Interesting note: this draft appears to have been prepared starting in January, around the same time that Justice Breyer, the oldest liberal justice, announced his retirement after a year of adamantly refusing to retire (he was finally replaced last month). I wonder if these developments are related.

Quote Originally Posted by Crandar View Post
It may galvanise some potential supporters, but I don't think it will have a significant impact, as it will mostly affect the counties already voting for Democrats. That being said, if the protests are dynamic enough, the Supreme Court may chicken out and water down the final text. Out if curiousity, is it explicitly forbidden to leak the document? As far as I know, there's no similar precedent, but quite a few Republicans are pretty vocal about the nasty punishment they would to impose on the "mole".
This leak isn't unprecedented - one similar one was in the 1850s (not an auspicious timeline comparison!), and generally justices used to be much more loose-lipped about internal affairs - but in the modern age it is rare. It might be the most ostentatious leak in the court's history. From what I can tell this might be the first time an actual draft, as opposed to the decision or reasoning, has been leaked, but it's not like the contents of this document are particularly novel or notable for scintillating intellectual or rhetorical expression. In any case the outcome of this case was foreordained in most court reporting and analysis for the past year, since the specific case was first granted cert last summer, because Trump appointed the guaranteed 5th vote for overturning Roe v. Wade just prior to the 2020 election.
https://twitter.com/jonathanwpeters/...09806430236672
https://theconstitutionalist.org/202...century-style/


You'd be surprised at how many conservative Evangelical and Catholic women - Republic, anti-abortion - get abortions. For example, by most exit polling of 2020, half of Catholics and 75% of Evangelicals voted Republican. In this older data,

• Many abortion patients reported a religious affiliation—24% were Catholic, 17% were mainline Protestant, 13% were evangelical Protestant and 8% identified with some other religion. Thirty-eight percent of patients had no religious affiliation.
You'll notice that it is not the case that 38% of Americans were irreligious or unaffiliated in 2014. All told, and considering that the CDC reported 630000 legal abortions alone in 2019, it's clear that even beyond all the anecdotal evidence there must be a large cohort of women who have had abortions in their lives who uphold anti-abortion politics. Such hypocrisies and/or coalitional compromises are probably common - just think of some of the patrons here - when it's hard to survey more than 20% national support for criminalizing abortion, going back decades.

It's remarkable that countries like Ireland, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico have all moved toward legalization of abortion in the past few years, but the US is following Poland's track and getting more and more restrictive. And the anti-abortion wing of American politics is proposing far more extreme and punitive policies than exist in Poland currently, though TBF decommunization almost completely killed legal abortion in Poland in practice long ago (one thousand legal abortion procedures per year or fewer for 30 years).

Even the Taliban reportedly allow some abortions on the grounds of threat to the mother's life or household poverty.

It remains completely unclear what sort of effect these disruptions will have on the American electorate. There are cases for both pessimism and optimism. But tens of millions did protest against police violence and impunity recently, with the 2017 and 2018 Women's Marches being two of the largest mass demonstrations in American history prior to those, and not much changed after all, so both optimistic and pessimistic accounts might hold truth.

The SCOTUS majority itself will not choke on the home stretch. Roberts, the Chief Justice, likely already had before the leak, because he is an institutionalist who believes in doing this work slowly and quietly (he condemned Roe before being elevated to SCOTUS, supported all anti-abortion jurisprudence before Trump, and most after). But the rest are very vocal about their beliefs and know well what they were installed to do.