The memory of that quiet lunch held at the White House almost 10 years ago has just taken on a whole new dimension, in light of the draft of a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which, if it is adopted, will invalidate the jurisprudence on which the country’s right to abortion has been based since 1973.
A historic and singular leak of the draft decision, Monday evening, on the Politico media site has just put the United States in turmoil.
In July 2013, Barack Obama received, in the President’s private dining room, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 80 years old, in a tactful attempt to obtain his retirement from the highest country court.
With the 2014 midterm elections approaching and the prospect of the Democrats losing control of the Senate, the president sees his last chance to secure a liberal seat on the Supreme Court for decades to come. by quickly appointing a younger judge, but just as liberal as the dean of the institution.
The strategy of the ex-president will end in failure, and the rest will have serious consequences…
In the spring of 2016, in the wake of the death of conservative judge Antonin Scalia, the Republican majority in the Senate will block the nomination of the more liberal judge Merrick Garland in the last year of Obama’s presidency, claiming that, so close to an end of term, the privilege of this appointment should go to the next president. Donald Trump, newly elected, will then choose the conservative Brett Kavanaugh.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the end of the populist mandate, in September 2020, will not open the door to the same interpretation of the context by Republicans. Donald Trump will indeed hasten to appoint another conservative, close to the American religious right, Amy Coney Barrett, just a few weeks before the Democrats regain power.
He will leave behind him outraged Democrats and a Supreme Court whose conservative ideological inclination has been oversized by these successions of failures and political bad faith, in contradiction more and more with the evolution of mores in the country.
“The Supreme Court is out of step with the majority of Americans on the question of abortion”, which the possible decision to suspend the constitutional protection of the right to abortion certainly comes to exacerbate, estimates the constitutionalist and specialist in American law, Bernadette Meyler, joined on Tuesday by The duty at Stanford University.
A disconnected court
The Supreme Court’s draft decision, the authenticity of which was confirmed by the country’s highest court on Tuesday, demonstrates this discrepancy. It is that in addition to Judge Samuel Alito, who signs the decision, the “choices” of Republican presidents numbering four – Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas – would support the end of this federal protection of the right to abortion, says Politico. The camp of the conservative John Roberts is still uncertain, but it could bring support for this decision to 6 against 3, or 66% of the magistrates.
However, a national survey conducted in May 2021 by Gallup shows a completely different sociological portrait of the United States, where 80% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal, one way or another, against 19 barely % who dream of a country where the voluntary termination of pregnancy would become a crime.
More specifically, support for the case law that the Supreme Court is preparing to strike down has been consistent in the United States since the 1990s. Last November, 63% of respondents to a Quinnipiac poll said they supported the Roe v. 1973, at the heart of this new controversy over the rights of women to dispose of their own bodies. In January, CNN showed that 69% of Americans opposed its scrapping.
The same survey by the American network also specified that 59% of respondents hoped that their State would adopt “more permissive” rather than “restrictive” policies in terms of abortion, and this, in the event that the judgment, in the crosshairs of American conservatives for years for partisan purposes, be struck down by the Supreme Court.
backfire
Under the circumstances, while ultra-conservative Americans are happy that such a proposed Supreme Court decision is about to leave the drawing board to shake up society, its existence should rather be feared by Republicans, believes political scientist David Lublin, a professor at American University in Washington, since this also risks “mobilizing pro-choice voters” in view of the upcoming legislative elections next November.
“Traditionally, the existence of this ruling has mobilized pro-life voters who oppose it. His disappearance will certainly reverse the trend. We are facing a debate on a social issue, which now favors the Democrats, ”he said in an interview.
“This decision also risks making a reform of the Supreme Court more likely,” said Bernadette Meyler, recalling that Joe Biden now has the report of the Commission he set up, in the wake of his election, in order to assess the legality and feasibility of changes his administration could make to the operation of the nation’s highest court. Adding judges, limiting their terms of office and reducing the Court’s power are among the avenues explored.
“The problem is that these changes are largely dependent on the results of the November elections,” she adds, elections which traditionally favor the party placed in the opposition during the presidential election. “Furthermore, the redrawing of electoral maps in some states for partisan purposes, the adoption of measures to reduce and complicate access to the polls and the ratification of these measures by the Supreme Court mean that a minority political party with minority ideas may be able to control the House and the Senate, ”argues Mme Meyer.
And she adds: “Will the Supreme Court decision galvanize popular opposition enough to lead to structural change in this court? It’s still too early to tell”, but not yet too late to do so, since a majority of Americans, again, according to a C-SPAN/Pierrepont poll dating from last March, are increasingly critical facing the institution, and are now calling for reforms. History to put this Court in tune with their modernity.