Roberts Weeps For Supreme Court, Destroyed Because You Saw That Roe Opinion Six Weeks Early
Chief Justice John Roberts is big mad. How very dare someone violate the sacred body of the nation's highest court by leaking a draft of the opinion that will force thousands of women and girls to carry their rapists' babies to term! These are the justices' private thoughts about the non-existence of a constitutional right to privacy. Have these people no shame!
"A leak of this stature is absolutely appalling," Roberts told a conference of lawyers and judges from the 11th Circuit, CNN reported. "If the person behind it thinks that it will affect our work, that’s just foolish."
And perhaps he's right. It certainly appears that the Republican appointees are about to lay waste to women's civil liberties, blissfully unbothered by the effect it will have on half the population. They're certainly unaffected by the rage they're stoking in the 80 percent of Americans who support the right to abortion in at least some cases.
But the leak will affect women's work.
Because they'll have to leave their states to access abortion care. Or miss out on educational and professional opportunities if they are forced to carry children they don't want and cannot take care of. Or are stuck in hospitals while doctors debate if they are really sick enough to deserve an abortion, or if they have to get just that much closer to dying before the "life and health of the mother" exception kicks in. Or are forced to carry non-viable fetuses to term, only to watch them die in pain. Or can't access IVF or common birth control methods like IUDs because pig ignorant legislators are ramming through gobbledygook legislation without consulting anyone with a rudimentary understanding of female anatomy, much less a gynecologist.
It will affect my work, because I'll be taking off the morning of May 17 for the Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice in DC. Hope to see you there, wherever there is. See, they're not sharing the location because anti-choice protesters tend to get pretty darn confrontational about people exercising their rights to speech, much less health care. And thanks to the Supreme Court holding that a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics violates protesters' free speech right to scream "Baby killer!" at every woman walking in the door, they've been able get right up close and personal when they do it.
But sometimes people in this lunatic country, where it's legal to regulate uteruses but not guns, get more than confrontational. Sometimes they call in bomb threats. Sometimes they blow up clinics. Sometimes they shoot doctors.
You know who doesn't do those things? Team Choice.
And yet, when the Synagogue Sisterhood shows up in DC, we'll be met by an eight-foot, non-scalable barrier outside the Supreme Court, just in case Dottie Finkelstein gets any ideas. And that buffer zone is a whole lot more than 35 feet, because the justices deserve protection from the mob, unlike those whores trying to get a Pap smear at Planned Parenthood.
Meanwhile conservatives are tying themselves into a knot trying to turn the leaked opinion into a threat of violence against the Court.
"The leak was terrible," tweeted "mainstream" conservative Rich Lowry. "Arguably worse has been the unwillingness of pretty much any Democrat to condemn a destructive act that may well put the safety of Supreme Court justices at risk, toward the end of distorting their deliberations on a highly sensitive legal question."
Lowry fails to explain exactly what this "destructive act" is destroying. Nor does he refer to any credible threats to the justices. Again, it isn't our side that waged a 50-year campaign of violence under the banner of "protecting babies."
Presumably they mean that the leak damages the Court's legitimacy, because if it leaks just like every other organization in DC, if it's not a hallowed body of jurists calling balls and strikes from within an ivory tower, then we have to admit it's a political body just like every other. And we have to admit that the harm it is about to inflict on the bodies of American women is a political act.
Which it is.
This is the culmination of a decades-long Republican project, and Mitch McConnell blew up the Senate for just this reason. The Supreme Court has become a tool for Republicans to exert political power in ways they never could if they had to get consent from the American people. And that is the real destruction of legitimacy.
The only effect of this leak of a document that was going to become public in six or eight weeks is to make people mad sooner. We were all going to find out that Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett were willing to shitcan 50 years of precedent to make sure that women are forced to give birth to unwanted babies. The streets were always going to be filled with furious protesters. The leak just deprives the Justices of the ability to drop this bomb in June or July and then hightail it out of town. They have to sit here for the rest of the term and face the anger of the people who have to live with the consequences of this decision. And it sucks to be shamed and have your hypocrisy pointed out by the majority of Americans who do not support this decision and think that you're an illegitimate body composed of partisan hacks.
But not as much as it sucks to be forced to carry a baby you do not want.
Stay mad. November is coming.
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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore with her wonderful husband and a houseful of teenagers. When she isn't being mad about a thing on the internet, she's hiding in plain sight in the carpool line. She's the one wearing yoga pants glaring at her phone.
