In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs and Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure Executive Director Kenneth Cleveland are appealing to the Supreme Court to opine whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional [1].

The Fifth Circuit had weighed in on December 12, 2019. The Supreme Court agreed on May 17, 2021 to hear the appeal in their term that starts October 2021 [2].

If the delay from the Fifth Circuit opinion to the Supreme Court opinion ends up running from December 2019 to December 2021, and if the annual numbers of abortions match the numbers reported by the Guttmacher Institute for 2017, then during that delay of 2 years there would be 1,724,640 abortions. During the delay since the Court’s Roe v. Wade opinion on January 22, 1973, a delay of 49 years, there would have been 63,293,364 abortions [3].

State officers and the other national officers past and present have been accountable for own their actions funding abortions, and for their actions standing by while persons are deprived of life without receiving the military or criminal processes that all persons are due according to the Fifth Amendment [4].

State officers’ and other national officers’ actions stem from the worst of human nature and of our political system:

• First, people’s systematic evasion of accountability by shifting responsibilities to others. (Legislators’ delegating lawmaking to administrators. Executives’ delegating law interpretation to judges and claiming they’re not responsible for their own actions executing the laws.)
• Second, the systematic defiance of the Constitution by Progressives, who get elected because of the rules and practices of both major parties [5].

State officers’ and other national officers’ actions are of first importance. Even so, even without addressing these actions this national tragedy could be ended simply and quickly, by changing justices’ actions. Justices past and present have been accountable for their own actions standing by during all this abortion.

We can get a good idea of what processes will soon have led the justices to stand by for 49 years if we simply consider the key process that’s letting the justices stand by now for 2 years: Already, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has 90 amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs filed.

“The amicus machine” [6] is one more system by which people in government secure valuable favors for their cronies.

Justices set process rules that welcome unlimited inputs of possible opinion content. Justices determine people’s advancement in the amicus machine by hiring people as law clerks, and by citing or incorporating their arguments.

Past alumni of the Office of the Solicitor General, past law clerks, and others in the amicus machine have various roles. Contributors provide briefs. Wranglers seek out the most-influential experts to provide briefs. Whisperers get contributors to collaborate so that there are fewer briefs. Also, whisperers label briefs to announce the unique substantive issue that each brief covers. And whisperers assign outside editors to manage each brief’s messaging. Outside editors are able to do much-more editing because the parties’ lawyers are blocked from editing others’ briefs, while outsiders are freed to edit others’ briefs, by the process rules set by the justices.

As a crony enterprise, amicus work substantially enhances law firms’ reputations. Almost all the firms that do this work pursue it not for the direct billings but rather as premier marketing that attracts clients whose cases in other courts are highly lucrative.

Given the complexity of modern government, law clerks and the amicus machine may seem highly valuable to enable justices to increase their workloads so they can provide more justice.

This mistaken view is blind to what we understand about cognition and behavior.

The brain is an inference engine [7]. Mostly without us being consciously aware that our brains are doing this, our brains assimilate input data by seeking out and finding the data’s embedded patterns. The more data of a given kind that the brain is exposed to and the more consistent the data’s patterns, the more that the brain’s recognition of these patterns gets used and gets strengthened, and the more that that the brain’s recognition of alternative patterns goes unused and gets weakened [8].

Further, the more that a legal system selects for individuals who can recall large amounts of text information and can argue using that information, the more that the justices will excel in these morally-agnostic skills and will seek to exercise them at every opportunity, and the less that the justices will excel in and exercise other skills, and wisdom.

Often people suspect that justices are guided by politics or by after-hours social norms. Rarely do people pay attention to what justices did on the job to become justices, and to what justices spend their time doing on the job as justices—even though these activities take up by far the greatest portion of these people’s time, and greatly shape these people’s behavior. Never have congresses and presidents used their constitutional power [9] to regulate the courts by eliminating law clerks and amicus briefs. But they certainly should.

Complexity and lack of wisdom are only of benefit when people seek to defy the Constitution. It takes Byzantine arguments and moral blindness to ignore that an unborn child has life from conception, and to focus one’s attention away from the first principle [10] that no person shall be deprived of life by abortion.

When people support the Constitution, they find that the Constitution uses concepts that are simple to understand and simple to support. Justice is served when the meaning of these concepts is not added to and when as a result, opinions are simple and principled.

Justice is further served when the constitutionally-supported natural right to life and the natural right to a speedy trial are respected by making life secure not after 49 years, and not after 2 years, but immediately.