The U.S. Supreme Court dropped its decision to allow Americans to continue to have access to the abortion pill known as mifepristone on a Friday night.

John Krull mug

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

That’s not surprising.

For decades, courts have used Friday evenings—especially Friday evenings at the start of long holiday weekends—to issue rulings that were likely to stir up some dust. Justices and judges like times when people are paying attention to other things to do such drops.

Few questions are more likely to create controversy in American life than abortion. It is our national quarrel that will not end—largely because we Americans continue to allow our fellow citizens with the most extreme views to set the terms of the discussion.

That much was made clear even before the high bench spoke.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion group, released a statement attacking former President Donald Trump for being soft on the issue. Trump, who appointed the three Supreme Court justices who made overturning Roe v. Wade and curtailing reproductive rights possible, has indicated that the increasing stridency of the Republican Party he leads may not help at the polls.

More recently, Trump said the court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe, returned the issue to the states.

That was too much for the zealots at Susan B. Anthony, who blistered the former president.

“President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold. Life is a matter of human rights, not states’ rights,” said Susan B. Anthony president Marjorie Dannenfelser.

She also laid down a litmus test for Trump and all other GOP presidential hopefuls. She said her group wouldn’t support a minimum 15-week national standard banning abortions.

A couple of things make this dustup interesting.

The first is that, on the larger point, Trump was and is right.

The Dobbs decision hasn’t helped Republican candidates anywhere. It’s tended to keep red states red, make blue states a little bluer and prompt purple states—where national elections will be decided for decades to come—to tinge toward blue.

Competitive Republicans know this and are trying to figure a way out of the political trap in which they’ve ensnared themselves.

That won’t be easy, as both the Susan B. Anthony statement and the Supreme Court stay demonstrate.

That’s the second interesting point.

The GOP’s activist base isn’t in a mood to allow any conservative to be honest enough to acknowledge this political reality. The anti-abortion true believers are determined to continue their long march to restrict or even eliminate reproductive rights until the very end.

Even if that means speaking deliberate untruths or shattering established norms of judicial decorum.

Sensitive perhaps to the huge blowback to the Dobbs decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to stay a lower court’s ruling to ban the abortion pill. Justice Clarence Thomas—he of the “ethical-scandal-of-the-week” club—voted to deny the stay.

But that wasn’t the big news.

Justice Samuel Alito, who drafted the Dobbs ruling, added a dissent that all but called his fellow conservatives on the bench names and stacked one dubious, unsupported assertion after another. In doing so, Alito didn’t advance a legal argument so much as shout an ideological polemic—one that took aim at, among others, fellow Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

By implication, Alito accused Barrett of both hypocrisy and moral cowardice.

There are many words that can be used to describe Alito’s dissent. “Dignified” and “judicial” are not among them.

But that’s the nature of America’s abortion debates in the aftermath of the Alito-drafted Dobbs decision. Because many of the standards previously used for weighing questions of fundamental rights before the court—legal precedents, factual evidence, close readings of the Constitution—Alito and his colleagues have decided no longer apply when it comes to abortion, every discussion about the issue turns into an argument and every argument into a free-for-all.

Most of the rumbling and brawling, though, seems to involve conservatives attacking other conservatives, and Republicans taking shots at other Republicans.

That may be the reason the Supreme Court dumped the decision to stay the lower court’s decision on a Friday night.

Whichever way the justices went on the question, a lot of people were going to be angry.

And many of them were going to be Republicans.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.

THE CITY-COUNTY OBSERVER POSTED THIS ARTICLE WITHOUT BIAS OR EDITING.