The leaked ruling that the US Federal Supreme Court is about to make on abortion is meant to scare the justices.
Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, California, was caught with a gun and a knife near the home of Supreme Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in Maryland and was arrested on charges of attempted murder after police received a phone call in which Roske himself threatened the murder of an unidentified Supreme Court justice and then suicide. As Roske himself said, the idea that the Supreme Court is about to severely restrict abortion in a landmark ruling shocked him.
As is well known, the federal Supreme Court in Washington is about to rule on the case Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al, commonly known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
In early May, the well-known news site Politico released an unauthorized draft of a Supreme Court opinion on that case, dated February 10, 2022 and signed by Justice Samuel A. Alito. The ruling, expected any day now, famously has the grandiose potential to overturn the decisions in Roe v. Wade from 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey from 1992. In other words, it has the potential to erase the improvised decision to call abortion a federal “right” defended by the U.S. Constitution, which it is not, and which therefore constitutes a blatant abuse, dripping with the blood of millions upon millions of babies still in the womb, and which carries an obvious weight even internationally.
If so, abortion in the USA would cease to be a federal “right” and revert to the judgment of individual states, i.e. to the pre-1973 situation. With unquestionable, enormous, fundamental benefit to the right to life.
Now, never, ever has it happened that an entire draft opinion on such an important case is leaked to the press. And, given what is at stake, the violence with which the abortion issue has been proposed and imposed around the world for decades, the number of human lives it has cost and the raw politicization of the whole issue, such a leak could have and has only one reason.
The strategy of tension. To inflame tempers, wreak havoc and frighten judges into backing down. When the draft opinion was circulated it was said and written, and it was a well-founded fear. Today Nicholas Roske makes helming a fact. Had he succeeded in his own intent of striking one to educate a hundred, we would be writing very different things today and abortion, both in the United States and around the world, would have been armored for who knows how long.
Roske was unbalanced. Of course. Maybe that makes it lighter? Hasn’t history been changed a thousand times by a “deranged” person? I am afraid that few truly realize the danger that the lives of millions and millions of children have run because of a “deranged” man’s quarter of an hour of celebrity, but mostly because of the responsibility of those who triggered the trouble by leaking Justice Alito’s draft.
The good news is that, rebus sic stantibus, the scorching weather has not fazed the supreme judges by one iota. There are no reports of wavering, doubts, or second thoughts. The bad news is that Nicholas Roske can be found by the pound at the market.