Mitch McConnell’s Refusal to Seat Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court Is Coming Back to Haunt Him

McConnell’s background suggests that he only cares about abortion as a box that all conservative Republicans need to check. According to Alec McGillis’s 2014 biography, The Cynic, McConnell was a staunch defender of abortion rights during his early career in local Kentucky politics. Only after McConnell was elected to the Senate in the 1984 Ronald Reagan landslide did he start staking out a hard-right position against Medicaid funding for abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

So when Barrett joined the court in late 2020, McConnell was probably reveling in his cleverness in thwarting the Democrats rather than thinking about abortion. Everyone knew that abortion decisions were in the legal pipeline, but the general expectation was that the conservative Supreme Court would continue to eviscerate Roe v. Wade piece by piece rather than reject it completely.

That was what would have happened if Chief Justice John Roberts were still the swing vote on a closely divided Supreme Court. As Roberts wrote with palpable frustration in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “Both the Court’s opinion and the dissent display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share.” If Roberts had been the author of the majority opinion, Mississippi would have been allowed to largely curtail access to abortion while Roe itself would technically still exist as precedent. But thanks to McConnell’s cynical machinations dating back to Garland, Roberts was a bystander as the other five Republican justices, led by a snarling Samuel Alito, handed down the most regressive Supreme Court decision in modern memory.