I’m Baaaack!

I swore that I would get a post up before this horrible weekend was up. So here it is.

My computer, entirely because of unethical procrastination on my part, finally died as it was predicted to months ago. The time was 10:22, April 18, the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. My new computer was purchased and set up by my IT expert, who lives with me, at approximately 11:16 on April 19.

It’s going to take me a while to catch up. I am so sorry for the interruption: there is a lot going on, isn’t there?

I want to thank Steve Witherspoon for passing along the news of my technological demise so the Alexandria police didn’t show up at my door for a safety check, like the last time. Steve had emailed me off site shortly before the Great Crash, so he seemed like a logical messenger.

Right now, the ethics story that gets my special notice is this, from The Federalist, which writes in part,

When the draft of the Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked to the press, the conservative justices who signed on to the majority opinion [faced a] very real threat of assassination…And still their pro-abortion colleagues stalled the release of the official ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, as detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito and reported Saturday by Fox News.

Alito is the justice who wrote Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending nationalized abortion. “Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief writes in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.” …Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the liberals when they expected to be wrapped up. They refused to provide a date. 

…On May 2, 2022, accomplice media outlet Politico published the 98-page draft of Dobbs. The unprecedented leak set off a wave of leftist protests and a literal firestorm of pro-abortion-led violence. …“In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze,” Hemingway wrote. Protesters also lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes…

“Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically,” Hemingway writes.  It took 53 days to finally release the Dobbs decision. Despite the growing threat to their colleagues, the liberals on the court refused to listen to urgent pleas to complete their work, Hemingway reports….

 “Hemingway wrote that Kagan, an Obama appointee, angrily confronted Breyer, a Clinton appointee, in May 2022 behind closed doors after at least one justice, Samuel Alito, had asked his liberal colleagues to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats,” Fox reported. “Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request, Hemingway wrote.” Hemingway wrote that “Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking,’” according to Fox. 

While pro-abortion zealots were calling for heads to roll, the court’s liberal minority did nothing to, as the left likes to say with empty virtue, “turn down the temperature.”  The justices needed all the help they could get….

“Shortly after the leak, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to provide full-time security for all the justices, but he drew criticism because authorities did not arrest protesters despite a law that prohibits ‘picketing or parading’ near a federal judge’s home to influence a court decision,” Fox reported.

…Contrary to the belief by Roe’s supporters that the final outcome could be changed if they just demonstrated and threatened and destroyed enough, the conservatives on the court never wavered….The Fox report on Hemingway’s new book comes after former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer reported rumors earlier this week that the Supreme Court’s liberal minority is once again “slow-walking the dissent” in a landmark redistricting case Louisiana v. Callais, “so that [the decision] will not be issued in time for many Republican states to actually go in and redistrict based on the decision.”

Nice!

10 thoughts on “I’m Baaaack!

  1. I figure that the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial doesn’t apply to a Supreme Court decision, but purposely delaying one would go against the spirit of the Sixth Amendment, no?

  2. Slow walking any decision suggests that the justices are making decisions based on political calculus and not the law. They have a duty to ensure the appearance of objectivity using legal arguments to make their case.
    This particular decision is a case in point. Roberts should give them a drop dead date and release the majority opinion on that date regardless of the completion of any dissenting or concurring opinions. That will remove the incentive to play politics from either side.

    • Yes. “Dissent by [this date] or forever hold your peace.” The released opinion would carry the annotation that “although X Justices did not support this decision, they have chosen to not offer a dissent for publication.” Or words to that effect.

  3. Glad you’re back! I hope it will be a seamless transition. Since I live in Colorado and you can abort full term, passed by the voters in a direct response to the Supreme Court case, (not my vote, but majority passed it), I never understood why everyone had kittens about the decision. That it was delayed is just one more example of why the general public is losing trust in every institution that really needs some public trust to function properly.

  4. If you listen to the vocal rumblings coming from the vocal political left, they are telling everyone what they are going to do with the Supreme Court “when”, not if, they regain majority power and the White House in Washington DC. Don’t blow off theses calls to pack the Supreme Court as insignificant.

  5. So, this strongly suggests that the Democratic Party members of the Supreme Court intentionally tried to give their supporters the maximum time to murder their opponents on the Supreme Court. Opponents may be too mild a word. When you are hoping the people get murdered by your political friends, enemies is probably the correct term. When you are angling to get the people who disagree with you murdered, ‘colleague’ is right out.

    • To follow up on my drive by mobile posting: What could Roberts have done?

      We don’t know if Roberts read the riot act to the liberal justices, but he should have. Justice Brayer was still on the court, and he’d be an ally in reining in the leakers. Make it clear that contrition is needed, and if they don’t there could be means of retaliation.

      But most of all, Roberts should have set a very short deadline. Make it clear that if that deadline was exceeded, the court would take the unprecedented step of publishing without the dissent.

  6. There is another article in the Times that I think is telling. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/us/politics/supreme-court-shadow-docket.html

    This article talks about the shadow docket, and they go into the history of its use. The article reports about leaked memos in a 2016 case. What I find telling is this passage:

    After obtaining the papers, The Times confirmed their authenticity with several people familiar with the deliberations and shared them with a spokeswoman for the court. The Times posed detailed questions to the justices who wrote the memos; they did not respond.

    Realize what that means: There are several leakers. Less than 100 people have access. I generally consider “several people” to mean more than 2.

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