The fate of Roe v. Wade apparently now turns on the predilections of Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh. The future of Roe v. Wade was the most important issue in Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing last year until the late-arising dispute over a 30-year-old accusation of sexual misconduct.
Kavanaugh secured the influential vote of Maine's sometime maverick Republican Susan Collins only after convincing Collins that he was not dead set on overruling Roe if confirmed. Roberts too was questioned closely about the case in his confirmation hearing 14 years ago and allayed some fears among abortion-rights advocates by stressing the importance of precedent and calling it a "jolt to the system" to overrule a prior decision.
Outside the Court, anti-abortion forces are working hard to provide a test case that the conservative bloc could use to flatly overrule Roe, notably in the new Alabama law that makes women and doctors alike criminally liable for abortions except in extremely rare circumstances. The new laws enacted in ruby-red Republican states validate their political strategy despite the still prevailing majority in the United States opposed to completely outlawing abortion.
The Court's reversal of an old precedent in the new decision, Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, refocused attention on the Roberts Court's record on reversing prior rulings. Statistics compiled for the Supreme Court Database at Washington University's School of Law in St. Louis show that the Roberts Court actually has been scrapping old cases at a slower pace than any of the previous Courts under three chief justices: Earl Warren, Warren E. Burger, and William H. Rehnquist.
A close examination of the overruled cases behind the statistics, however, shows that the conservative justices' policy slips are showing beneath their robes. Among 22 cases listed either in my Supreme Court Yearbook, the Supreme Court database, or both, nearly half divide neatly between five Republican-appointed conservatives and four liberal justices, currently the four Democratic appointees and earlier including the moderate Republican appointees Anthony Kennedy and John Paul Stevens.
Twice, the Roberts Court reversed prior decisions to throw out provisions of campaign finance laws favored by Democrats and election reformers and opposed by Republicans and conservative groups. In both of those cases, the conservative majority acted more like legislators than judges by discounting the fears of corruption that Congress had cited in enacting the campaign spending limits.
Among other 5-4 conservative reversals, the Roberts Court narrowed the scope of federal antitrust law by rejecting a century-old precedent and just last year threw out a 40-year-old precedent to limit the financial base for public employee unions. Another precedent-reversing decision limited, in the name of newly discovered Second Amendment gun rights, the power of local governments to regulate possession of handguns. The parallel to Republican Party platform positions cannot be ignored.
The conservative justices all followed the Republican script in their confirmation hearings by promising to interpret the law instead of making law, as activist judges presumably do. In any number of cases, however, the Republican justices have turned out to be activists bent on unmaking the law. Look, for example, at the 5-4 decision in 2007 to uphold a federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortions just seven years after striking down an almost identical state law.
In last week's decision, the Court threw an earlier ruling, Nevada v. Hall (1979), that allowed a California plaintiff to sue the state of Nevada in a California court for injuries sustained when hit by a car driven in California by a Nevada state employee. In the new case, the tables were reversed: a Nevada man, the wealthy investor Gilbert Hyatt, sued California's tax agency in Nevada court for alleged wrongdoing in an aggressive tax audit back in the early 1990s.
The conservative majority led by Justice Clarence Thomas concluded that states enjoy sovereign immunity in other states' courts even though the Constitution never says so in so many words. Thomas recited, of course, the various rationales for overruling old decisions, including supposedly unfavorable consequences. But Breyer noted that the old case had been rarely used: only 14 cases in 40 years when a state was sued in another state's courts.
Liberal justices have prevailed in only three of the Roberts Court's 5-4 reversals of prior decisions by picking up Justice Anthony Kennedy's vote in the same-sex marriage case and by picking up votes from Thomas or Justice Antonin Scalia in two criminal law decisions. Some of the other reversals have come by lopsided votes: two in unanimous decisions, two others by 8-1 votes.
It bears noting here that the Warren Court was unanimous in two of its most important reversals of prior decisions. All nine justices joined in the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson. A decade later, the Court was unanimous again in reversing a prior decision when it ruled, in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), that indigent criminal defendants must be provided an attorney for their defense. History now judges both of those reversals to have been well considered and long overdue.
As chief justice, Roberts has tried in vain to dispel the odor of political partisanship that hangs over the Court more than perhaps ever before in history, but he has gone along with his fellow conservatives in all of those overtly political cases To paraphrase Roberts from another context, perhaps the best way for the Court to stop being seen as political is, in fact, to stop ruling on the basis of politics.
Many experts believe that Roberts will shy from providing the fifth vote to flatly overrule Roe v. Wade just as Republicans and President Trump have hoped for in packing the Court with doctrinaire conservatives. As Trump might say if asked, "We'll see what happens."
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