The Dobbs Leaker Accomplished Nothing But Accenting The Left’s Contempt For Democracy

A lot of people are seething about the Supreme Court’s decision to allow state legislatures to protect unborn lives, but someone who is almost certainly sulking in a corner (or should be) is the useless insurrectionist who leaked an early draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision.

It’s been nearly two months since someone attempted to compromise the integrity of the judicial process by leaking Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The damaging consequences of that attack on the court can’t be overstated, and it’s a scandal of its own that we still don’t know who the leaker was, since Chief Justice Roberts passed the investigation to the same FBI that went 44 days before agreeing to even investigate attacks on pro-life clinics when pressed by The Federalist.

That said, the leaker, who was lauded by many Democrats as a “brave clerk” who “risked his or her career” to “warn the country,” turned out to be a contender for the most useless self-immolation in America. His or her actions did absolutely nothing but further reveal the left’s contempt for our republic and its laws anytime they stand firm against the left’s agenda.

Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, who comprised the majority in the Dobbs opinion, refused to be cowed into backing down. They refused despite intimidation efforts at their family homes, threats against their lives and their children, a pressure campaign from Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer who told Gorsuch and Kavanaugh they would “pay the price” if they challenged abortion precedent, and even an assassination attempt on Kavanaugh’s life.

If the leak’s intent was to intimidate the justices into changing their decision, it failed. If it was to spark a public pressure campaign with the purpose of convincing the justices to decide cases based on public opinion rather than the Constitution, it failed. If it was to inspire Congress to attempt to preemptively overrule the bench by passing a radical bill allowing abortion to the point of birth for virtually any reason, it failed.

The Supreme Court as an institution — one of the few that has weathered the public decline in institutional faith in recent years — was not destroyed by the leaker’s act of mutinous stupidity. Nor, against the leaker’s best efforts, was the integrity of its ruling.

The one thing the leaker did accomplish, however, was giving everyone one more indicator of how quickly leftists who declare themselves the “defenders of democracy” will reject the constitutional process when they don’t get their way. It was far from the first, after four years of incessant whines about a concocted Russia hoax when Donald Trump won the White House.

Nor was it the last — since the final Dobbs decision dropped we’ve seen renewed calls from Democrats and leftist media activists to pack the court or simply start ignoring its rulings, not to mention the vandalism, arson, and insurrection that broke out in states across the country from people who refused to accept the court’s decision. The leaker and many others on the left have shown time and again that “norms” only matter to them when those norms can be manipulated to further an agenda — the minute they stand in the way, it’s curtains.

The other alternative, of course, is that the leaker simply sacrificed his or her legal career in a bid to get a job at CNN. If that was the goal, it very well might end up successful.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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