I continue to be amazed by what is being described as the "political firestorm" that has been ignited by the leak of Justice Alito's draft majority opinion in Dobbs. Let me try to state my conclusions a little more clearly than I did in my posting from a couple of days ago.
Let's go back to, say, April 30th. Pre-leak. We, the public, are in a state of uncertainty regarding the disposition of the Dobbs case. Not total uncertainty, to be sure; there was plenty of uncertainty-reducing information already out there, mostly in the form of the Justices' prior writings in prior cases (and elsewhere) about the issues presented in the case. None of us knew with certainty what the Court was going to do, but we all could rationally and reasonably survey the landscape and come up with probabilities connected to any number of possible outcomes.
So, if you had asked me, on April 30th, about my assessment of the likelihoods of various outcomes, I would have given you something like the following answers:
