Liberal Supreme Court Justice Had A ‘Shocking’ Post-Dobbs Breakdown

The Supreme Court’s liberal justices delayed releasing their dissents on the 2022 landmark abortion decision, brushing aside requests from conservative justices who faced threats following the leak of the draft decision, according to a new book from conservative author Mollie Hemingway.

In Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution, which was released on Tuesday, Hemingway lays out how Justice Samuel Alito’s balance of principles and pragmatism delivered one of the most important Supreme Court rulings in American history. She also goes behind the scenes following the shocking leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision.

On May 12, 2022 — 10 days after POLITICO published the leaked majority opinion in Dobbs — justices met in conference to set the dates for the release of looming decisions. The Dobbs ruling was at the top of conservative justices’ minds during the conference.

“The majority opinion had been done for more than three months and was waiting only for the dissents,” wrote Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist. “Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat. Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome. The dissenters demurred.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed the liberal justices to give a date when they could expect the dissents to be completed, but the liberals refused to set any date, according to Hemingway.

“Following the conference, Justice Elena Kagan visited Justice Stephen Breyer’s office,” Hemingway continued. “Though he had not yet said he would accommodate the justices whose lives were at risk by getting out a dissent, he was the member of the liberal bloc most willing to do so … Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking.’”

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Hemingway called the liberal justices’ stunt “outrageous.”

“You had the actual justices having their lives threatened multiple times a day, their children’s lives threatened, their spouses’ lives threatened. They had to move out of their homes. They had to wear bulletproof vests,” she added. “There was a man who was arrested for trying to kill Brett Kavanaugh and his family, and he said he wanted to take out three justices.”

“Delaying a decision because even though you know that abortion is not really mentioned in the Constitution you wish it were, even if it costs the lives of your colleagues, it’s outrageous and shocking behavior.”

Just over a month after the liberal justices denied conservatives’ requests to release the opinion quickly, a man who plotted to assassinate Kavanaugh was arrested near the justice’s home.

Hemingway told The Daily Wire that if a plot to murder a Supreme Court justice had succeeded, any pending decisions would have been disrupted.

“It’s important that people know, had one of the left-wing activists succeeded in assassinating a Supreme Court justice, it would have changed the decision because a ruling is only official when it’s handed down publicly,” Hemingway said.

After weeks of threats against conservative justices and their families forced some, including Alito and his wife, to move to secret locations, the Dobbs decision was officially handed down on June 24 in a 6-3 majority ruling, with five of the conservative justices agreeing to overturn the precedent set by Roe v. Wade.

Alito penned the majority opinion that overturned the infamous Roe decision that found a Constitutional protection for abortion. Hemingway explained why Alito was the perfect justice to write the opinion for conservatives. Since Chief Justice John Roberts did not sign onto the majority opinion overturning Roe, Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice, chose who would write the opinion.

“Thomas knew that it had to be done perfectly. It had to keep a majority together,” Hemingway wrote. “There had been previous efforts at the court to overturn Roe that had fallen apart. And so he chose Alito because he knew he would do it in a masterful way and that he would keep the majority together. One of Alito’s specialties is keeping a majority together even if that means sacrificing some of what he would want to happen in a decision.”

Hemingway’s book hits the shelves as rumors about a potential Alito retirement swirl around Washington, D.C., but Hemingway told The Daily Wire that she does not believe Alito will step down anytime soon.

“I think there are so many people who are trying to get Alito in particular to retire,” Hemingway said, adding, “I find pressure campaigns to be somewhat obnoxious and I don’t know why people do them exactly, but if you’re going to pressure, I think that people should consider pressuring the chief, John Roberts. He’s in his 70s. He’s the second longest-serving justice on the court after Thomas. And it would be probably better for the conservative legal movement to replace John Roberts than to replace either Thomas or Alito.”