No matter where you stand on the issue of abortion you should be horrified over the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v Wade.

What’s shocking isn’t that the Court may be on the verge of reversing Roe - many experts expected that -  but that the draft opinion was leaked to Politico. 

This NEVER happens.

Opinions are released at the conclusion of the term in June and leaks of draft opinions - until now - were unthinkable.

Leaks are everywhere in Washington but never originating with the Supreme Court. The Court - until now - stayed above the fray, debating legal issues in private and circulating opinions in complete confidence until they were ready for publication.

The leaker, a Supreme Court insider, has compromised the integrity and independence of the court by releasing a majority opinion penned by Justice Samuel Alito in the Mississippi case that bans abortions after 15 weeks of gestation.

The guilty party is clearly a bad actor with an agenda. Perhaps the leaker is hoping to gin up public hysteria in the naive belief that protests might change the votes of the justices who are in the majority. Maybe the leaker wants to goose Congress into hastily passing a federal law legalizing abortion.

Then again, this leak has the political benefit of temporarily deflecting attention away from Biden’s failed presidency and his 38% approval rating.

Hmmm. It’s almost as if this leak was designed to motivate the liberal base of the Democratic Party, which is also suffering the effects of Biden’s inflation. As I write this, barricades are up around the Supreme Court and demonstrators are screaming obscenities about the conservative members of the court. It’s ugly and likely to get uglier.

So who did this?

Each of the nine justices has three or four clerks. Those are recent law school grads, usually top-of-their-class lawyers from prestigious law schools. That’s about 36 lawyers who have access to draft opinions.

Those are the likeliest suspects as they do legal research and aid in the preparation of Supreme Court opinions. If it is a clerk who released the opinion, or gave it to a third party to release, that lawyer should be permanently disbarred.

Could a justice herself or himself have leaked the opinion? Let’s fervently hope that is not the case. The justices pride themselves on their collegiality and respect for each another. A leak originating with a justice would destroy the institution.

Reacting to the leak, the non-partisan SCOTUSblog Tweeted this:
It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.

In the frenzy that is being unleashed by this opinion - written in February and by no means final - it’s worth remembering that overturning Roe would not make abortion illegal in the U.S. It would mean there is no constitutional right to abortion, something that even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once questioned, according to this draft opinion.

If this opinion holds, abortion laws would be decided by the states, by the people. In some states, abortions would be illegal. In others, like Mississippi, the gestational dates would be limited. And in some dark blue states, abortions will be legal up until the moment of birth. 

An abortion-until-birth bill almost became law in Virginia in 2019, until the public outcry forced even patrons of the bill to withdraw their support, especially after Gov. Ralph Northam coolly explained that unwanted babies could be kept comfortable until they die.

That was stomach-turning.

If you thought discourse in America was already uncivil, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Thanks to a previously unimaginable breech of confidentiality on the Supreme Court, we are about to plunge into the ugliest, most unhinged moment in memory. Demagoguery will be everywhere, calls for court packing will resume and America will be more Balkanized than ever.

A plague on the person who leaked the opinion and on the publication that printed it.