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George W. Bush, 64, has never endorsed the right to abortion or voted to invalidate strict regulations. Earlier in his career, as a government lawyer, Roberts filed in the High Court a brief claiming that the 1973 Roe had been wrongly chosen and had urged that it be rescinded.
It is probably up to Roberts to know if such laws will be enforced in the months and years to come. And after a 14-year career as Chief Justice and recent public signals, following Judge Brett Kavanaugh's replacement of Judge Anthony Kennedy, there are two important characteristics that predict the man in the center.
Roberts is working progressively, laying the groundwork for his views, keeping an eye on future business and avoiding any "shock" of precedent, as he promised during his confirmation hearings before the Senate in 2005.
He is also deeply concerned about the reputation of the Supreme Court and the public's respect for its legitimacy, and its own.
It is unlikely that Roberts, who has reflected aloud on what history will make of him, would want his legacy to be reversed by reversing the landmark of 1973, so entrenched in the politics of the nation.
Yet this is not the end of the problem in today's busy climate on women's reproductive rights. Roberts could join his conservative brethren to reduce access to clinics practicing abortion and support other measures, such as stricter regulation of doctors, which reduce a woman's ability to terminate her pregnancy.
If he takes this route, the 1973 Roe and the cases that have taken place since then prohibit the government from imposing an "undue burden" on women seeking to abort a fetus before viability is completely canceled. .
Still, Roberts would break Kennedy's pattern and disrupt life in America. In 2013, he easily turned away from the deep-rooted legal reasoning of the Supreme Court to incite the Conservatives to eviscerate a significant portion of the 1965 voting rights law in the Shelby County case. Holder.
Roberts' public message
"We are talking about the Constitution," he said in a speech in Minnesota. "Our role is clear: we need to interpret the laws and the US Constitution and ensure that the political branches act within them."
The following month, in response to President Donald Trump, Roberts said federal lawyers should not be politically identified by the presidents who appointed them. "We have neither Obama judges, nor Trump judges, neither Bush nor Clinton judges," Roberts said in a statement, asserting the independence of the judiciary.
But at the same time, Roberts has often reinforced the partisan division in the Supreme Court, where the five conservative judges are appointed by the Republican presidents, the four liberal judges of the Democratic presidents. Accelerating the politics of the present moment, Trump campaigned against the right to abortion during the 2016 presidential campaign and pledged to appoint judges who oppose Roe v. Wade.
Roberts also voted in favor of inverting the previous four-decade-olds that were part of the country's legal fabric almost as long as Roe v. Wade, in last June's controversy over trade union rights and the unobtrusive test of state immunity this week. trial.
In this week's case, dissident judges presided over by Stephen Breyer warned that the Conservative majority rejected a 1979 precedent for no valid reason and wondered what the next step would be. Breyer cited a 1992 precedent on abortion rights, Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, who had supported Roe, to support his defense of the previous but also slightly to highlight the potential issues of reproductive rights.
Roberts' balance sheet on abortion
As an attorney at Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush Administration, Roberts criticized Roe's legal underpinnings.
In 1990-91, in a Supreme Court case involving abortion counseling at family planning clinics receiving federal funding, Roberts urged judges to use the case to overthrow Roe. On behalf of the Bush administration, he wrote that Roe's constitutional core, which gives the woman the right to privacy to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, finds "no support in the text, the structure or history of the Constitution ". The Supreme Court ruled for the government over the disputed settlement but refused to take Roe as requested by the Roberts' brief.
Roberts, in his 2005 Senate hearing, described Roe as an established precedent and said, "I think overturning a precedent is a shock to the justice system." The precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and equity. " He stated that judges should not overturn a case simply because they think the decision was wrongly taken.
Answering specific questions from senators, he also said that his Catholic faith would not be a factor in his decisions.
Since then, Roberts has taken sides in two major cases with states defending strict regulations, most recently in a controversy in Texas in 2016. He disagreed when the majority rescinded the measure taken in Texas which, among its provisions, provided that doctors performing abortions must hold "admission privileges" in a local hospital. The law had resulted in the closure of several clinics.
Kennedy issued the fifth key vote, along with the four Liberal justices, to overturn the rules in Whole Woman's Health c. Hellerstedt.
A potential shift?
Yet last February, when the judges were confronted with Louisiana's attempt to enforce similar "admission privilege" rules, Roberts took a different direction.
A lower US court of appeal had upheld the Louisiana law, thus rejecting the heart of the Whole Woman's Health decision. A Louisiana health clinic and doctors have asked the judges to ensure that the new regulations would not come into force, or even close clinics, before the constitutionality of the law is tested. They argued that the lower court had challenged the Supreme Court's precedent of the 2016 case; Louisiana officials responded that their law could be distinguished from the Texas law that had been invalidated.
Without Kennedy and with all eyes waiting for the court decision on Feb. 7, Roberts joined with the four liberal justices to prevent law enforcement in Louisiana as challengers of the clinic appealed on the merits.
It was a modest and progressive gesture whose meaning is not yet clear. Roberts could finally approve the new rules for doctors when the merits of the dispute are heard.
But the action added an extra element to a chief justice who assumed the role of chief policy maker.
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