Late Monday evening, Politico reported that the Supreme Court has taken a preliminary vote to completely overturn Roe v. Wade, publishing lengthy excerpts from a leaked copy of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion tossing out the landmark 1973 decision guaranteeing the right to legal abortion. While it should be noted that abortion is still available everywhere until the decision is released officially, and the leaked judgment isn’t the final ruling, the draft opinion does speak to what Democrats have feared since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court in late 2020.
If the Alito decision as written does end up going through, it will represent the most spectacular liberal political failure in American history. Abortion access has been the third rail of American politics for decades, often popping up for conservatives to derail completely unrelated legislation if the Hyde Amendment provision banning federal funds for abortion wasn’t included in the bill language. And yet, though the Democrats have held majorities in Congress and the White House quite a few times over the last 50 years, they have never codified Roe into federal law. Not doing so left the door open to where we are today, where the right to abortion is all but dead, just waiting the last few weeks for its official SCOTUS funeral pyre.
