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

Paragraph 5 of 5

Sentence 3 of 3

I see two claims here:

“’For this reason, it is essential that this Court maintain the power to restore authority to its proper possessors by correcting constitutional decisions that, on reconsideration, are found to be mistaken.’ Thornburgh, 476 U. S., at 787 (dissenting opinion).”

The claims:

• “’For this reason, it is essential that this Court maintain the power to restore authority to its proper possessors by correcting constitutional decisions that, on reconsideration, are found to be mistaken.’”
• “'[I]t is essential that this Court maintain the power to restore authority to its proper possessors by correcting constitutional decisions that, on reconsideration, are found to be mistaken.’”

This sentence continues the Justice White quote of the last sentence, and bears the same assertion that this is true by way of the words “as” and “explained” in the attribution tag.

The first claim’s truth value relies on both its content and the truth value of the preceding sentence, and that previous sentence is still undetermined, so this claim is undetermined. But the second claim stands on its own, so let’s see what it has for us. The sentence is kind of a mess, but it’s not impenetrable.

Here are the pieces of the claim to make sense of:

The phrase “it is essential that this Court maintain the power” indicates that the Court has a power and needs to continue to have that power (or ensure that the power continues, depending on how we take “maintain”). The power in question is “the power to restore authority to its proper possessors,” which doesn’t seem to be an enumerated power of the Court. This part definitely deserves more thought. Who said that the Court is the body to determine power location?

The phrase “correcting constitutional decisions” is also a little strange. Does it mean that there are mistakes in the Constitution that the Court can fix? Probably not, since the Court goes on and on about how the Constitution can only be addressed by the Legislative branch. My guess is that White means that SCOTUS decisions that implicate constitutional matters are subject to correction by the Court.

The next phrase introduces a bit of a logical rabbit hole. The matters White asserts that the Court can correct are “constitutional decisions that, on reconsideration, are found to be mistaken.” So White admits to the fallibility of the Court but endorses the fallible Court as the appropriate body to correct the Court’s mistakes. Fine. But who’s to say that the Court isn’t wrong this time, either in its assessment of the “mistaken” decision or in the new interpretation?

The Alito faction would endorse an interpretation that is in line with how the framers intended the matter, but even that requires interpretation, and both the method and the interpretation are subject to disagreement.

So it’s a big mess, and these two claims are undetermined:

• “’For this reason, it is essential that this Court maintain the power to restore authority to its proper possessors by correcting constitutional decisions that, on reconsideration, are found to be mistaken.’”
• “'[I]t is essential that this Court maintain the power to restore authority to its proper possessors by correcting constitutional decisions that, on reconsideration, are found to be mistaken.’”