The U.S. Supreme Court recognized today that protest, even when done by abortion protestors, isn't racketeering or extortion. Good. Better will be when the high court admits that neither the "right" to an abortion nor the "right to privacy" is found in the Constitution.

UPDATE: Here's the PDF of the court's unanimous ruling in favor of Operation Rescue and against the National Organization for Women.

This is awesome. The threat of RICO severely hampers protests, I think. So this is really good news for the ability of anti-aborts to make their dissent more visible.

This also should effectively end a disburbing attempt to expand the Hobbs Act that the Bush WH had actually supported (sending Ted Olson as a friend to the court on behalf of Planned Parenthood against Roy Scheidler.)

I wonder if Breyer had to take into account Zimbabwean court rulings to determine the intent and scope of the Congressional Law, the Hobbs Act? W/e it took the court unanimously found it within their power to simply read a law and apply it. Shocking really.

This is nice, and I never would have expected a unanimous decision (it was 8-0, did Ginsburg recuse herself?), but the upcoming "partial-birth" case will reveal (to a large extent) what we've got in Roberts and Alito.

From what I've read, the direct challenges to Roe (e.g., SC's new law... assuming the governer signs it) will not be heard by the Court, presumably because there aren't enough votes to overturn. Is it conceivable that the new conservative intellects on the Court could persuade Kennedy to join them?

Also, is there any chance that, instead of sending the issue to the States, the Court would restrict abortion through the 14th Amendment?

Ralph: Alito wasn't on the court when the case was heard, so he didn't get to participate in the ruling.

Ah. That explains the 8-0. Thanks.

Ralph,

I too will be quite interested to see how the partial-birth abortion restrictions, and other cases, will be handled by Roberts and Alito. I am most interested in how the arguments in those cases will be framed. I suspect that from the first we will get a good sense of whether the SC will move in a federalist direction of possibly sending the abortion issue back to the states or if it will retain control of national abortion policy by reading a protection of unborn life into the 14th.

My sense is that the federal approach is much more likely