Someone leaked a draft of the Supreme Court's decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which apparently overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The leak is certainly a betrayal of trust and a failure of professional ethics on the part of the leaker and the act is possibly criminal.
Whoever did it, whether affiliated with the Court's liberals or with the conservatives, deserves to have his or her legal career ended. If any of the Justices had anything to do with it they deserve to be impeached. The guilty party has done profound damage to the integrity of the Court.
But beyond that, the reaction of many on the left to the news that the Court appears poised to allow states to craft their own laws on abortion is deeply disappointing.
To see why it's disappointing check out this compilation of tweets from various lefties put together by Jordan Boyd at The Federalist.
Over and over those who express outrage over the Court's ruling - which is not yet official and won't be until the summer - call for violence, destruction, and threaten the Justices and their families. This is how barbarians practice politics: Give us our way or else we'll burn everything down and threaten you and your families with violence.
In all of the tweets that Ms. Boyd catalogues there's no evidence at all of any argument, no reasons are given to cause anyone to think that the Court has wrongly interpreted the Constitution in Dobbs, and no Constitutionally based defense of Roe against Justice Alito's scathing critique of that 1973 decision.
Rather what we see are very angry people forsaking rational argument and giving way to their rage over the fact that in the future they may have to travel to a different state for the opportunity to dismember their unborn baby.
Some aver that the Court is declaring war on women. They seem oblivious to the fact that for the last fifty years there's been the equivalent of a war on the unborn that has cost some 60 million fatalities. Besides, it seems odd that the same folks who insist that they don't know what a woman is are now telling us that there's a war against them.
They're also warning that democracy is imperiled by returning to the states and their citizens the right to decide whether abortion will be permitted and under what circumstances it will be permitted, as if allowing the people, through the ballot box, to make this decision is somehow anti-democratic.
Among Ms. Boyd's collection of tweets there are many which call for "burning everything down," even as the left has loudly and persistently condemned the violence of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. I hope in the days ahead to read numerous repudiations from progressives of their fellow progressives who are calling for mob violence today, but I won't be surprised if those repudiations never materialize.
(By the way, doesn't Twitter forbid calls for violence and mayhem on its platform, or did that all change when Elon Musk took over?)
In any event, Alito's majority decision clearly states why Roe was wrongly decided. It'll be interesting to see whether any of those who want the abortion regime to continue will offer a compelling case - based on the Constitution, not on emotion - for thinking that Alito is wrong.