As always, you can find the Dobbs v. Jackson decision here.

Paragraph 8 of 11

Sentence 4 and 5 of 5

I’m actually doing two sentences at a time here, because the Dobbs authors have broken what should be one sentence with an integrated quote into two separate sentences. Neither does anything on its own, though, so here they are together:

“Even when an argument about legislative motive is backed by statements made by legislators who voted for a law, we have been reluctant to attribute those motives to the legislative body as a whole. ‘What motivates one legislator to make a speech about a statute is not necessarily what motivates scores of others to enact it.’ Id., at 384.”

The first sentence is an assertion and the second sentence is a quote from O’Brien that agrees with and offers some support for that assertion. There’s a little expansion on the idea in the O’Brien quote, but this is pretty clumsy.

At any rate, and for whatever it’s worth, that quote appears as advertised in O’Brien:

“What motivates one legislator to make a speech about a statute is not necessarily what motivates scores of others to enact it, and the stakes are sufficiently high for us to eschew guesswork. We decline to void essentially on the ground that it is unwise legislation which Congress had the undoubted power to enact and which could be reenacted in its exact form if the same or another legislator made a ‘wiser’ speech about it.”

And the point makes sense. If the Court were to ascribe the positions of “statements made by legislators who voted for a law” to “the legislative body as a whole” they’d commit a composition fallacy.

The bottom line is that they “have been reluctant,” even if it’s just this once, to assume of the whole what the motives of the parts are. In that sense, the claim is true:

• “Even when an argument about legislative motive is backed by statements made by legislators who voted for a law, we have been reluctant to attribute those motives to the legislative body as a whole.”