by Bill White
[Transcript]
And just like that, the war in Ukraine has slipped into the ether.
Dobbs -v- Jackson Women's Health Organization, or Dobbs, is a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that deals with the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that banned abortion operations after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
So, the lower courts had ruled in preliminary injunctions to prevent enforcement of the law on the basis that the law violated the holding of women's rights in Planned Parenthood -v- Casey, or Casey as it is referred to, a decision which generally allows a woman to opt for an abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Oral arguments were held in December 2021 and a decision was expected by the end of the 2021–22 term, which ends October 2nd this year, but yesterday, POLITICO obtained a leaked Supreme Court draft majority opinion, and that draft suggests that the Supreme Court is prepared to overturn both Roe and Casey.
According to this draft opinion, Justice Alito is said to have written: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start”. Alito continued “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Well, you’ll get no argument from me there…
And POLITICO wrote that four of the other justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — joined the draft opinion with Alito while Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan will be writing dissents. It is unclear how Chief Justice John Roberts will vote or if he has already joined a written opinion.
A number of questions arise from this, not least of which is who leaked the draft opinion? From my Twitter feed, the knee-jerk reaction and majority appear to support the guess that the document was leaked by a Leftist clerk, who naturally leaked it to POLITICO, a known Lefty publication. But I'm not so sure about that...
Supporters of the trending Twitter opinion say that the draft was leaked to pressure the justices and to provoke the Leftist Mob to riot, as they do so often, hoping to force the justices to change their opinion. That plan seems too easy and quite unlikely. Supreme Court Justices are unlikely to submit to Mob Rule.
However, knowing how the Left would react, I believe a Conservative, either one of the Justices or a clerk working there, released the draft opinion now, rather than a month before the midterm elections. That makes much more sense to me; I am of the view that we should get the riots over with now so that they can’t be used by the Biden Administration to institute sweeping changes to the voting process like was done by Democrats in 2020.
And if I was going to leak that document, I would have sent it to a Leftist publication, but that's just me. Frankly, the document would have been spiked by many of the Conservative publications as being too sacred to be published before its time and even if it had been published, the Leftists would have immediately denied its authenticity if, for example, FoxNews had run with the story. So, I don’t doubt the authenticity of the draft opinion, but I do question the method of its leaking.
Of course, I could be wrong. The Democrats’ lust for murder is strong, so maybe some lowly clerk for Sotomayor or perhaps Sotomayor herself was so crazed by the draft opinion that they couldn’t wait to release it. Well, we’ll probably never know who leaked it. Time will tell whether this draft opinion survives. Please G-D I hope that it does.
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