The Roberts Court and the Attack on Reproductive Freedom in America

[Celerity]

https://washingtonspectator.org/the-roberts-court-and-the-attack-on-reproductive-freedom-in-america/



One of the first major decisions of the Supreme Court under John Roberts’s tenure as Chief Justice came in 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart, a landmark case that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. But Roberts had been on the (undisclosed) record as critical of Roe v. Wade since at least 1981. That year, when he was working as an advisor to the attorney general and shaping legal policy at the very top of the Justice Department, he wrote favorably that the leading voices on the Right “recognized a serious problem in the current exercise of judicial power,” which he said was illustrated “by what is broadly perceived to be the unprincipled jurisprudence of Roe v. Wade.”

Yet in 2005, when John Roberts took the oath to testify truthfully in the Senate hearing on his nomination to the Supreme Court, he had to get around the fact that the majority of the American people, and probably the majority of senators, supported Roe. To overcome this problem, Roberts offered obfuscating testimony. Despite his oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” at his confirmation hearing, it was not until 2022 that Roberts chose to fully reveal his views on Roe, when he joined the majority of justices in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in upholding Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban, in direct contravention of Roe.

One persistent piece of spin by Roberts was to claim that the anti-abortion briefs he signed on to or supervised when he was the political deputy in the Solicitor General’s Office of the George H.W. Bush administration were just “the positions of the administration” and thus did not reflect his own views. (Bush himself had supported family planning and Planned Parenthood earlier in his public career but made the expedient transition to pro-life positions when he joined the Reagan ticket in 1980). Such positions included supporting a state law requiring women to notify their husbands before they could obtain an abortion and defending a gag rule barring family planning clinics that received federal money from discussing abortion. These sorts of maneuvers came to characterize how Roberts and other extremist judicial candidates who opposed abortion rights would disguise their unpopular views, both as they surfaced in their past records as well as in their testimony under oath before Congress.

Roberts also omitted Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic from a list of his most significant cases that he provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In that litigation, Roberts took the same side as antiabortion extremists against a women’s health center that had sued under federal civil rights laws to stop those extremists from blockading abortion clinics. The petitioners included Randall Terry, who relaunched “Operation Rescue” in 1986 (after it was initially launched in 1970 by the radical Catholic antiabortion activist L. Brent Bozell Jr., William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law). Its slogan was “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” Other petitioners were Michael and Jayne Bray. Michael Bray was a member of a violent domestic terrorist group called the Army of God, which called for a biblically based government in America. He had been convicted a few years earlier, in 1985, of bombing abortion clinics and women’s health advocacy centers.

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[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

Of course he lied at his confirmation (Not just Roberts either). Anyone that claims they didn't know he was lying is a liar. (or a fool/ likely both)