Fritz Pettyjohn: Lisa Murkowski and the Supreme Court’s decisions on vaccine mandates, concealed carry, and abortion

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By FRITZ PETTYJOHN

On Jan. 7 the Supreme Court will hear challenges to two vaccine mandates ordered by the Biden administration. It looks as though the court is at last ready to intervene on behalf of basic American liberty. This is a decision that is long overdue, but it will be welcomed by American patriots. 

If these mandates are overturned, it will be because there is a new “Thomas Majority” on the court.  It includes Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. These five conservatives, acting together, can get the court back to what it was meant to be, and was for the first 150 years of its existence. 

Hopefully, the vaccine mandate cases are a harbinger of things to come. Constitutional conservatives across the country eagerly look forward to a series of decisions in 2022, and many more in the years ahead. In June the Court is poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade (1973). Affirmative Action is before the court in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard.  In New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the right to concealed carry will be addressed. AHA v. Becerra should give us a review of “Chevron deference,” which was adopted in 1984, and has led to the explosive growth and power of the administrative state. 

Roe v. Wade is one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, right up there with Plessy v. Ferguson (1894), which authorized legally sanctioned racial discrimination. It wasn’t as bad as Dred Scott, which led to the Civil War, but it has denied the people of this country their right to decide abortion policy. On that subject, the court writes all the rules, and the people have nothing to say about it. 

There is no right to an abortion in the U.S. Constitution. They just made it up. This has been a constitutional travesty from the day it was decided.  It took the court 58 years to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. So much for the “sacred principle” of stare decisis. When Roe is overturned in June, it will be 49 years old. 

Affirmative action may be well intended, but it’s still racial discrimination. In Harvard’s case Asian-Americans are the principle victims.  I fully expect Justice Thomas to write the opinion declaring such discrimination unconstitutional. As a proud, highly intelligent black man, Thomas is viscerally opposed to being treated as if he is incapable of making it on his own. This is an opinion that will be a joy to read.

Practically speaking, you can’t get a concealed carry permit in New York. Does this violate the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of ” . . . the right of the people to keep and bear Arms . . .”? Emphasis on bear. That’s the question before the court in NYR&PA v. Bruen. There is an excellent chance that the Thomas Majority will rule that there is a right to “bear”, or carry, arms. After all, it’s specifically guaranteed in the language of the Bill of Rights. If so, this case will be the most important advance in 2nd Amendment law since District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). 

This country and this economy are practically strangling in over-regulation. The administrative state is a constitutional abomination. Overturning Chevron deference will be the first step in reining in this bureaucratic monster. AHA v. Becerra is the perfect case to start rolling back burdensome regulations.

Justice Kavanaugh’s vote will be critical in all of these cases, in some of them the deciding one. But he wouldn’t be on the court if it was up to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski. She never really made clear why she opposed him. In the end, she mumbled something about judicial temperament, but that was just a weak excuse. 

In fact, Murkowski expects Kavanaugh to be the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Murkowski is a pro-abortion extremist. She doesn’t believe in any restrictions, of any kind, on a woman’s right to end the life of an unborn child she carries. This is her most sacred principle. If she had her way, Brett Kavanaugh wouldn’t be on the court because of it.

Because Alaska now has a jungle primary, and ranked choice voting, Murkowski doesn’t think she’ll pay a political price for her opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination.  She will make it on the ballot in November, and expects to achieve a majority as the second choice of Democratic voters. Her conservative opponent, Kelly Tshibaka, has chosen to run as proud Trump Republican, so Alaska Democrats will never support her.  

In large part, expect Murkowski to try to turn her reelection into a referendum on Trump. His behavior on and after Jan. 6 will be fully exposed in the upcoming public hearings of the House Select Committee.  If voting for Murkowski is a way to repudiate Trump, she’ll wind up getting votes from more than just Democrats. 

The irony of ironies will be that if Alaskans have to endure six more years of Murkowski, we’ll have Trump to thank for it.

Fritz Pettyjohn was admitted to the Alaska Bar Association in 1974, and has been looking forward to the overturn of Roe v .Wade ever since.

56 COMMENTS

  1. Lisa murkowski ma’am please just go away let the next group try to give us some “for the people, by the people of the people.” Please, ma’am, just go away. Being a politician is so simple, President Trump proved it. Take care of doing the right things for us ALL. Oath integrity please oath integrity is all we need.

  2. Never underestimate Roberts. He may surprise you and vote with the 5 “conservatives” so that he can assign the writing of the majority opinion to himself. That will allow him to use weasel words and ambiguities that, in essence, negate the overall decision……especially on Roe.

    • Interesting thought, but if Roberts did such a thing the other Justices would still be free to abandon his opinion and write their own. I’m not sure how that would work, especially if all 5 conservatives joined an opinion that was not the “majority”, but we’ve seen a lot of unprecedented things lately so nothing surprises me anymore.

  3. Good summation, Fritz. But in my opinion, Democrats will choose Murkowski as their first choice, not second. She takes excellent care of her Democrat constituency. As for Justice Thomas’ Conservative leadership on the high court……we have the late Justice Scalia to thank for that. He performed a fine piece of mentoring to Thomas.
    .
    Question:. Why didn’t the high court jump on the opportunity to weigh-in on election fraud during the 2020 suits? There was more than ample evidence to show that cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Detroit engaged in highly questionable conduct on election day of 2020. These cities turned red states into blue. Otherwise, Trump won, hands down.

    • The USSC and most of the lower courts never took evidence or testimony on the merits; everything was decided on technical and legal grounds. It’s not uncommon for a court to take a technical or procedural route offered to them to avoid a controversial decision on the merits, but I think there might be more to this.

      • I think that the SCOTUS did not want to get involved in any way with the 2020 presidential election because if they started down that road the and really questioned the outcome, the nation would have come unglued. There was no way that they would overturn an election even if there was sufficient evidence.
        If we think that the Democrats and Lisa Murkowski are militant about abortion now, just wait until Roe v Wade is overturned. There will be many teeth worn down from gnashing.

      • Or,…. given the overall scope of racial tensions in November and December of 2020, the high court didn’t want to examine evidence that might ignite a race war over alleged election fraud in cities that are governed by Black leaders (Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta).

      • And it’s because there is NO EVIDENCE, ample or otherwise. How can you smart, engaged citizens not accept this? Trump lost. It that simple.

        • Plenty of evidence, Singh. The truth hurts. But it won’t happen again, in 2022 and 2024. Election integrity laws will be enforced to keep you cheating bastards from doing it again. Including prison time for Democrats.

          • Singh:
            The US Senate push to relax the filibuster, one time, so that Democrat Senators can vote on the Voter Rights Act. There’s your evidence! VRA will allow federal control over ALL state election integrity laws. The Democrats so fear election integrity and accountability, that they have to try and pass a bill that will allow them to continue cheating during US elections. There’s your evidence!
            Open your eyes and discover the truth.

        • Evan, Sure Xiden won and not one dead person in Cook County voted Kennedy in 1960, those were North Vietnam boats picked up on the radar in the the gulf of Tonkin and not waves, the Maine sunk from a Spanish mine too… we never had an air plane named the U-2 and Francis Gary Powers wasn’t an American Pilot from Ohio, right?
          No there never has been any monkey business in American politics, yeah, you are so right all of the time… must get old schooling the rest of us?

  4. There is no way that our corrupted and co-opted Supreme Court rules against the draconian and unconstitutional Wuhan Virus “vaccine” (sic) mandates of China Joe Biden.

  5. If we put up with 6 more years of Lisa, it is Alaskans fault for voting on emotion, not logic. There fixed for you.

  6. I hope we can get back to the US Constitution and American Case Law. Whatever did we do for jurisprudence before the exclusive Bar Association set up shop in the 1800’s? The Constitution was applied.

  7. If we get six more years of Princess, it has nothing to do with Trump. Nada.
    It will have everything to do with her having a superior political machine and Alaska’s ongoing tilt to the left.
    Blame Trump?
    What an absolutely asinine comment from a lightweight clearly out of his league.

      • The league you’re not a member of. The league of common sense. Sigh.
        So predictable.
        Please, go get a doll and show us where the bad orange man hurt you.
        Funny you never bother to attempt to point out where I’m wrong. Probably because you can’t.
        You’re out of your league here.

        • This is not rocket science or brain surgery. Democrats have been conditioned and trained to hate Trump. That’s what drives them. Alaska Democrats and other inferior thinkers will mass-up for Lisa. Same in Wyoming for Liz. Lisa and Liz are not the enemy. The Democrats and their trained idiots are the enemy. Vote against all of them.

  8. J6 was lie just like Biden won. If Conservatives continue to believe the lie and not fight for the truth then we deserve what we get. People need to stop watching tell a vision.

    • C: how is it that J6 is a lie? Seriously, it seems like there is plenty of evidence that proves SOMETHING happened. Right?

      • Like the 8000 hours of cctv that is being withheld from the public? You know, the videos of capitol keystone cops throwing flash bangs and tear gas grenades into the non violent crowds? Same keystone cops beating unarmed protestors, as well as acting as capitol tour guides?

        • Non-violent crowds? I saw a ton of hate against the constitution, law enforcement and democracy. It was violent. It was UNQUESTIONABLY violent. What evidence am I missing? Why do you hate the police?

          • Why do you ignore fact? The keystone coppers were just as guilty of violence as much if not more than the crowd. Why did 4 crowd members lose their life that day, while every keystone cop went home at the end of the day? You should probably remove the blinders that your professors have places on you.

    • Truth? OK.
      Truth is my candidate, Donald Trump failed to win re-election. It was a mix of bad luck, bad campaigning, and a poorly run campaign. Like most Republicans he didn’t fight the battles he should have fought until it was after the fact and too late.
      More, like it or not his tweets really did piss off a lot of women.
      Instead of making a campaign about issues, he allowed the campaign to be about him.
      More truth: Jan 6 was a riot, prompted by a corrupt FBI. It was not an insurrection. Trump told the protesters to be peaceful, then to go home when things got out of hand.

      • It was NOT a riot, TMA. It was a protest. You’ve already been conditioned by Pelosi and her Democrat thugs.

  9. SCOTUS will likely rule this mandate unconstitutional and it would be surprising if it wasn’t unanimous. Contrary to what many think, the current SCOTUS has held unanimous rulings more often than not. In fact during the last term more than half of SCOTUS rulings were unanimous decisions…SCOTUS isn’t nearly as partisan as the partisans would have the ill-informed believe.

    • No, Steve, the corrupt and co-opted Supreme Court, which nowadays almost invariably sides with the federal government and its overreaching power, will either rule in favor of PotatoHead’s illegal and unconstitutional Wuhan Virus mandates, or will just punt it back down to the lower district courts, to approve in their stead. Bank on it.

      • Do you have anything, at all, to support your misguided opinion? My opinion is based upon the fact that SCOTUS has ruled repeatedly, time and time again, for individual freedom. My opinion is based upon the fact that SCOTUS has ruled unanimously more often than not. My opinion is based upon the fact that previous SCOTUS rulings hold that states and local jurisdictions have the constitutional authority to make and enforce health regulations. Your opinion seems to be based upon nothing more than, well your opinion. Please Jeff, for once, share what it is you base your opinion on. Rhetoric and sound bites aren’t opinion and they do not make a fundamental base for ones opinion.

  11. Lisa’s a cafeteria Catholic. I told her this myself during catacism class. I know the real truth, but I promised her I would not devulge it publicly until after the election. She admits that Catholics no longer desire large families. To hell with the pill. It was too easy to confuse them with other drugs of the day.

  12. Life begins at conception, Senator Murkowski. Your Catholic faith believes in the sanctity of life. There is no liberal or conservative Catholic view on that. Plain and simple.

    • From the moment of conception, a child has the natural instinct to live. Doesn’t matter that their mind isn’t formed yet. We consider pouring salt on garden slugs as necessary for our gardens to thrive. However, if some person does it just to be doing it, we consider that to be cruel, and discourage it.
      When a fetus is taken out of the womb, we can see it writhe in pain. We agree that even garden slugs probably feel pain, as the salt shrivels them. How much more so an unformed child who isn’t developed enough to be able to cry out in pain? What about partial birth? Now there is cruelty, of a degree meriting sever punishment. An ice pick through their brain stem? Evil to the max.

  13. Hmmm. Gotta love the two sides of the abortion fight.

    Dems steadfastly refuse to back off their (God-given?) right to kill an innocent fetus, but go apeshit when animals are raised and slaughtered for food, or when a convicted, repeat felon dies from a fentanyl overdose while a dumb cop kneels on his back.

    On the other hand, ‘good’ republicans go apeshit over a teenage girl aborting an unwanted fetus because she has yet to graduate from high school, doesn’t want to destroy her body in childbirth and has no means to support a newborn, BUT… they cheer when a predator drone drops a laser-guided bomb onto the laps of a couple heathen Muslims riding around in the middle of the Yemen desert with a couple of AKs and an RPG in the back of their Hilux.

    Seems like SCOTUS will only resolve this by establishing the exact moment when fetus stops being a fertilized egg and becomes a human being. Maybe in line with the presence of brain activity that determines whether the plug can be pulled at the end of life.

    Then maybe we will be able to differentiate between a medical procedure and murder.

    In the meantime, let’s continue to remain intractable on this issue.

  14. Fritz- I see you’re part of the “Mike Pence” back-stabber club. You and the rest of the uni-party republicans don’t understand. America FIRST is priority one. Take your “orange man bad” over to huffpo where you’ll be high-5’d and embraced.

    • Mike Pence didn’t stab anyone in the back. Trump demanded that he violate the law and ignore the clear language of the 12th Amendment, which commanded him to”…open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted…” He had no discretion. It was a purely ministerial act.
      I was a volunteer for Goldwater in 1964 and have been a committed conservative ever since. I don’t take directions from you or anyone else about where I should go with my opinions.

      • You sure? Looked like it to me. Seems every “republican” tossed Trump under the bus, to include Pence.

        What should have happened was a stop of the election did a 100% audit right then and there.

        My grandmother hung out with Barry. She was one of the big-wigs for the AZ chapter for republican women.

        On the flip side, being a lawyer pretty much says it all for me, “fritz”.

        That is the nice thing about this country- we have free speech. Some speech is more freer than others. You keep drinking that “orange man bad” koolaid.

    • Exactly how, under the US Constitution, does a Vice President get to override, delay, or void the Electoral College process?
      Be very specific with your citations.

        • Oh sure. You know the last certifying officer is the most rephrehensible. He certifies he Knows, the packet is complete, duly authenticated, and swears the votes are tabulated without undue foreign influence and he has excercized due and reasonable review, the tabulations are complete and represent the will of the people. He read all the correspondence submitted. Considering the hurried timeframes this reasonable due care was taken, by him? Show me! Kinda like the purchase of the voting machines. Show me the requisition; who signed it what date? Show me ALL the correspondence. Show me the money in the budget; show me all the approvals, show me all the back-up. The media doesn’t even have the curiosty to foi this info. It’s all there. It’s our info, our money. Wouldn’t you want to know these things? No. You just like to watch tv. And. Trust. And, obey. ⭐???‍♂️

  15. Pretty simple, really. Mrs Murkowski represents people, Alaskan people. She represents commonsense, patience, patriotic Alaskans, and decency– regard for Alaskans’ stewardship for the beautiful Great Land and its resource; orderly and compassionate behavior. She goes to the villages. She communicates with people, people of all sorts, to represent Alaskans under the Constitution of the United States of America. I was there on the Parkstrip in 1958 with all the shouting and fireworks, because Alaskans wanted to be active participants in the American Democracy. No doubt folks like Mrs Murkowski embrace the Alaska patriotism then and now. Upstarts come and go. Arizona. Washington CD. Pennsylvania. Alaskans always have their heart in Alaska. Those others remain cheechakos the rest of their natural born days, whether their body resides in Alaska or not. Those that supported that traitor are neither patriots in Alaska or the United States of America. Simple really. Good riddance to him and his ilk, and go slink in the corner out of the way of decent people who support patriotism and people, not BIG RAPE and plunder, and the painted sepulchres that pledge allegiance to traitors.

    • Yeah. He didn’t promise to provide native cadavers to the CDC (regardless of “covid”) so CDC can quantify the plastic in them like we have been begging her for this free service as our number one priority for all these years and so our “true friend” came through for us at last. Don’t you want CDC to know how much plastic is in your body when times up? Because so much plastic is implanted in food now days, volumnizing it etc. She is so sweet. I wonder if this happens before or after burial. So will CDC go in the night and dig up the graves before or after the memorial service Lisa? Please explain how that’s gonna work. Because desecration is a big deal isn’t it?

  16. This is serious. She made a last minute cdc contract. There is a large financial number on it. This is not a joke for you to laugh at. This is a real deal she negotiated. As a native woman I object. Just like she would if it was she instead. I expressly do NOT donate my remains to the Queen of England’s cdc corporation or anyone else to measure plastic or anything else. I believe this is all so much worse than you are lead to believe in Alaska. Who does she think she is! Go Kelly!

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