Former solicitor general: Roe v. Wade likely to be overturned

Politico reports that Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general and liberal scholar, "predicted Tuesday night that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark decision that gives women abortion rights." Conservatives on the court have made overturning the decision a "trophy," he said, more likely to be won if a Republican chooses a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy. Dellinger said he thought that conservatives would try a piecemeal approach to overturning the decision, but that if Kennedy is replaced by a Republican president, that an outright overturning of the decision is likely. "Rachel Brand, the former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush who helped usher Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito through the confirmation process, demurred on a question about Roe's reversal. 'Frankly it has not occurred to me that that is of any kind of reasonable likelihood any time soon,' she said. 'But I will say that whenever Justice Kennedy retires, if the court looks anything like it does now in terms of makeup, that will be the mother of all confirmation fights. That will be brutal, and I wouldn't want to be in my old job for that one'" (Hohmann, 6/23).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.