Josh Hammer

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation. At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.

It's been almost a month since Politico scooped its bombshell leak, an unprecedented revelation of a draft majority opinion in a still-pending Supreme Court case. That leaked draft opinion, penned by the stalwart Justice Samuel Alito in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, would finally overturn 1973’s infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision. Alito’s draft opinion does not go far enough, at least as far as the proper pro-life end goal is concerned, but it is a praiseworthy development and an admirable start toward an abortion-free America.

Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked majority opinion in this Supreme Court term’s marquee abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ought to be applauded by pro-lifers. In many ways, the opinion represents an epochal triumph for the conservative legal movement that I, despite being a clear part of, have often been quick to criticize. If Alito’s five-justice coalition holds — and it remains an “if” until the moment the opinion is formally released — then the decades-long architects of the movement will deserve credit for finally fulfilling one of the movement’s raison d'êtres, the overturning of the odious Roe v. Wade decision.

In the four decades since the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982, the conservative legal movement has made great strides in recasting the federal and state judiciaries in its image. The Society is enormously popular on leading law-school campuses and has sent many of its leading lights into the federal judiciary. Numerous sitting Republican senators, some of them former Supreme Court clerks, came up through the Society’s ranks. Perhaps most remarkable, given the Society’s humble origins, five justices, the majority of the sitting Supreme Court, would identify as some sort of constitutional “originalist.

The conservative legal movement has again been bludgeoned. The culprit, as has far too often been the case, is once more the Supreme Court’s most mercurial chief justice, John Roberts. In June Medical Services LLC v. Russo, a 5-4 Court majority enjoined Louisiana’s enforcement of its law that would require abortionists to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a prenatal abattoir. The Court’s four liberals, ever-reliable in their outcome-oriented efforts to further the progressive political agenda, wrote for a pro-abortion plurality. Roberts, for his part, wrote a separate opinion concurring in the judgment — notwithstanding the fact he dissented in a virtually analogous Texas case, Whole Women’s Health v.