“Those are personal,” Alito said, Kennedy wrote in the diary. “But I’ve got constitutional responsibilities and those are going to be the determining views.”
Despite that assurance, Kennedy voted against confirming Alito to the Supreme Court.
Alito didn’t return a request submitted to the Supreme Court’s press office seeking comment on the Times article.
In July, Alito wrote the majority decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned both Roe and another landmark abortion rights case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which was decided in 1992.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote.
“Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division,” he wrote, noting that those cases “must be overruled.”
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” he wrote.
It was that amendment, the 14th, which Alito reportedly had told Kennedy almost 17 years earlier established a right to privacy.
But Alito’s opinion in Dobbs said that abortion is a “fundamentally different” right than ones such as “intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage,” because “it destroys … ‘fetal life.'”
The Dobbs ruling meant that individual states would again have the authority to strictly limit or even ban abortion, or to allow it with loose restrictions.
Abortion has been largely banned in at least 13 states since Dobbs was issued.
In a concurring opinion with Dobbs, Alito’s fellow conservative, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that other landmark rulings by the court that established gay rights and the right to contraception should be reconsidered now that Roe had been tossed out.
Thomas said in his opinion that those rulings “were demonstrably erroneous decisions.”
The cases he mentioned are Griswold v. Connecticut; Lawrence v. Texas, which in 2003 established the right to engage in private sexual acts; and the 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which said there is a right to same-sex marriage.
Thomas noted that all those decisions are based on interpretations of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
He wrote that the constitutional clause guarantees only “process” for depriving a person of life, liberty or property cannot be used “to define the substance of those rights.”
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-assured-kennedy-on-abortion-rights.html