John Roberts and Abortion


To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed. The work of the Court will not be affected in any way.

— Chief Justice John Roberts

Bari Weiss, the resigned-ahead-of-being-cancelled ex-New York Times editor and writer, has come out with a commendable response to the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

The leak is big. Weiss quotes Politico, which leaked the draft document, saying, “No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.”

The leak is politically important. It comes from someone on the left, and aims to overturn the trend toward a Democratic wipeout this Fall by mobilizing Democrats’ pro-choice female and youth base to vote and go active, and to supplant inflation, crime, and open borders as the key election issue.

The leak is awful. A (possible Yale) law professor told Weiss:

the leak is not surprising because many of the people we’ve been graduating from schools like Yale are the kind of people who would do such a thing. They think that everything is violence. And so everything is permitted.  .   .  this person sees themselves as a whistleblower. What they don’t understand is that, by leaking this, they violate the trust that is necessary to maintain the institution.

Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington, is even more blunt: “There appears no ethical rule or institutional interest that can withstand this age of rage.”

Bari Weiss herself feels that today, “power and winning are the only tests of virtue,   .   . it is nothing more than the most recent salvo in our race to the bottom.”

Here’s what I think. While Roberts says the leak will have no impact on Court action, I believe it will shift Roberts toward overturning Roe v. Wade. His balanced effort to hold a deeply divided court together has failed. The left has upended the Court’s most treasured privacy tradition. So Roberts will go 6-3, joining the conservatives, but shaping an opinion that both looks moderate but nevertheless ends the precedent of basing abortion on a Constitutional right.

 

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