Roe, and and the terrifying virtue of precedent

For the entire life of my great-grandfather, who I knew and remember quite well, up until him having aged into the second half a century of his existence, and for several years before his conception, the Supreme Court of the United States did uphold the now much disgraced notion of "separate but equal" for being, in fact, a thin veil over a reality of the most egregious inequality in American education. It has been said, by constitutional scholars across the proverbial but now ever-increasingly concrete aisle, to be a super-precedent. This term has been flung about not least in the now penultimate confirmation process, hurried and rushed over in much heat and fray, at the close of 2020 with an election already undergoing, with the question fluttered across news outlets 

The paradox, or reliance and innate flaw of legal reasoning, and the ability of a decision so wrongly decided to endure and flourish, is at the heart of the legal argument concerning Roe v. Wade and the actual, governing precedent currently subject to debate, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Casey so often, or sometimes, discussed being the much-dead (and long before without a heartbeat) Democratic Governor Casey of Pennsylvania, who mixed pro-union and workers' right policies with pro-gun and pro-life (or should I say anti-life and anti-choice) policies, represented nobody's actual belief - save, perhaps, the centrist Justices who crafted it out of the crumbling tower of Roe, but nonetheless is upheld as the shield safeguarding the most-spoken right of American women. Whereas the current senator Casey, of the body of voluntarily ejaculating Casey Sr:s body, has very much been touted in line with a new Democratic orthodoxy, whether of the neoliberal or of the extreme left (I think a little of both, in a ghastly mixture challenging the old left coherent with a more Democratic-governed, as well as more equitable America) the battle lines have been greatly redrawn, with the example of Governor Kennedy of Louisiana - one of few blue states in a red band of ostensible backwardness - being mostly ignored, when not condemned. In this realignment, casting the GOP as the now abominated party of cranks and puritanical extremists ostensibly  wishing to impose, by the point of a gun, a Calvinist autocracy (ostensibly welcoming the Papist likes of Casey, who argued the case of life before the Supreme Court by crafting the pitiful law then challenged) and the Democratic party as, well, "not Calvin, not Hitler, not the rape and destruction of the Earth within the next electoral cycle". In the context of abortion, this spells to the maintenance of a right either clearly spelled out in the constitutional ahadith issued throughout a period of the 1940s through 1970s or in the metaphysical realm of natural rights, versus the gradual disintegration of said constitutional (if not metaphysical or natural) jurisprudence. 

On the question of jurisprudence, in essence two camps have emerged, with a number of (symptomatically more intelligible) voices pressing the virtue and value of the precedent, whether it can be salvaged through the preserving mists of time, but in essence talking - or sputtering - their gall against the object allegedly worthy of the greatest scorn: The draft itself (this not being an opinion, and much less law, and even as the final majority opinion it would not redraw any existing law) or the leaker (whose hand thus, again ostensibly, could shape and twist the minds and hands of the supreme nine so as to change the governing majority) and the poor example set by unleashing, let alone regarding ulterior motives concerning the final result, this half-baked fetus or jurisprudential change, tantamount to revolution. 

It has also been said, very vitriolically and (it must be said) frivolously, that Brown v. Board of Education, Obergefell v. Hodges and possibly Lawrence v. Texas (in short, the great legacy of the ever-praised Justice Kennedy) would be evicted similarly, and very lately, in spite of - shall we say - substantial reliance interests. We know, 

This in effect 

On the question itself I suspect, as had also been said, if