Miscellaneous
Roe vs Wade First Things Magazine HEADLINE: ROE WILL GO by Robert P. George First: If “politicization” means making the Court seem driven by politics rather than law, Roe and Casey are the ultimate causes of politicization. And having this Court stick by those precedents (when, as seen below, they are squarely at issue) would only heighten the impression that the Court is doing politics, not law. For the public knows that the Court is majority originalist and that originalism cannot be squared with Roe and Casey. So if the Court maintained those precedents against a head-on challenge, no one in the nation would doubt that it had done so for fear of the political fallout. And this signal that the Court is susceptible to political blackmail would only deepen the problem. Second: Though other cases might have left room to uphold an abortion regulation without fully overruling Roe and Casey or resorting to made-up rationales, this case does not. Any such ruling would have to rest on reasoning that was groundless, vague, or entrenching of some sort of abortion right. It would either exacerbate the Court’s reputation for politicized decision-making, multiply its forays into the political warzone, or extend the damage done to our legal and political order by Roe and Casey’s survival. Third: Developments this summer make it clear that a failure to overturn Roe and Casey outright would do more than increase those precedents’ immediate harms. It would shatter the conservative legal movement. Scores of filings in Dobbs suggest that the conservative legal movement now sees this case as the ultimate test of this Court’s position on reversing Roe, which is in turn the ultimate test of the Court’s commitment to constitutionalism. Anything less than reversal of Roe would be a wholesale defeat for the conservative legal movement. It would put wind into the sails of critics who have in recent years claimed that the conservative legal establishment is faking a commitment to restoring the courts to principled constitutional reasoning, and is really only interested in securing judgeships for its cronies.