Politico: The Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade & Casey

This is why Mitch McConnell stonewalled Barack Obama on Justice Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. This is why the GOP forced a sexual predator named Brett Kavanaugh onto the Court. This is why Donald Trump and the Senate Republicans threw together Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in a matter of days after Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed. This was always the endgame: overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They will come for Griswold v. Connecticut next, probably in the next court session. But for now, at the end of the Court’s 2021-22 session, a majority of five justices will overturn Roe and Casey.

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO. The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.

No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.

A person familiar with the court’s deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.

The three Democratic-appointed justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – are working on one or more dissents, according to the person. How Chief Justice John Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already written opinion or draft his own, is unclear.

[From Politico]

The fact that they didn’t even need Roberts’s vote. That’s what they wanted too. Because even though Chief Justice Roberts was appointed by W. Bush, they feel like he’s “squishy” on conservative issues, like whether women should have access to health care, or whether women should have reproductive freedom. So the right-wing of the country fought on this single issue for decades and they finally got what they wanted with Donald Trump: the ability to remake the Court entirely. While overturning Roe was always the endgame, let’s be clear: this Court will f–k everybody over for decades to come. Next year would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe too.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid and Instar.

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