Some right-wing activists are furious at Chief Justice John Roberts because he didn’t join the court’s four far-right justices in allowing a restrictive Louisiana anti-abortion law to go into effect while it is being challenged in the courts.
The Religious Right has a well-developed strategy of relentlessly passing ever-more-restrictive abortion bans at the state level with the expectation that the rightward march of the federal judiciary in the Trump-McConnell era will bring an end to Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to choose to have an abortion.
This week’s ruling was not on the substance of the Louisiana law; it was an agreement to delay the law’s implementation while courts consider a substantive challenge. The law is similar to one that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 2016; Roberts ruled to uphold that law.
Religious Right activists are hoping for an eventual win on the substance, but meanwhile some are expressing outrage at Roberts for keeping the law from going into effect immediately. Right-wing pundit Mark Levin declared Roberts a “disgrace.” Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft declared the ruling “AWFUL.”
In an angry tweet, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer described Roberts as an “Obama Judge and abject political hack.” When his comment was met with well-deserved mockery, in which critics pointed out that Roberts was a Bush nominee who joined the Court well before Obama became president, Fischer defended his language by saying that Roberts had become an “Obama judge” when he voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act.
Right-wing activists on Twitter denounced Roberts as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” the “new David Souter” and a “deep state agent.”
Frank Amedia, a former Trump campaign advisor whose POTUS Shield network has been praying for God to create more Supreme Court vacancies for Trump to fill, was upset about Roberts even before this latest ruling. In January messages to supporters, Amedia said God had revealed that Robert was “tainted” by “anti-Trumpism” and is not reliable enough to count on for an end to Roe v. Wade.
We noted earlier this month that Religious Right leaders were circling like vultures over the Supreme Court as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent cancer treatment.
