Supreme Court liberals’ penchant for slow-walking major rulings isn’t simply political, it has put in peril the lives of the conservative majority.
As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway uncovered in her New York Times best-selling new book on Justice Samuel Alito, the high court’s three liberals long delayed the release of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling reversing Roe v. Wade. They refused to deliver their long overdue dissent for months, stone-walling even after their ideological allies at Politico leaked a draft of the majority opinion in early May 2022.
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. The attacks on the right would keep coming.
Protesters lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes.
“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.”
One would-be assassin was breathtakingly close to completing his deadly errand at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home.
Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama nominee, seemed so hell-bent on stalling the ruling that ended nearly 50 years of bad law and nationalized abortion that she screamed at fellow liberal Justice Stephen Breyer in his chambers, demanding he not give in to the majority’s exhortations.
“Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking,’” Hemingway writes in the book.
‘They’ve Had Nothing But Time’
Now we learn Kagan and her liberal colleagues slow-walked another Alito-written opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively put an end to Democrats’ nakedly race-based gerrymandering.
The case focused on a lawsuit led by the NAACP demanding Louisiana create a second majority-black congressional district. What they were really after was forcing the red state to draw up another Democrat seat. Lower courts helped them do just that. The plaintiffs argued that just one majority-black district was a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As The American Spectator described it, the section established “affirmative action for black Democrat politicians.”
“This has not produced particularly outstanding results. And by that I mean the results it has produced have names. Like Hank Johnson, Sheila Jackson Lee, Frederica Wilson, Bennie Thompson, Maxine Waters, Dollar Bill Jefferson, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Al Green, Cori Bush, and lots of others,” The magazine’s Scott McKay wrote. “The Congressional Black Caucus has been the repository of crooks, dopes, communists, and reprobates on a scale unmatched by any other, for the express reason that the districts producing the Star Wars cantina-scene cast of characters that make up that caucus are protected.”
Alito and the majority agreed with Louisiana resident Phillip “Bert” Callais and others who argued Louisiana’s revised map “is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The 6-3 ruling was ready long ago. The court had first heard oral arguments in Callais in March 2025. It was reheard in October, and finally released late last month.
Curiously, the long-delayed ruling, compliments again of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, came out in the wake of Hemingway’s book on Alito and revelations of the dangerous slow-walk on Dobbs.
“So they’ve had nothing but time on this. And I think it does confirm that reporting for this case that they were slow-walking,” Hemingway told me on an upcoming episode of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast, slated for release on Tuesday.
The motive is clear: drag out the release of Callais so state legislatures won’t have time to redraw their maps. If the legislatures run out of time, that helps Democrats take back power, Hemingway said. She said Kagan is “far and away the most political” of the liberal justices.
“I don’t even mean that in a bad way, necessarily. She comes from more of a Democrat political world and knows how to play politics,” Hemingway said. “Usually justices are awful about politics. They think they’re good, but they’re just awful. [Kagan] is actually pretty good about doing it and getting a desired outcome.”
‘Groundless and Utterly Irresponsible’
Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s lone dissent attacking the conservative majority on procedural grounds laughably accuses the justices of having partisan motives. She unwittingly — as KBJ routinely does — exposed the partisan motives of the court’s left wing. Jackson is upset about the timing of the release of the ruling, which wouldn’t be advantageous to the Democrats’ campaign to take back the House in this year’s midterms.
In a rebuttal criticizing Jackson’s attack as “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge” lacking restraint, Alito notes that the “constitutional question was argued and conferenced nearly seven months ago.”
The court could have released the ruling long before it did.
“The decision comes out, the left is outraged they won’t be able to artificially manufacture these racist gerrymanders and they’re losing their minds. And so they try to appeal various aspects back to the court,” Hemingway said of the stalling tactics leading up to the ruling.
She said the other two liberal justices, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, were savvy enough not to throw a “hissy fit.” Jackson was not.
“Because she throws the hissy fit that is absolutely ungrounded by law or reality, it gives Justice Alito the opportunity to include a footnote saying, ‘Uh, we conferenced this back in October.’ The point-being, ‘You all slow-walked this,’” Hemingway said.
The Wall Street Journal ’s editorial board noted as much last week.
“The footnote suggests some pique by Justice Alito about the Court’s long gestation on Callais, and understandably so since Justice Jackson is accusing the majority of playing politics,” the board wrote.
‘A Political Game’
Not surprisingly, many corporate media outlets have yet to report on the liberal justices’ delay games and, in the case of Dobbs, the perils created in the waiting.
“We know why they are not talking about it, which is that they are playing a political game and it would not help them politically to reveal how political the liberal justices are being,” Hemingway said.
