Trump’s Supreme Court darlings put outsized pressure on their colleagues to get the Dobbs decision published as quickly as possible, overturning Roe v. Wade and plunging women in many states across the country into healthcare chaos, a new book by a conservative pundit reveals.
Alito, by Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway, hits shelves on Tuesday, but the network got a sneak peek, highlighting a dispute between Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Stephen Breyer over Breyer’s apparent willingness to speed up the liberal Justices’ dissent to the majority opinion in Dobbs.
The court cannot publish one without the other, and until the Dobbs decision was published, Roe v. Wade remained the law of the land.
Hemingway writes that, upon hearing Breyer had entertained a request from Justice Samuel Alito to wrap up work on their dissent quickly, she allegedly “screamed so loudly” that “the walls were shaking.”
The conservative Justices, the book claims, were in fear for their lives.
“Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway writes.
“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome. The dissenters demurred.”
The book appears to be alleging that Kagan, Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor were deliberately delaying their dissent to give would-be assassins time to pick off their political opponents on the bench.
On May 2, 2022, the draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked, revealing the court was planning to overturn the decades-old right to abortion nationwide.
If a judge dies after a case has been heard, but before a decision has been published, their voice is voided. That’s a ruling the Supreme Court itself made in 2019.
For Dobbs to be overturned in such a fashion would have required an extraordinary assault on the bench, with at least two Justices assassinated.
Hemingway leans into that kind of scaremongering in her book, writing: “Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically.”
She goes on: “In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze.”
Amy Coney Barrett allegedly “had to put on a bulletproof vest in front of her children.”
The Justices were all provided with extra security after the leak of the draft decision, and one person was arrested and eventually convicted of attempting to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022.
Whoever leaked the Dobbs decision, allegedly drawing conservative judges into the line of fire, also gave those same judges the ammunition they needed to pressure their benchmates to hurry up and finish their dissenting opinion.
Who stood to gain more from the leak is a moot point now, and the identity of the leaker is still unknown.
No Justices were hurt in the less than two months between the leak and the publication of Dobbs.
In Texas, maternal mortality rose 56 percent in the first year of the state’s abortion ban. More than 62 million women live in states with abortion bans. Those women are two times as likely to die from complications of childbirth as their counterparts in states where abortion remains legal.
