Supreme Court upholds ban on partial birth abortion

From The Washington Post:

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision pitted the court's conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how _ not whether _ to perform an abortion.

See, I told you so. We are winning and now is not the time to surrender by choosing a pro-choice liberal to be the Republican nominee for the 2008 presidential race.

And to give credit where credit is due, thank you George W Bush for putting two good originalist justices on the Supreme Court.

This decision may well provide a good indication of the ideological direction of the court with its new makeup. With the retirement of O'Connor, who possessed the instincts of a legislator not a judge and therefore sought to be a balancing influence on the court by acting as the "swing vote", the court may become consistently conservative in its judicial outlook.

If this is true it would bode well for the prospects of firearms rights with a Second Amendment case headed for the high court in relation to the D C gun ban which was recently overturned by the D C Circuit Court of Appeals.