CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin opined Monday, after the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana abortion law, that “Roe v. Wade may need one more justice from President Trump.”
Toobin was referring to the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts had sided with the court’s four liberal, Democrat-appointed judges, rather than the other four conservative, Republican-appointed ones. He also wrote the majority opinion.
It was the third major decision this month in which Roberts sided with the liberals. As Breitbart News observed: “In the last two weeks alone, Roberts has sided with the liberals in the LGTBQ discrimination case; the case blocking President Trump from rescinding DACA (for now); and now, on Monday, a case striking down a Louisiana abortion law.”
“I have plenty of surprise,” Toobin said. “Something is going on with John Roberts.”
In the abortion case, Toobin noted, Roberts appeared to have changed his mind about state laws requiring abortion be regulated more carefully to protect women’s safety.
“This law was almost identical to the one in Texas. John Roberts dissented in that case [Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016)]. John Roberts said that Texas law was constitutional. But he lost that case because Anthony Kennedy was still on the Court, and he voted with the liberals in that 5-4 decision.
“Louisiana passes a law that’s almost identical to the Texas law, and here Roberts switched places, because he says stare decisis — the rule of precedent — requires that we honor the deacon of a couple years ago, even though I disagreed with it at the time.
“What that suggests is that Roe v. Wade may need one more justice from President Trump.”
Toobin went on to say that Roberts’s decisions was “extraordinary” and that it will “shape the presidential campaign, because it will inject the Supreme Court back into the conversation.”
Later, on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, Toobin elaborated:
I do think the president can make a good argument that: I need more justice to get on the — to a point so that we can eventually overturn Roe v. Wade.
By the same token, Joe Biden can argue that this issue is still unsettled. And with the age of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, their continued tenure on the court and their possible replacements should be something voters are thinking about when they go to the polls.
Elsewhere, in the New York Times, former Hillary Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon said that Robert was only pretending to be liberal, on occasion, to convince Democrats to “continue to play within the system.”
Fallon is executive director of “Demand Justice,” a liberal group pushing Democrats to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court to at least 11, so that the new vacancies can be filled by liberals, canceling any conservative advantage.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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