Judge Clarence Thomas condemns leak of US Supreme Court abortion ruling
Senior justice fears leak of draft opinion overturning right to an abortion has changed the institution ‘fundamentally’, as protests rage across the US.
The US Supreme Court has been “fundamentally” undermined by the leak of a draft opinion overturning the right to an abortion, one of its judges said as protests over the anticipated ruling were staged across the country.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving member of the court and a long-time critic of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that enshrined the right to an abortion in federal law, said the idea that someone at the court would leak “even one line of one opinion” would once have been thought impossible.
“Now that trust or that belief is gone forever,” Thomas, 73, told a Dallas conference on social and racial inequality sponsored by conservative and libertarian groups. “When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I’m in, it changes the institution fundamentally. It’s like an infidelity that you can explain it but you can’t undo it.”
Thomas, appointed to the court in 1991, dissented the following year from an opinion reaffirming the Roe decision. He has since become a hero to conservatives. His wife Virginia, an activist, has been drawn into a congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol after it emerged that she sent a series of text messages referring to the 2020 election result as “the greatest Heist of our History”.
Politico, the website that obtained the leaked draft opinion, said Thomas was the most senior of five justices who voted to overrule Roe. In an interview with a Berkeley law professor who was once one of his clerks, Thomas criticised the people protesting outside the homes of the conservative justices.
He said conservatives “didn’t throw temper tantrums” and that they “would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way”.
Demonstrators gathered from New York to Seattle on Saturday to show their anger. Thousands assembled at the Washington Monument before proceeding to the Supreme Court.
Gloria Allred, 80, a lawyer, told a rally in Los Angeles of being raped at gunpoint in the 1960s and suffering serious bleeding after a “back-alley” abortion.
“I want you to vote as though your lives depend on it,” she said. “Because they do.”
The Times
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