One of Joe Biden’s few effective moments in the June 27th Presidential debate was his answer on abortion rights, when he made the comparison that repealing Roe v. Wade was like “turn[ing] civil rights back to the states.” This is a key policy difference that the Biden campaign is banking on to animate Democrats and Independents alike.  Unlike the rest of the media, Hy and Christopher deconstruct the subtext of the comment, the impact of returning issues like IVF to the states.  The Southern Baptist Convention recently condemned the practice.  How will moderate suburban women vote if they believe—correctly or incorrectly—that their right to use extraordinary medical means to get pregnant might be taken away by state legislatures?

Hy and Christopher debate whether IVF could be the issue that causes the Christian and the pro-life political movement to split.  The pro-life ethics of IVF collide with the desire of people to be fruitful and multiply with their own biological children. Telling a mother she cannot have a biological child of her own— and must instead go through an adoption process of someone else’s child— underpins a GOP weakness going into election day.

 Then we note that the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute criminalizing the possession of firearms by individuals with domestic violence restraining orders against them. Commentators have depicted the ruling in United States v. Rahimi as a “victory” for gun safety and women’s rights, even though it only retained the status quo. But the opinion is important for another reason: It signals what could be the start of a major course correction in the conservative justices’ approach to constitutional interpretation.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the only dissenting vote, due to his commitment to a judicial philosophy called “original intent”, whereas several of his conservative colleagues subscribe to “textualism”.

Originalism holds that judges are to interpret a law based on the meaning of the law’s text at the time it was enacted. In the case of provisions of the Constitution, originalism thus claims to tether judges’ interpretations to the understandings of the Founding generation (or later for the more recent amendments).  Textualists, though, are not as bound by the past, and limit their views to specifically what the constitution says—snd what it does not.

Hy and Christopher note that in a speech last year at Catholic University, Justice Amy Coney Barrett reiterated the point. “We have to be very, very careful in the way that we use history,” she said, adding that deploying historical evidence to advance a legal conclusion can be like “looking over a crowd and picking out your friends.”

Why do we care?  Because the ACLU is suing Gov. Jeff Landry to stop him from posting the 10 Commandments in Louisiana school classrooms, a law passed by the legislature.  “Original intent”, as Hy observes, would protect the bill and allow it to come into force, but if “textualism” (i.e. following the specific written word of the constitution) The predominant philosophy, some of the‘s conservatives might side with the liberals and uphold the 1980 Supreme Court decision preventing the posting at the 10 Commandments.