How An Overlooked Justice Undid Roe v. Wade

The best part of waking up? A full cup of Folgers coffee and music on full blast. Wake me up! Wake me up inside me! So wake me up when it's all over. The moment I wake up, you're all right? The best part of waking up is Folgers in your... Shop Fulger's Instant Coffee and more at your nearest retailer. The infamous leak of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade violated the crucial policy of confidentiality within the Supreme Court. It also put the conservative justices at very real risk. amid intense outside pressure and even an assassination attempt. Now, new revelations about what took place behind the scenes during that tense period has shined a troubling spotlight on the polarization of the High Court. In her new book on Samuel Alito Samuel Alito, who penned the Dobbs decision, Molly Hemingway details the fraught lead up to the release of that landmark decision and highlights the way the conservative justice has modeled the way forward for the court. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howl. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. This episode is sponsored by Brickhouse Nutrition. You've probably heard about those weight loss injections that everyone's been talking about. And for good reason. The results can be pretty incredible. They work by helping regulate blood sugar and keeping your appetite in check. But here's the thing. Not everyone wants to deal with weekly injections, especially when you start hearing about some of the side effects that can come with them. That's where Lean comes in. It's a weight loss supplement developed by doctors, and people are seeing some really impressive results. The ingredients in Lean are backed by research, showing that they can help lower blood sugar, turned stored fat into energy, and reduce those constant cravings that make dieting so hard. This stuff is no joke. I am one of those people that eats sometimes a lot when I'm stressed. But once Lean came into the picture, I was able to rein in my cravings. Let's get you started with 20% off in free rush shipping so you can add Lean to your healthy diet and exercise plans. Visit takeleen.com and enter Wire for your discount. That's promo code wire at takelein.com today. I want to tell you about a critical front in the pro-life movement that our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom are fighting right now. Under the Biden administration, the FDA sought to bypass pro-life state laws by making abortion drugs available through the male. This is incredibly dangerous. It means anyone can access these drugs, including men who want to coerce or trick pregnant women to abort their unborn babies. That's what happened to a young woman named Rosalie. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing her in a case to overturn the FDA's unlawful action. They're also representing the state of Louisiana, which has some of the strongest pro-life laws in the country. This is a really important case that could protect women and save countless unborn lives. ADF could use your support right now. For a limited time, every dollar you give to ADF will be doubled, but only while matching funds last. Go to join ADF.com slash wire or text wire WIRE to 838 to have your gift for life matched.

Joining us now is Molly Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist. Molly, great to have you on. It's wonderful to be here with you. So your book just came out on Samuel Alito, and it's already making headlines, actually. First, what surprised you most while reporting this book? Something that really changed how you personally saw Samuel Alito in the court. Well, I interviewed close to 100 people for the book, and these were Supreme Court justices and federal judges. law professors, really high-level people. And the thing that was the most revealing for me, was about the reaction of the liberal justices to the Dobbs leak. So when that leaked, the justices who signed on to the Dobbs decision, this was the one overturning Roe after 50 years. They had their lives threatened. They had to wear bulletproof vests. They had to be moved to secure locations. And the liberal justices actually slow walked their dissent, quite intentionally so, and against the wishes of their colleagues, to kind of drag that out until the very last minute. though their colleagues' lives were under threat. And I just thought that was, you know, something, obviously nobody knew that was going on behind the scenes, and it was just really surprising to learn that. Yeah, honestly, I was shocked when I first read that coming out of your book. What, can you unpack it for us? How exactly did they slow walk that process? Okay, so the Dobbs decision was disseminated to all the justices by early February. And that meant that the dissent could be written. If it weren't already written by that point, they could fine-tune it. And yet, it leaks on May 2nd, which is three months later. And they then meet in conference, the justices meet in conference, and they are shocked to find out that the Dobbs decision, which needs both the majority opinion and the dissent in order to be made public, they were shocked to find out that those justices did not have... anything close to being ready to have it come out. So some of the justices who were dealing with these daily threats at their homes, which led to an assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh, they said, can you speed it up? So they say, well, maybe we'll get to it by June. And then when they finally get the dissent, together by June, they include a completely gratuitous and unnecessary footnote to a case that was still being worked on, and so it didn't come out for another three-plus weeks. Now, when you're dealing with daily threats every day at your home, your wife, your husband, your children are facing these, that's a really long time period to go through when you know your colleagues could have done it much more quickly. Again, truly shocking, and we all remember that. It was really dire for the conservative justices, particularly Brett Kavanaugh. That was very alarming. Have we seen anything like this before in the past or known about this happening in the court before?

There have actually been quite a few leaks from the court. They're usually not that important, you know, things coming out years out after the fact, or maybe the results of a decision will be leaked to, you know, friendly reporter or something like that. But this was the first time in history that a complete decision in draft form had been released to the public. It was absolutely unprecedented. But you saw the news just this past weekend that there are more papers being leaked in order to advance a cause. It appears that, again, you know, a big complaint of the liberal justices is that the court isn't playing along with lower court federal judges, you know, doing this national injunction game, and they don't like how they're handling the emergency docket. So a leak comes out to help the liberal justices. And so... you know, it's kind of shocking and alarming and also probably the result of what happens when you don't hold people accountable for leaking in the first place. Right, a lot of complaints that no one was ever found or held accountable for the previous leak. In terms of the slow walking, I feel like we're seeing that again by the left side of the court. Is that correct? Well, I was very interested to see this latest reporting that... The liberal justices are slow walking the decision about the racial gerrymandering case that they heard in October. A lot of people have been wondering, why have we not gotten this case from October resolved? Everything else has been resolved. What's the holdup? And there's reporting that they are once again slow walking. And the reasoning there, a lot of people are speculating, is because the... Longer that the decision takes to come out, the less states can respond to the result of that decision. And it is believed that it would really hurt Democrats if this decision were going the way people expect that it will be going. A lot of focus on Ketanji Brown Jackson. No hard accusations, but a lot of people speculating. after her comments publicly criticizing the shadow docket that maybe it's coming from that side. Again, we don't know anything solid. Samuel Alito, of course, the focus of this book is on Samuel Alito. And you argue that he's often kind of overlooked in terms of his importance to the court over all these years. Why has he been so essential? And then why was he so essential in the Dobbs ruling? So a lot of times Americans and conservative Americans really love to focus on Justice Scalia, that sort of father of originalism, or Clarence Thomas, who's, you know, widely regarded as one of the country's greatest Americans. But Samuel Alito... is unlike those two, very reserved, very shy. And he's kind of flown under the radar. A couple years ago, when I was interviewing a bunch of the justices and other people for a book I co-authored with Kerry Severino, they were all saying, why does nobody pay attention to Samuel Alito? He's the giant on this court. And I knew I wanted to cover him and explain the significance of his jurisprudence. And I try to show that.

Final question. As you've documented, there's been some pretty seismic moments for the court in recent years, and it does feel like a splintering is happening. Do you see, you know, a healing taking place amongst the Supreme Court justices or further division? Well, historically, the court has had a lot of different opinions among the members, but they usually constrain themselves to just saying... what they want to say in their opinions and dissents, some of which can get quite harsh. The difference that we've seen recently are some of these temper tantrums or public statements undermining their colleagues or undermining the integrity of the court itself. I do think that the liberal justices could learn from the conservative justices in how to handle being in that very frustrating position of being in a minority on the court. Conservatives had to deal with that for literally decades, and they didn't respond by trashing each other publicly or undermining the integrity. I think the left needs to learn that as well. We've really documented some pretty fascinating moments in the court and some real bombshells in your book that, as we said, already making some major headlines. Best of luck with it. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. We love your program. That was Molly Hemingway, editor-in-chief of the Federalist, talking about her new book, Samuel Alito. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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