Guns and abortion: Contradictory decisions, or consistent? - The Associated Press - en Español

And two momentous decisions by the Supreme Court in two days have done anything but resolve them, firing up debate about whether the court’s conservative justices are being faithful and consistent to history and the Constitution — or citing them to justify political preferences.

“The hypocrisy is raging, but the harm is endless,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday after the court released its decision on abortion.

The court corrected a historic wrong when it voided a right to abortion that has stood for nearly 50 years, former Vice President Mike Pence said Friday.

Wade, the controversial 1973 ruling that upheld the right to abortion, say the Supreme Court back then did just what some accuse the majority justices of doing now, adapting and twisting legal arguments to fit political positions.

A number agree that, for all the controversy of the rulings, the majority justices at least followed a consistent legal theory in issuing the decisions on abortion and guns.

The court majority’s decisions on gun rights and the ruling a day later on abortion both rely on a philosophy of constitutional interpretation called “originalism.” To assess what rights the Constitution confers, originalists hone in on what the texts meant when they were written.

That logic is shaky, he said, given the conclusion by many legal historians that the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights is, in fact, much narrower than the court majority insists.

But taken together, he said, the decisions on guns and abortion create a whiplash effect from a court that claims to be protecting individual rights, then effectively limited many Americans’ control over their own bodies