Good Op-Ed from NYT's Brooks on Roe v. Wade

The New York Times: Roe's Birth, and Death:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views.

Brooks argues against the "Constitutional option" on filibusters, but deals with the root cause of lack of comity in the senate.