When the draft of the Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked to the press, the conservative justices who signed on to the majority opinion suddenly wore bigger targets on their backs. The very real threat of assassination hung over them like a coming thunderstorm.
And still their pro-abortion colleagues stalled the release of the official ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, as detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito and reported Saturday by Fox News.
Alito is the justice who wrote Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending nationalized abortion.
“Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief writes in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.”
The dissenters — Justices Stephen Breyer (counting down the days until his retirement at the end of the 2021-22 term ), Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — “demurred,” Hemingway reports. Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the liberals when they expected to be wrapped up. They refused to provide a date.
The tension and the threats escalated.
‘Serious Security Risk’
On May 2, 2022, accomplice media outlet Politico published the 98-page draft of Dobbs. The unprecedented leak set off a wave of leftist protests and a literal firestorm of pro-abortion-led violence. Six days later — on Mother’s Day — a radical who was eventually arrested thanks to a half-eaten burrito firebombed the Madison headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action, a Christian pro-life, pro-family organization.
“In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze,” Hemingway wrote. Protesters also lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes.
More than a month after the leak, Nicholas Roske, 26 at the time, arrived at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with murder on his mind. In his possession were a Glock pistol, ammunition, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, duct tape, and more accoutrements, according to the criminal complaint. Roske said he was going to stop Roe v. Wade from being overturned by getting rid of a judge — or three — that voted to stop the deeply flawed 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide.
“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,” Hemingway writes.
It took 53 days to finally release the Dobbs decision. Despite the growing threat to their colleagues, the liberals on the court refused to listen to urgent pleas to complete their work, Hemingway reports.
The ‘Wall Was Shaking’
Kagan, an Obama nominee, made her opinion on the delay loudly clear, according to Hemingway’s book, as reported by Fox.
“Hemingway wrote that Kagan, an Obama appointee, angrily confronted Breyer, a Clinton appointee, in May 2022 behind closed doors after at least one justice, Samuel Alito, had asked his liberal colleagues to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats,” Fox reported. “Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request, Hemingway wrote.”
Hemingway wrote that “Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking,’” according to Fox.
While pro-abortion zealots were calling for heads to roll, the court’s liberal minority did nothing to, as the left likes to say with empty virtue, “turn down the temperature.”
The justices needed all the help they could get. But the Biden administration shrugged off the serious threats. Biden press secretary, Jennifer Psaki, insisted the demonstrations were peaceful.
“I know that there’s an outrage right now, I guess, about protests that have been peaceful to date, and we certainly do continue to encourage that, outside judges’ homes, and that’s the president’s position,” Psaki said on May 10.
“Shortly after the leak, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to provide full-time security for all the justices, but he drew criticism because authorities did not arrest protesters despite a law that prohibits ‘picketing or parading’ near a federal judge’s home to influence a court decision,” Fox reported.
Garland refused to enforce the laws against pro-abortion radicals who threatened Supreme Court members even as he was siccing the FBI on parents who spoke out against liberal school district policies.
‘We Can Only Do Our Jobs’
Contrary to the belief by Roe’s supporters that the final outcome could be changed if they just demonstrated and threatened and destroyed enough, the conservatives on the court never wavered.
“We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey,” Alito wrote in his Dobbs opinion. “And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.”
The Fox report on Hemingway’s new book comes after former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer reported rumors earlier this week that the Supreme Court’s liberal minority is once again “slow-walking the dissent” in a landmark redistricting case Louisiana v. Callais, “so that [the decision] will not be issued in time for many Republican states to actually go in and redistrict based on the decision.”
