It isn’t a liberal…
The leaked draft of Alito’s opinion is dated February 10 and is almost surely obsolete now, as justices have had time to offer critiques, dissents and revisions. But as of last week, the five-member majority to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
A person close to the court’s most conservative members said Roberts told his fellow jurists in a private conference in early December that he planned to uphold the state law and write an opinion that left Roe and Casey in place for now. But the other conservatives were more interested in an opinion that overturned the precedents, the person said.
I don’t think we need anything more to know that conservatives are trying to pressure Roberts. In fact, that second paragraph indicates that a conservative Justice shared what was said in a private conference and then whoever they told leaked it to the press.
So Republicans need to shut the fuck up about the leak.
Anyway, here’s the story. The inmates are now running the asylum:
The explosive leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade not only focused the nation on the magnitude of the change facing abortion rights, it also signaled the rise of a rightward-moving court that is testing the power of fellow conservative Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
As the country awaits a final decision, the intense deliberations inside a court closed to the public and shaken by revelations of its private negotiations appears to be not between the court’s right and left, but among the six conservative justices, including Roberts, in the court’s supermajority.
The mere existence of the draft indicated that five justices had voted at least tentatively to reject Roberts’s incremental approach to restricting abortion rights. Instead, they would reverse Roe after nearly 50 years of guaranteeing a right to abortion that could not be outlawed by the states.Advertisement
The fact that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. authored the draft is a sign Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s longest-serving member and the only one to write that he would overturn Roe, asserted his seniority to choose who would get the job. In Alito’s more than 16 years on the Supreme Court, he has supported every government restriction on abortion that has come before him.
It is another signal that the 67-year-old Roberts, hailed by scholars just a few years ago as one of the most powerful chief justices in history, is not in control of the process as the court readies its most influential decision in decades.
There is also reason to believe Roberts has not given up. Many who know him well and have watched his maneuvering of the court through other issues are certain he is still preparing his own opinion in hopes he might draw at least one of the court’s newest conservatives to his side. Such an outcome might save 1973′s Roe and the subsequent affirming 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, while severely limiting their protections…
Roberts has sometimes sided with the liberals in some of those disputes, particularly when he thought the authority or reputation of the court was at stake.
That ship has officially sailed. The reputation of the Court is in tatters. Of course it really sailed when the conservative Justices banded together to accept Bush vs Gore and then ruled in a blatantly partisan manner. Everything that’s happened since then has simply reaffirmed that. But since shamelessness is their superpower, they no longer care. I kind of doubt John Roberts is going to care after this either. It’s just will to power, no matter what, by any means necessary.
I think Roberts will continue to pretend he is a moderating influence so they can keep up the pretense that the Court is not a fully theocratic, authoritarian body. But after this he surely knows there’s nothing he can do about it and that Alito and Thomas are the real leaders on the Court. I doubt he’ll put up much of a fight.