The Supreme Court is unraveling. The leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would overturn the 1973 abortion-rights precedent Roe v. Wade is just part of it.
The court began to leak even before the opinion (there were reports in late April that Chief Justice John Roberts was trying to coax Justice Brett Kavanaugh to abandon the anti-Roe majority) as well as after (there were reports that Kavanaugh hadn’t wavered). Huge fences have gone up around the court, blocking access for protesters and everybody else. The justices are also facing protests outside their homes.
The importance of these developments lies in how they are transforming the institution’s political character. The justices’ decisions have never been apolitical. How could they be, when hard questions of constitutional law require the application of moral judgment about political institutions? Yet the justices haven’t been seen as politicians – nor have they seen themselves that way.
That’s changing. The court’s deliberations hadn’t leaked the way the political branches do. Now they do – because ordinary institutional politics provides benefits to leaking.
Congress and the White House need to be guarded aggressively from the public because politics incenses some people and makes others downright crazy. Now, quite suddenly, the Supreme Court needs similar protection.