Justice Samuel Alito is apparently not done yet.

After overruling the two-generations-old precedent established by Roe v. Wade, demolishing it in his Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization opinion last year, Alito is undeterred by the national turmoil he’s created. Toward the end of this year’s term, he’s striving to increase it.

The Dobbs decision reversed a legal landscape in which a right to abortion was protected in every state to one in which it’s protected only in states which chose to do so. Dobbs was supposed to be — rookie Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh plaintively hoped — the Supreme Court’s last word on the subject.

Not if Alito has anything to say about it.

Instead of staying out of the issue as “red states” pile on restrictions and “blue states” create protections, Alito wants to turn up the heat.

When a far-fetched claim produced an order by a single federal district judge that FDA approval of a drug used to induce abortion, in effect for a quarter century, was illegitimate, Alito was one of two justices to dissent from a stay, and the only one to write about it.

Alito predicted the outcome of the case — that the court won’t start overruling FDA approvals, something it’s never done before — then made a jaw-dropping claim about the Biden administration. If the court somehow embraced his own view, he wrote, “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts that it would even obey an unfavorable order.”

Legitimate doubts? What evidence is there that the administration has ever, or ever would, defy a Supreme Court order?

There’s more. Though Alito has repeatedly complained that the five justices who voted for Dobbs have been targeted by protests, he’s oblivious to his own role in fanning the flames, such as calling Roe “egregiously wrong” — words probably never uttered about a previous decision by another justice.

Alito also gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal saying he knew the source of the notorious leak of the Dobbs decision, but wouldn’t reveal it.

This is a transparent slap at Chief Justice John Roberts, whose leak investigation produced nothing. Alito may never be chief justice himself, but clearly wants to lead the court’s conservatives.

Meanwhile, the toll of Alito’s recklessness continues to mount, as Republicans seek ever-harsher sanctions against women seeking abortions, including some whose lives were endangered by confusion over which laws apply.

Maine has not been immune, either. The annual “hands around the State House” demonstrations against Roe had steadily diminished in size and intensity, despite a small uptick during the LePage administration.

On Monday, the right-to-life movement was out in force, waiting patiently in the rain to get through security even as their rally in the Hall of Flags was beginning upstairs.

Ultimately, some 650 people signed up to testify against a bill from Gov. Janet Mills, L.D. 1619, outnumbering proponents 10-1. They believe it would allow abortion up to the moment of birth, for any reason.

What the bill would do is allow third trimester abortions if a physician consents, as in the case of Dana Peirce, whose doctors discovered a major fetal abnormality in the 32^nd week, and who had to travel to Colorado for an abortion. The bill’s hearing lasted until 7 a.m. the next morning.

While Mills testified her bill is “reasonable, limited and compassionate,” it’s hard to see the limits; it could extend well beyond Peirce’s case.

And Mills is taking particular heat because she’s previously said she was satisfied with state laws codifying Roe.

What’s happening is that Republican extremism is raising corresponding passions among Democrats, especially young ones, understandably still in shock about Dobbs.

Mills, whose political antennae are keen, is trying to maneuver through a minefield whose terrain, grievously, involves some of the most intimate decisions human beings ever have to make.

There are no good answers. That may seem like no answer, but for the moment it may be all we have.

We do know Americans will never accept the near-total bans so many Republican legislatures are foisting on them. Yet majorities have, almost since Roe was handed down, shown support for some restrictions — though what those might be are maddeningly hard to define.

Justice Alito, meanwhile, appears impervious to criticism, and perhaps is for now. In the only comparable pronouncement one can find in all Supreme Court history, a once-admired chief justice said blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The Dred Scott dictum did not prevail, though it took a war to extinguish it. The battle at hand may be less dire — but it should never have had to be fought.

 

 

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