WASHINGTON (AP) – Extensive Supreme Court rulings on weapons and abortion have sent an unmistakable message. Conservative judges hold power and are not afraid to use it to make transformative changes to the law, nothing more than depriving a woman of her right to an abortion, which has existed for nearly 50 years.
No more half-measures, they announced Friday, repealing Rowe against Wade and allowing states to ban abortions. And the day before, declaring for the first time that Americans have the right to carry pistols in public for self-defense, they said the Constitution was clear.
“A troubled and newly created court,” Judge Sonia Sotomayor, one of three liberals in the nine-member court, described her colleagues earlier in June.
In particular, the abortion case was a rejection of the growing approach favored by Chief Justice John Roberts.
The cash case decisions on consecutive days were the latest and perhaps clearest manifestation of how the court has evolved over the past six years – the product of a historic incident and republican political brute force – by an institution that leaned properly but produced some remarkable liberal victories, to one with an aggressive, 6-3 conservative majority.
They also showed the enormous influence exerted by two right-wing defenders, Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Thomas wrote the court’s opinion on weapons, while Alito wrote on the majority of abortions.
Alito’s opinion was unequivocal.
“Rowe and Casey must be repealed,” he wrote, citing the remarkable precedents of the abortion court of 1973 and 1992, “and the power to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Only one of the court’s six Conservatives, only Roberts said he would take a more “measured course” simply by upholding the Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeks. He said Roe’s overthrow was an unnecessary and “serious shock” to the legal system.
But the chief judge failed to garner any support from his colleagues on the right, including three judges nominated by former President Donald Trump.
Judges Neil Gorsuch, Brett Cavanaugh, and Amy Connie Barrett helped form a majority to overturn Rowe and fulfill the then-Trump prophecy that Supreme Court officials would vote that way.
They were selected after a scrutiny by Trump’s White House and conservative interest groups designed to avoid the frustration caused by earlier Republican nominees such as Judges David Souther and Anthony Kennedy, whose votes helped keep Roe before 30 years.
But how did Trump even manage to take three vacancies? After Judge Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky promised to prevent President Barack Obama from taking office during election year.
Obama nominated Merrick Garland, then a federal appeals judge and now President Joe Biden’s attorney general, but Republicans would not even give Garland a hearing.
When Trump surprisingly won the presidency, he nominated Gorsuch, who was confirmed only after McConnell rejected what was left of the Senate filibuster for candidates for the Supreme Court.
Judge Anthony Kennedy retired the following year, and Cavanaugh received a hair’s breadth after facing allegations that he denied sexually assaulting a woman when they were teenagers decades ago.
The death of liberal Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 2020 led to the quick confirmation of Barrett by Republicans, despite the upcoming election and McConnell’s opposition during Obama’s term to fill a seat in an election year. She took her seat just days before the 2020 elections and solidified her conservative position on the court.
Without the votes, the liberal minority in the three-judge court could only look frightened, limited to writing disagreements that alternated between ulcers and sadness.
In his disagreement over the arms case, Judge Stephen Brier accused his colleagues in the majority of acting “without taking into account the potentially deadly consequences” of their decision, which came after a recent series of mass shootings and as Congress worked to pass control of the weapons law signed by Biden on Saturday.
In the abortion decision, Breyer, Sotomayor and Judge Elena Kagan came out with an unusual disagreement, speaking as a whole.
“With grief – for this court, but more for the many millions of American women who have lost basic constitutional protection today – we disagree,” they wrote.
The disagreement included a warning that “no one should be sure that this majority has done its job.” Judges suggest that the logic of the decision also jeopardizes previously recognized rights to same-sex marriage and contraception.
Alito refuted the proposal, writing that “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to call into question precedents that do not affect abortion.” But in a separate opinion, Thomas called on the court to reconsider its basic confidentiality decisions, including its 2015 opinion, which guarantees the right to same-sex marriage.
The next term promises more than the same: positive action and voting rights are already on the agenda, and an important election case can be added to the mix.
Public approval of the court is already low, according to opinion polls, and judges have repeatedly spoken out in defense of its legitimacy over the past year.
Roberts was the leading voice, urging the public not to view the court as more than just another political branch of the government after it became entangled with Trump over judicial independence.
Years ago, Scalia sometimes opposed the smaller steps that Roberts often preferred. But at the time, there was no conservative majority without a chief justice.
Judge William Brennan, a liberal who had served for parts of five decades, told his staff that with five votes, anything was possible in the Supreme Court.
Conservatives have a free vote.
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For a full coverage of the AP on the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion, see
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