As the Supreme Court prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, conservative justices faced escalating threats to their lives while their liberal colleagues delayed, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh came perilously close to becoming a martyr to the abortion cause.
The full scope of that danger, and the role of the courts liberal wing, is laid out in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution, a new book by conservative commentator and Supreme Court analyst Mollie Hemingway. According to Western Journal, Hemingways work centers on Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization opinion, portraying him as a steadfast constitutional conservative whose majority decision finally toppled Roe after nearly half a century.
In the tense months before the Dobbs ruling was formally issued, a leaked draft majority opinion alerted the left that the judicial foundation of legalized abortion was about to crumble. Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices, Hemingway wrote in the book, according to The Federalist, the conservative outlet where she serves as editor in chief.
Hemingway underscored the lethal implications of that breach, noting that the timing of the final decision was not a mere procedural detail but a matter of life and death. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically, she wrote, capturing the grim calculus that radicals on the left could easily understand.
Americans who followed the news at the time will recall the nightly scenes outside the private homes of conservative justices, where large, aggressive crowds gathered in what were clearly designed to be intimidation campaigns. These were not peaceful civic demonstrations but volatile, targeted protests that pushed the boundaries of legality and decency, especially given that federal law prohibits efforts to influence judges by picketing near their residences.
The situation escalated from menacing to nearly murderous when a disturbed supporter of abortion rights traveled across the country to Kavanaughs Maryland home, armed and prepared to kill, before apparently losing his nerve and calling authorities on himself. (Shockingly enough, transgender issues were apparently involved.) That episode, chilling on its own, now appears even more damning in light of Hemingways reporting about what was happening inside the court.
Hemingways book reveals a detail that most Americans likely never heard: conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, pleaded with their liberal colleagues to complete their dissents quickly so the Dobbs decision could be issued and the security threat reduced. Instead of responding with urgency to the danger facing their fellow justices, the courts liberals allegedly dragged their feet and refused even to commit to a date by which their dissents would be finished.
In fact, according to Fox News account of Hemingways book, the liberal justices were so indifferent to the mounting peril that they would not agree to any timetable at all for releasing their opinions. The final Dobbs decision was not published until June 22, 2022 a full two weeks after the Kavanaugh assassination attempt on June 8 a delay that, by any reasonable measure, prolonged the period of maximum risk.
Hemingway is explicit about what that delay meant in practical terms. Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat, she wrote, according to The Federalist. Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.
The chain of events began when Politico, a liberal D.C. outlet, published the leaked draft majority opinion on May 3, 2022, detonating a political and cultural firestorm. That disclosure triggered an immediate, horrifying, but utterly predictable wave of protests that continued for nearly two months, with the justices homes turned into nightly targets for rage-fueled activists.
Within that fevered atmosphere, the Kavanaugh plot unfolded, culminating in the would-be assassins arrest outside the justices home on June 8. The fact that the final Dobbs ruling still had not been issued at that point meant the incentive for extremists to alter the courts composition by violence remained fully intact.
No one is alleging that the liberal justices actively conspired in any assassination attempt, and Hemingway does not claim they did. Yet, as she and other conservatives argue, they did not need to be co-conspirators to bear moral responsibility for ignoring obvious dangers that the whole country knew were escalating with every day of delay.
The reality is stark: every additional day before the decision was handed down preserved a window in which killing a single justice could have changed constitutional law for a generation. By refusing to expedite their dissents, the liberal justices signaled, at best, a shocking indifference to the safety of their colleagues and, at worst, a willingness to tolerate heightened risk in the hope that political pressure or worse might intervene.
There is a grim symmetry in the fact that Kavanaugh, of all the justices, became the target of the Dobbs-related assassination plot. His 2018 confirmation hearings descended into a spectacle of uncorroborated accusations and character assassination, cheered on by Democratic senators and their media allies, revealing just how far the left was willing to go to block a conservative jurist from the nations highest court.
Those hearings, with their literally unbelievable charges repeated endlessly by the establishment press, marked a collapse of any recognizable standards of decency, honesty, or integrity in American politics or what used to be called journalism. Hemingway, together with co-author Carrie Severino, chronicled that disgrace in their 2019 book Justice on Trial, which meticulously documented how Democratic power brokers and a compliant media tried to destroy a mans reputation to preserve their ideological grip on the court.
Her new volume extends that indictment beyond politicians and pundits to include the left-leaning justices themselves, portraying them as part of a broader progressive movement willing to gamble with lives to protect abortion on demand. For conservatives who believe in the rule of law, judicial independence, and the sanctity of life, the picture that emerges is not merely of ideological disagreement but of a culture on the left that treats political ends as justification for almost any means.
The Dobbs decision ultimately stood, Roe fell, and the assassination plot failed, but the episode raises enduring questions about the character and priorities of those entrusted with the nations highest judicial authority. Hemingways reporting suggests that when conservative justices were most vulnerable, their liberal counterparts chose delay over duty, leaving the country to wonder how many on the left would have quietly accepted a deadly outcome if it had preserved their preferred version of rights at the expense of both life and the Constitution.
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