I was proved fucking right
July 3, 2018 was a momentous day. Somehow leaping up past an immense field of worthy candidates, we were witness to the most embarrassing opinion column in the history of the Washington Post, a newspaper that employed Richard Cohen for 130 years:
If Chicken Little and Cassandra had a baby, they’d name him Jeffrey Toobin.
Anyone watching CNN lately has probably heard Toobin’s prediction that if a conservative fills the Supreme Court seat left vacant by departing Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, abortion is dead.
No more reproductive choice; no more equal protection for the LGBTQ community; no more fun for anybody, except Jesus and his acolytes. The effect has been an unloosing of hysteria upon the land. Democrats began tearing their garments and gnashing their teeth as they foresaw 24/7 Christian broadcasting and Charlton Heston reruns. Republicans, always sore winners, fired their guns in the air, swatted Hillary Clinton piñatas and — I’m not sure this part is true — square-danced till way past dark.
[…]
What new justice would want to be that man or woman, who forevermore would be credited with upending settled law and causing massive societal upheaval? As for other conservative justices, only Clarence Thomas would likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the most important voices in this discussion, echoed the thoughts of close-to-the-court sources, who told me that neither Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. nor Neil M. Gorsuch would likely want to wade into that swamp and weigh in on a Roe v. Wade reversal.
Yes, that’s someone paid a six figure salary to write 800 or maybe 1600 words about politics a week saying that Sam Alito would never vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. After all, Susan Collins said so. Hey-yo!
Anyway, Erik Wemple caught up with her earlier this week, and if you think Parker would show any humility at all, you don’t under stand how top-end know-nothing punditry works:
Turns out that enough conservative justices had their waders at the ready. Asked whether she stands by her column, Parker responded, “One hundred percent. At the time it was written, it was accurate — it was on the nose.” Timing is critical to her point, she argues: The column appeared two years before Ginsburg’s death and Barrett’s confirmation, which proved pivotal in tilting the landscape against Roe. “I have had excellent sources on the Supreme Court for many, many years,” said Parker, who sees Gorsuch, Roberts and Kavanaugh as incrementalists disinclined to undo important precedents in a single ruling. Had the “jackals” of the abortion rights movement not protested at Kavanaugh’s house, Parker said, he might well have switched sides in the Dobbs case.
Oh, I see — Kavanaugh would have voted to re-affirm Roe had there not been some protests at his house months after he had voted at conference to overrule it. They also forced noted moderate incrementalists Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch to vote to overrule Roe because…look, here’s my new column about how Obergefell is absolutely 100% ironclad safe!
Or maybe Republican elites have always really wanted to allow the state to brutally force women to carry pregnancies to term, and all of your Savvy theories were right at the intersection of Concern Trolling and Wishful Thinking, and if you had the slightest shame you would try to find a job you were actually qualified to do.