11-19-2022
Evangelical leader accuses Justice Samuel Alito of leaking Supreme Court decisions.
Rev. Rob Schenck has written a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts informing him that Justice Samuel Alito leaked the outcome of a critical 2014 Supreme Court ruling that gifted corporations with religious rights and allowed them to deny health care to employees.
The revelation of Alito’s leak in that case adds weight
to the likelihood that he also leaked the draft text of the decision destroying the right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.
According to the letter, after learning of the pending ruling, Schenk was able to use the information to prepare material and statements in advance for when that ruling was announced.
He even contacted the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, before the ruling was released, to let them know how it was going to go.
Rev. Schenck wants Chief Justice Roberts to keep that in mind. When searching for who leaked a draft version of Alito’s Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization of Jackson opinion.
Considering there may be a severe penalty to be paid by whoever is responsible for the initial leak of the recent draft opinion, I thought this previous incident might bear some consideration by you and others involved in the process.
The leak of the draft decision in Dobbs was more than just a breach of Supreme Court tradition and security. By putting out a version of the opinion that was incredibly harsh, and which went far beyond the limits
of what many had expected in the ruling, that draft put a stake in the ground that may have forced even conservative members of the Court to move faster than they had wanted in completely demolishing Roe and the entire concept of privacy rights.
Many have suspected that this is exactly why the leak was made in the first place; not to warn people about what was coming, but to put conservative members of the Court into a position where they either signed on,
or were marked out as traitors to the anti-abortion cause. In short, there was a lot more go gain for Alito
to have leaked the decision he wrote, than for any of the more moderate Justices on the Court to have made the text available before the justices made their final decisions.
Alito reportedly leaked the ruling on the Hobby Lobby case to a small group of supporters and religious rights advocates.
However, the leak of the Dobbs opinion was made to the public, dropping like a bombshell into national politics when it was published in full by Politico. In September, Joan McCarter reported that the leak of the draft Dobbs opinion was still being investigated, but Justice Neil Gorsuch revealed that the outcome of that investigation might “not be made public.”
Which would seem to limit the possible consequences of the leak to something less than a slap on the wrist.
That there has been no announcement of findings seven months after the opinion was released makes it seem more likely that no public report is forthcoming.
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