I posted earlier about the spreading fear among women and their supporters that the right wing’s drive to roll back women’s rights through the courts is reaching fruition with the Bush nominees. What is increasingly apparent is that the right wing also thinks its time has come.

Aside from political power-plays like the South Dakota constitutional provocation currently underway, there is this weirdness:

A protester who crashed a van through an abortion-clinic door demanded to be locked up immediately after being sentenced to 10 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution.

Frank Lafayette Bird, who could have remained free for several weeks before reporting to prison, plans an appeal that he hopes will end with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is unconstitutional. . . .

Bird’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Brent Newton, declined to comment but told Hittner in a previous hearing that his client intends to appeal. It would be his second challenge to the FACE Act.

Newton argued successfully before U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt in August 2003 that the charges should be dismissed because Congress had exceeded its authority under the commerce clause of the Constitution when it adopted the FACE Act.

The government appealed Hoyt’s ruling, and a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed it in February 2005, ordering a new trial. The full 5th Circuit Court upheld the panel’s decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Bird’s appeal.

Now he thinks the time is right, and he’s counting on Alito and Roberts to spring him (presumably he expects the fact of a fellow-traveling anti-choicer languishing in pokey will move their hearts to act that much more quickly). To be sure, the article quotes a constitutional scholar giving his chances of success as “very, very slim”, but what’s interesting is that he believed things had changed enough to give him a chance to strip clinics of protection all by his lonesome. The winks and nods and codewords in the confirmation hearings certainly got the message across. Somehow all that pretended “neutrality” and “open-mindedness” on display still managed to convince the nutcases it was (literally) full speed ahead to roll back women’s rights. Funny how they all got the same message at the same time when, supposedly, there was nothing on record to indicate how the new Justices would vote.

Question: What will be the next act of extremism intended to draw a Supreme Court appeal and overturn a standing precedent favoring human rights?