WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is calling for a criminal investigation of the leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft memo signaling the end of the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision.
“This lawless action should be investigated and punished as fully as possible. The chief justice must get to the bottom of it and the Department of Justice must pursue criminal charges if applicable,” McConnell said Tuesday.
The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, was published by multiple news organizations Monday evening, setting off a political and legal firestorm that has engulfed Washington. While the draft is not a final ruling, the text indicates that the nation’s highest court is poised to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives” in individual states.
The Senate’s top Republican notably did not comment on the substance of the pending ruling, choosing to focus solely on the fact that it had been surreptitiously passed on to reporters, describing it as a “an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court.”
“Somebody, likely somebody inside the court, leaked a confidential internal draft to the press. Almost certainly in an effort to stir up an inappropriate pressure campaign to sway an outcome,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “Liberals want to rip the blindfold off Lady Justice. They want to override impartiality with intimidation. They want to elevate mob rule over the rule of law.”
McConnell’s critics swiftly howled that it was the Kentuckian who made this moment possible by withholding a vote on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
After the surprise election outcome in 2016, President Donald Trump went on to fill three Supreme Court vacancies, including Scalia’s, which McConnell held open for most of Obama’s final year in office.
“A timely reminder that Mitch McConnell packed the Supreme Court specifically to set the stage for Roe to be overturned,” tweeted Charles Booker, the leading Democratic candidate challenging Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., this year.
Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, dubbed the ruling the work of “Mitch McConnell’s illegitimate Supreme Court.”
Anti-abortion advocates rushed to praise McConnell’s pivotal and relentless political positioning.
Matt Lewis, a self-described pro-life columnist for The Daily Beast, wrote that McConnell’s decision to hold Obama’s Supreme Court vacancy open throughout 2016 gave conservatives who weren’t sold on Trump a reason to vote in that election. Trump won — and as majority leader, McConnell became a shepherd for conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“Conservatives may well be on the 5-yard line of finally winning a nearly 50-year struggle,” wrote Lewis. “If that happens, McConnell will arguably be the most significant pro-life leader in American history, even if American history doesn’t give him enough credit.”
But for now McConnell isn’t rushing to claim that credit, deciding it is more politically advantageous to take umbrage with the process of arguably the most momentous court ruling of the era.
As Democratic leaders express anger and protesters surround the Supreme Court, McConnell has positioned the justices as the victims.
“The justices must be able to discuss and deliberate in an environment of total trust and privacy,” he said. “Americans cannot receive a fair trial if politicians, pundits, bullies and mobs get a say in court. Judicial independence is vital. But the far left has spent years shamelessly attacking it.”
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