> In fact, the original Roe v Wade decision is the archetypical example of ... “... zany partisan outcome.” The Roe v. Wade decision was joined by 1 Roosevelt-

> In fact, the original Roe v Wade decision is the archetypical example of ... “... zany partisan outcome.” The Roe v. Wade decision was joined by 1 Roosevelt-appointed justice, 2 Eisenhower justices, 1 Johnson justice, and 3 Nixon justices, and opposed by 1 Nixon justice and 1 Kennedy justice. Abortion was not a partisan issue until afterwards when a group of GOP activists decided it would help them politically to spin abortion into a moral panic they could organize around in churches (which, except for the Catholic church, had mostly been ambivalent before). This is hard to remember after 4+ decades of intense partisan propaganda about the subject from the GOP. The Supreme Court was not really a partisan institution at the time, and justices regularly split in their decisions in every imaginable configuration. (After the ignominious end of the Nixon administration, a different group of GOP activists started a decades-long conspiracy to stack the court with corrupt partisans with no regard for the collapse in the court’s legitimacy and the rule of law. That plan has been highly successful, Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell’s great masterpiece.)