The draft opinion, which could change before it is finalized, indicated that the court would let individual states determine abortion’s legality. Chief Justice John G. Roberts called for an investigation of the leak, and Mitch McConnell said the person responsible should face criminal charges. …
If Dr Fauci can walk-back his comment that that Covid Pandemic is over, then Roberts and the rest of the GOP Supremes can walk-back this ‘draft’ decision.
The conservatives do not need Roberts to overturn Roe V Wade. They can do it without Roberts. November is soon, Dems must vote more Senators and Representatives into Congress. Here is Erwin Chemerinsky on the Hill discussing Roe V Wade in light of what has happened.
Should he choose to, Roberts can certainly put some pressure on Kavanaugh & Gorsuch to revert back to what they promised to Susan Collins, and he himself can revert to his own moderate tendencies, if he wants to restore respect for his Court.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion but stressed that it was not final even as the disclosure triggered a political earthquake with potentially broad electoral and legal consequences.
Expressing indignation over the extraordinary leak, the likes of which has not been seen in modern times, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called it a “betrayal of the confidences of the Court” and ordered an investigation. “This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here,” he said in a statement.
While protesters gathered outside the court headquarters, chanting loudly enough for members of Congress to hear as they entered the Capitol across the street, President Biden and other Democrats called on voters to elect more abortion rights supporters so that lawmakers could codify the principles of Roe into federal law, while Republicans accused liberals of orchestrating the leak to intimidate the justices. …
The draft opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was circulated among the justices in February and leaked to Politico, which published it Monday night and reported that it had the support of at least five of the nine members of the court. Draft opinions routinely change as they are traded among the justices who offer their suggestions and at times votes even shift during the process.
The court did not elaborate on how the draft ruling may have been adjusted in the current case, which stems from a challenge to a Mississippi law severely restricting abortion rights, but emphasized that no one should assume it will necessarily reflect the final decision, expected sometime in June or early July.
“Although the document described in yesterday’s reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case,” the court said in its statement. …
The unprecedented disclosure of a draft opinion in such a major case threw the Supreme Court into turmoil as it faced a head-spinning breach of its traditional secrecy. …
The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion but stressed that it was not final even as the disclosure triggered a political earthquake with potentially broad electoral and legal consequences.
Expressing indignation over the extraordinary leak, the likes of which has not been seen in modern times, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called it a “betrayal of the confidences of the Court” and ordered an investigation. “This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here,” he said in a statement. …
[Apparently, they really wanted this to be a surprise, and are very disappointed.]
As Senator Elizabeth Warren made her way to a car outside of the Supreme Court, her outrage was palpable.
“I am angry. Angry and upset and determined. The United States Congress can keep Roe v. Wade the law of the land. They just need to do it,” Warren said as she was surrounded by reporters and protesters alike. The scene was captured on video, and quickly ricocheted across social media. …
After a reporter observed that they had “never seen” Warren so angry, she responded with a direct aim at her colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Her visible indignation was emblematic of the tensions embroiling Washington over the loaded issue and how to proceed following the breach.
“Republicans have been working toward this day for decades. They have been out there plotting, carefully cultivating these Supreme Court justices so they could have a majority on the bench who would accomplish something that the majority of Americans do not want,” Warren said.
She proceeded to reference polling numbers indicating that 69 percent of Americans oppose the landmark decision being overturned. …
Maybe secret fits better than surprise. The cat should not be released from the bag until one determines who will get their butt clawed when the cat is freed. We still will not know the answer to that question until Wednesday, November 9, 2022, but there is time for endless spin and speculation between now and then. We are past the point of just sampling focus groups already.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
What Was the Strategy Behind the Supreme Court Leak?
May 4, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
The leak of a draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade is not a surprise, but it is something of a mystery.
What’s unsurprising is that the accelerating politicization of the judiciary that began with Roeitself would overwhelm attempts to sustain an apolitical charisma around the operations of the court. Every development and controversy and scandal along the way — the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the multistage death of the filibuster, the pocket veto of Merrick Garland, the Brett Kavanaugh affair, the liberal enthusiasm for court-packing — cut away some element of the apolitical illusion. The leak of a draft decision, a violation of the secrecy around deliberations, is another escalation, but it’s part of the same pattern, the same trend that’s defined judicial politics for two generations now.
But the mystery lies in the strategy behind the leak.
All we know right now, from the leak and related reporting, is that Samuel Alito’s draft reflected the breakdown of the court about three months ago, when his draft first circulated — five votes to overturn Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, three votes against, John Roberts in the middle. But plenty of decisions have changed between the initial vote and the final ruling, including the Obamacare decision in 2012 (where Roberts switched sides) and Casey itself (where Anthony Kennedy wrote the decision upholding abortion rights after initially voting to overturn Roe). And in this case, it always seemed imaginable that an initial stark split would give way, through some kind of intra-judicial persuasion, to the kind of minimalist ruling that Roberts in particular favors.
So if you were simply following a crude strategic logic, the fact that what’s been leaked is a draft from months ago might suggest that a leaker on the conservative side hopes to freeze a wavering justice — Kavanaugh being the obvious candidate — into their initial vote, by making it seem like the very credibility of the court rests on their not being perceived to cave under external pressure.
For support for this theory, look no further than an editorial last week in The Wall Street Journal, warning that Roberts might be “trying to turn” some of his colleagues toward a more modest ruling, one that would uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban without explicitly overturning Roe. The Journal editorial page is well sourced inside the conservative side of the Supreme Court; one of its editorials accurately foresaw that Roberts and Neil Gorsuch would join the liberals to expand the Civil Rights Act’s protections to gay and transgender Americans. So its warning last week could supply a direct conservative motive for a leak.
But then there is the evidence against the conservative-leaker scenario. First, the leak did not go to The Journal or an avowedly conservative media source; it went to reporters at Politico, an unofficially nonideological but, from a conservative perspective, functionally liberal outlet.
Second, as the court has moved rightward, the climate in the left-leaning part of the elite legal world (which is to say, most of it) has become much more self-consciously activist and anti-institutionalist than the climate among, say, Federalist Society types — meaning that if you were betting on a big act of institutional sabotage right now, you would bet on it coming from the left. (And indeed, the leaker was swiftly praised by prominent voices on liberal-legal Twitter.)
Third, you can imagine various possible rationales for a liberal leak. At the most basic level, there might be the hope that seeing the inevitable backlash unfold now, while the ruling can still change, could make a figure like Kavanaugh waver further, rather than locking in his vote.
Then, too, to the extent that liberals hope abortion could be a galvanizing issue — for organizing and fund-raising as well as votes — in a midterm election that’s otherwise shaping up disastrously for the Democrats, the leaker might see this as giving his or her side a head start, by encouraging the new Resistance to get to work a month early.
And finally, to the extent that a leak like this has some delegitimizing effect no matter what, that might be an end unto itself: If the court is going to be conservative, then let it have no mystique whatsoever.
This last place is where most liberals will end up, I’m sure, should the draft ruling turn out to be the final one. But there is an irony here, of course, because a key implication of Alito’s draft — and of arguments marshaled for generations by Roe’s critics — is that treating the judiciary as the main arbiter of our gravest moral debates was always a mistake, one that could lead only to exactly the kind of delegitimization that we see before us now.
Regardless of whether the draft becomes the final decision, then, its leak has already vindicated one of its key premises: that trying to remove an issue like abortion from normal democratic politics was always likely to end very badly for the court.
There’s not much good to say about inflation, with higher prices dogging consumers at the grocery store and the gas pump. But there is one bright spot: Government I bonds are earning eye-popping rates.
New I bonds — low-risk federal savings bonds indexed to inflation — issued through the end of October will earn an annualized rate of 9.62 percent for six months, the Treasury Department announced this week. The rate also applies to older I bonds that are still earning interest. …
Because of the way rates are set on I bonds, people holding older bonds may be earning double-digit rates. An I bond rate has two parts: a fixed rate, set when the bond is issued, which stays the same for its 30-year life, and a variable rate, which is based on the six-month change of the Consumer Price Index and can reset twice a year, in May and November. The Treasury Department applies a formula to combine the two into a composite rate.
The fixed-rate component is currently zero — but it has been 3 percent or higher in the past. I bonds purchased through early 2001 are currently earning more than 13 percent, if holders haven’t already redeemed them, according to the government’s TreasuryDirect website. …
If the right of a woman to decide whether to have a baby won’t qualify as a guaranteed right, then neither will most of the rights you have long assumed are yours.
Nobody will soon forget where they were when they got Monday’s news: The right of women to control their own bodies and to decide whether and when to have a child will no longer belong to them if the leaked Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade becomes law this summer.
But there is more. Reading the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, you quickly learn that all the rights people have long taken for granted — like the rights to decide whom to marry, whether to use birth control, with whom to have sex, how to raise your children, and an endless list of other freedoms — will no longer be protected unless you can point to language in the Constitution expressly guaranteeing those rights, or convince five Supreme Court justices that they are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” …
The Federal Reserve ramped up its attack on rapid inflation on Wednesday, approving its biggest interest rate increase since 2000, detailing a plan to shrink its massive bond holdings and signaling that it will continue working to cool the economy as it tries to tamp down the fastest price increases in four decades.
Yet investors found a reason for relief. While the Fed raised interest rates half a percentage point and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, said similarly large increases would be “on the table” at the Fed’s upcoming meetings, he shot down the idea that policymakers were considering an even larger move, as some investors had feared.
That reassurance helped to send stock indexes soaring. The S&P 500 rose 3 percent, the biggest jump since May 2020.
Many on Wall Street have been nervously eyeing the Fed’s path as it tries to beat back inflation, worried that officials might slow demand so much that the economy will tip into a painful recession. While the Fed is withdrawing monetary help at the fastest pace in decades, Mr. Powell’s comments showed that the central bank was trying to chart a brisk course, but not a drastic one. …
… Still, the Fed’s suite of policy changes underscored that the central bank is serious about cooling down the economy and the job market. Officials have grown increasingly nervous that price increases, which have lasted longer than many economists had expected, could become more permanent. By lifting rates and shrinking its nearly $9 trillion in bond holdings, the Fed will push borrowing costs higher across the economy, moves aimed at slowing demand.
“Inflation is much too high and we understand the hardship it is causing, and we’re moving expeditiously to bring it back down,” Mr. Powell said during a news conference on Wednesday. “We have both the tools we need and the resolve it will take to restore price stability.” …
The jurist said that, after work last Friday, he dropped into a bar near the Supreme Court “to have a few pops,” and inadvertently forgot to take his briefcase when he left.
Have a nice day, Susan Sarandon. You have done as much to set back womens’ rights as you could. And now you have it.
The draft opinion, which could change before it is finalized, indicated that the court would let individual states determine abortion’s legality. Chief Justice John G. Roberts called for an investigation of the leak, and Mitch McConnell said the person responsible should face criminal charges. …
NY Times – May 3
Fred
Not sure if Clarence would want Virginia indicted.
If Dr Fauci can walk-back his comment that that Covid Pandemic is over, then Roberts and the rest of the GOP Supremes can walk-back this ‘draft’ decision.
Fred:
The conservatives do not need Roberts to overturn Roe V Wade. They can do it without Roberts. November is soon, Dems must vote more Senators and Representatives into Congress. Here is Erwin Chemerinsky on the Hill discussing Roe V Wade in light of what has happened.
The Hill, “Rising: May 3, 2022”
“Sacremento Bee, Here’s what’s unprecedented about the Supreme Court’s coming reversal of abortion rights”
Should he choose to, Roberts can certainly put some pressure on Kavanaugh & Gorsuch to revert back to what they promised to Susan Collins, and he himself can revert to his own moderate tendencies, if he wants to restore respect for his Court.
Chief Justice Roberts is mightily peeved there was a leak.
‘Because we wanted it to be a surprise!’ no doubt.
Leaked draft of Supreme Court ruling signals a seismic shift in American politics and law
NY Times – May 3
Leaked draft of Supreme Court ruling signals a seismic shift in American politics and law.
NY Times – May 3
The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion but stressed that it was not final even as the disclosure triggered a political earthquake with potentially broad electoral and legal consequences.
Expressing indignation over the extraordinary leak, the likes of which has not been seen in modern times, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called it a “betrayal of the confidences of the Court” and ordered an investigation. “This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here,” he said in a statement. …
[Apparently, they really wanted this to be a surprise, and are very disappointed.]
‘Angry and upset and determined.’ Visibly rattled Elizabeth Warren reacts to Roe v. Wade leak
Boston Globe – May 4
As Senator Elizabeth Warren made her way to a car outside of the Supreme Court, her outrage was palpable.
“I am angry. Angry and upset and determined. The United States Congress can keep Roe v. Wade the law of the land. They just need to do it,” Warren said as she was surrounded by reporters and protesters alike. The scene was captured on video, and quickly ricocheted across social media. …
After a reporter observed that they had “never seen” Warren so angry, she responded with a direct aim at her colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Her visible indignation was emblematic of the tensions embroiling Washington over the loaded issue and how to proceed following the breach.
“Republicans have been working toward this day for decades. They have been out there plotting, carefully cultivating these Supreme Court justices so they could have a majority on the bench who would accomplish something that the majority of Americans do not want,” Warren said.
She proceeded to reference polling numbers indicating that 69 percent of Americans oppose the landmark decision being overturned. …
CNN Poll: As Supreme Court ruling on Roe looms, most Americans oppose overturning it
CNN – January 21
Maybe secret fits better than surprise. The cat should not be released from the bag until one determines who will get their butt clawed when the cat is freed. We still will not know the answer to that question until Wednesday, November 9, 2022, but there is time for endless spin and speculation between now and then. We are past the point of just sampling focus groups already.
Ross Douthat
What Was the Strategy Behind the Supreme Court Leak?
May 4, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
The leak of a draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade is not a surprise, but it is something of a mystery.
What’s unsurprising is that the accelerating politicization of the judiciary that began with Roeitself would overwhelm attempts to sustain an apolitical charisma around the operations of the court. Every development and controversy and scandal along the way — the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the multistage death of the filibuster, the pocket veto of Merrick Garland, the Brett Kavanaugh affair, the liberal enthusiasm for court-packing — cut away some element of the apolitical illusion. The leak of a draft decision, a violation of the secrecy around deliberations, is another escalation, but it’s part of the same pattern, the same trend that’s defined judicial politics for two generations now.
But the mystery lies in the strategy behind the leak.
All we know right now, from the leak and related reporting, is that Samuel Alito’s draft reflected the breakdown of the court about three months ago, when his draft first circulated — five votes to overturn Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, three votes against, John Roberts in the middle. But plenty of decisions have changed between the initial vote and the final ruling, including the Obamacare decision in 2012 (where Roberts switched sides) and Casey itself (where Anthony Kennedy wrote the decision upholding abortion rights after initially voting to overturn Roe). And in this case, it always seemed imaginable that an initial stark split would give way, through some kind of intra-judicial persuasion, to the kind of minimalist ruling that Roberts in particular favors.
So if you were simply following a crude strategic logic, the fact that what’s been leaked is a draft from months ago might suggest that a leaker on the conservative side hopes to freeze a wavering justice — Kavanaugh being the obvious candidate — into their initial vote, by making it seem like the very credibility of the court rests on their not being perceived to cave under external pressure.
For support for this theory, look no further than an editorial last week in The Wall Street Journal, warning that Roberts might be “trying to turn” some of his colleagues toward a more modest ruling, one that would uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban without explicitly overturning Roe. The Journal editorial page is well sourced inside the conservative side of the Supreme Court; one of its editorials accurately foresaw that Roberts and Neil Gorsuch would join the liberals to expand the Civil Rights Act’s protections to gay and transgender Americans. So its warning last week could supply a direct conservative motive for a leak.
But then there is the evidence against the conservative-leaker scenario. First, the leak did not go to The Journal or an avowedly conservative media source; it went to reporters at Politico, an unofficially nonideological but, from a conservative perspective, functionally liberal outlet.
Second, as the court has moved rightward, the climate in the left-leaning part of the elite legal world (which is to say, most of it) has become much more self-consciously activist and anti-institutionalist than the climate among, say, Federalist Society types — meaning that if you were betting on a big act of institutional sabotage right now, you would bet on it coming from the left. (And indeed, the leaker was swiftly praised by prominent voices on liberal-legal Twitter.)
Third, you can imagine various possible rationales for a liberal leak. At the most basic level, there might be the hope that seeing the inevitable backlash unfold now, while the ruling can still change, could make a figure like Kavanaugh waver further, rather than locking in his vote.
Then, too, to the extent that liberals hope abortion could be a galvanizing issue — for organizing and fund-raising as well as votes — in a midterm election that’s otherwise shaping up disastrously for the Democrats, the leaker might see this as giving his or her side a head start, by encouraging the new Resistance to get to work a month early.
And finally, to the extent that a leak like this has some delegitimizing effect no matter what, that might be an end unto itself: If the court is going to be conservative, then let it have no mystique whatsoever.
This last place is where most liberals will end up, I’m sure, should the draft ruling turn out to be the final one. But there is an irony here, of course, because a key implication of Alito’s draft — and of arguments marshaled for generations by Roe’s critics — is that treating the judiciary as the main arbiter of our gravest moral debates was always a mistake, one that could lead only to exactly the kind of delegitimization that we see before us now.
Regardless of whether the draft becomes the final decision, then, its leak has already vindicated one of its key premises: that trying to remove an issue like abortion from normal democratic politics was always likely to end very badly for the court.
You were in the trash. Before I took out the “paper and the trash” I looked.
There’s not much good to say about inflation, with higher prices dogging consumers at the grocery store and the gas pump. But there is one bright spot: Government I bonds are earning eye-popping rates.
New I bonds — low-risk federal savings bonds indexed to inflation — issued through the end of October will earn an annualized rate of 9.62 percent for six months, the Treasury Department announced this week. The rate also applies to older I bonds that are still earning interest. …
Because of the way rates are set on I bonds, people holding older bonds may be earning double-digit rates. An I bond rate has two parts: a fixed rate, set when the bond is issued, which stays the same for its 30-year life, and a variable rate, which is based on the six-month change of the Consumer Price Index and can reset twice a year, in May and November. The Treasury Department applies a formula to combine the two into a composite rate.
The fixed-rate component is currently zero — but it has been 3 percent or higher in the past. I bonds purchased through early 2001 are currently earning more than 13 percent, if holders haven’t already redeemed them, according to the government’s TreasuryDirect website. …
Inflation bonds are earning eye-popping rates: 9.62 percent
NY Times – May 3
The new Supreme Court’s iron fist
Boston Globe – Laurence Tribe – May 3
well, i am not shocked by the breach. I’m shocked by the decision.
Fed Makes Biggest Interest Rate Increase Since 2000 as High Inflation Persists
NY Times – May 4
Kavanaugh Asks If Anyone Has Seen Briefcase He Accidentally Left at Bar Last Week, Andy Borowitz
The jurist said that, after work last Friday, he dropped into a bar near the Supreme Court “to have a few pops,” and inadvertently forgot to take his briefcase when he left.