Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist news site, joined the RCP Podcast on Thursday to talk about her new book on Justice Alito, the fallout from the leaked Dobbs decision, and what she described as an erosion of the long-standing tradition of collegiality on the Supreme Court. Mollie’s book: “Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution” “What happened to the justices after the Dobbs decision was leaked was unconscionable,” she said. “These are people who are not used to being in political scrums and had to be moved to secure locations, had to wear bulletproof vests in front of their children, had to deal with massive home-security concerns.” “These people are not paid what they would get paid in the private sector. They don’t frequently live in secure estates, and some of them are just flat-out in suburban neighborhoods.” “To face that kind of situation, where you have left-wing groups posting home addresses, organizing protests-it’s a very destabilizing situation,” she said. “And learning about what the liberal justices did after the Dobbs leak was, to me, the most shocking story I tell in the book,” Hemingway said. “When the Dobbs leak happened, there were immediate threats on everybody’s lives,” she explained. “Now, this was something 50 years in the making. Everyone knew the arguments for and against overturning Roe.” “The majority had the much more difficult task, and they got their work done by early February,” she said. The draft was leaked to the public in May, “and sure enough, they didn’t even get the dissent filed until June.” “I don’t think it came out until June 24 or something. So it was nearly two full months of death threats.” “One of the most important norms on the court is that you keep your disagreements with your colleagues to your written work. Over the decades, they have gone after each other in their opinions and dissents. They say unbelievably funny but mean things to each other, but then they kind of leave it there,” she said. “Now you’re starting to see some of the justices impugn the integrity of the court or even go after colleagues personally.” “We had Justice Sotomayor recently apologize for what she said about Justice Kavanaugh, which was really shocking inside the court,” she explained. “It was good that she apologized, but you’re seeing this weakening of that norm in not-good ways.” The source of the Dobbs leak was never identified. “Had a real investigation been done, it is much more likely that they would know for certain who did it,” Hemingway said. “They do have their theories. Nobody thinks it was a justice. A lot of people believe it was a clerk. They didn’t really do a thorough investigation.” “Asking, ‘Did you leak it?’ is not the kind of question that could help you figure out if someone was part of an operation of some kind,” she said.
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