What would the Founders think of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs? Say we do what Bill and Ted did in their “Excellent Adventure.” We jump into a phone-booth-shaped time machine and travel back to 1776 to find Thomas Jefferson and ask him about Dobbs. I see at least two possibilities.
In the first, we encounter the Evil Jefferson. He turns out to be an unrepentant former slaveholder, aghast that women of all races had the right to vote in modern America. In the second, we encounter the Hero Jefferson. This Jefferson reads Dobbs in the vein of the vaunted revolutionary we’ve come to mythologize because he wrote that our freedom is unalienable despite what encroaching governments might say.
The Hero Jefferson shakes his head in anger that the passage of two and half centuries has done so little to cause federal courts to exercise power to protect people from authoritarian government.
