Word: roes
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First promulgated by the Reagan administration in 1988, the gag rule was a not-so-disguised way for members of the religious right and other anti-abortion activists to inject their narrow views into government policies otherwise protected by Roe v. Wade. If family planning clinics can't even discuss abortion, gag rule proponents reason, fewer women will have abortions...
...religious right planned to use abortion as a wedge issue. At sessions to form the Moral Majority, Paul Weyrich said the movement should "focus attention on the abortion issue, because it would split the Democratic Party, while hardly affecting the Republican vote." Paradoxically, the very decision they hated -- Roe v. Wade -- gave these political operatives the cover they needed: so long as that ruling was in effect, Republicans could give lip service to a "right to life" without facing immediate consequences. But with Roe endangered, the prospect of legislatures' having to debate the whole matter over again is daunting...
...rulings made conservatives question their assumption that 12 years of Reagan- Bush appointments had produced a right-wing lock on the court. But in order to join the 5-to-4 majority that reaffirmed abortion rights last week, Kennedy had to step away from his own earlier opposition to Roe v. Wade, which he signaled just three years ago when he put his name to a withering attack on Roe written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and joined by Antonin Scalia, the court's right-wing philosopher-bulldog. At an end-of-term party last week, ) the court clerks gently...
...clerk-did-it theory works this way: Rehnquist believed that Kennedy would join him, Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Byron White to produce a majority decision repudiating Roe. But while Rehnquist was writing what he thought would be a majority opinion along those lines, Kennedy was persuaded to switch by his clerk Dorf, perhaps with the collusion of Souter's clerk Rubin...
...third, less Machiavellian theory might hold the key. Kennedy may indeed have disparaged Roe three years ago, before Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall. But faced with the possibility that Roe might really be overturned -- and the social tumult that would ensue -- he instinctively pulled back from the brink...