The politics of Dobbs
By 
In two weeks the SCOTUS will hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health. This case involves Mississippi’s attempt to ban almost all abortions after 15 weeks of gestation. The law is obviously in direct conflict with Roe v. Wade, and with Casey, the 1994 case that upheld Roe on the basis of stare decisis, aka considerations of precedent.
The case generates three possibilities:
(1) Roe and Casey will be explicitly over-ruled.
(2) The Mississippi law will be upheld, but Roe and Casey won’t be over-ruled, at least explicitly. Instead they will be rendered somewhat toothless through various “minimalist” arguments that purport to uphold them while actually depriving both holdings of much of their practical importance.
(3) The law will be struck down, on grounds that will be some version of Casey redux, i.e., Roe may be wrong, but precedent requires it to be upheld, especially because of Casey’s own independent force as a source of stare decisis (this is the kind of bootstrapping argument that lawyers and legal academics suffering from Elite Legal Brain just love btw).
For what it’s worth, i.e., this post plus five bucks will get you a double something or other at a hipster coffee shop, I personally think (2) is by far the most likely outcome, in an opinion authored by Roberts, C.J.
If that happens, what will be the political fallout? I think such an opinion will end up being a worst of both worlds sort of thing for SCOTUS institutionalist types, most particularly Roberts, C.J. It will of course outrage supporters of abortion rights (this represents about two-thirds of the US adult population at present btw), since it will represent a functional over-ruling of Roe and Casey. But it will fall far short of what the right wing in general, and the whole Federalist Society edifice in particular, has been chasing after for all these years, which is more than anything else an explicit repudiation of Roe and everything it purportedly represents. They too are going to be outraged.
The net result of all this will be that Stephen Breyer will decide that it’s now more important than ever that he remain on the Court, because otherwise people would begin to question its non-partisan purity of essence.