the court’s conservatives are staying true to the country’s founding principles and undoing errors of the past.

The court corrected a historic wrong when it voided a right to abortion that has stood for nearly 50 years, former Vice President Mike Pence said Friday. On Twitter, he said the decision returned to Americans the power to “govern themselves at the state level in a manner consistent with their values and aspirations.”

Opponents of Roe v. Wade, the controversial 1973 ruling that upheld the right to abortion, say the Supreme Court back then did just what some accuse the majority justices of doing now, adapting and twisting legal arguments to fit political positions.

Members of the court’s current conservative majority, laying out their thinking in this week’s decisions, have been quite consistent, sticking to the words of the country’s founders and the precedents of history that reach back even further, those supporters say.

In both decisions, the majority makes the case that if a right is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, the bar for...

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