Balls & Strikes Editor-in-Chief Jay Willis wants to set the record straight: the Supreme Court’s conservative makeup is nothing new. Talking to host Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Willis says the high court has been a conservative institution since the late 1960s.
“There’s sort of this popular conception of the court is fairly balanced... for decades, there was a liberal wing and a conservative wing and then a so-called swing justice,” he explains.
“It was Sandra Day O’Connor then it was Anthony Kennedy, but Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy were both Republican appointees, both conservatives. So at all times the court has leaned conservative. And then obviously since Anthony Kennedy was replaced with your good friend and mine, Brett Kavanaugh, that entire model has been out the window.”
Willis was breaking down the court’s political leanings because the future of Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance. SCOTUS heard arguments this week in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that may decide if a state is entitled to block women from getting abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. And quite frankly, pro-rights people are scared.
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Willis explains why they have good reason to be. “It’s certainly the most conservative Supreme court since the Great Depression,” he says.
He notes that Roberts compared American abortion access to North Korea’s, suggesting it’s too lax, and Kavanaugh waxed poetic about other times the court had overturned it’s own precedents, apparently missing the point that those cases actually expanded people’s rights.
Amy Coney Barrett stated that she basically thinks adoption access should be enough to block women’s rights. So what do all these things have in common? Well, Willis tells Molly that these judges on the right seem to think they really are upholding justice.
“They don’t think this is like an abdication of their judicial responsibility in their movement. This is like an act of tremendous courage that they’ve been building towards for decades. And it’s like a privilege for them to be able to follow through on this promise to follow through on this movement,” he says.
Barrett’s comments on the issue, in particular, were “really flippant, really shocking and [it] does not portend well for what comes next.”
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