supreme court

Alito Memo Shows Strategy for Undermining Roe v. Wade

By David Brody
Capitol Hill Correspondent

CBN.com – (CBN News) – WASHINGTON, D.C. – A 1985 memo by Samuel Alito on abortion has the nation’s capital buzzing again. The stunning part is that the memo reveals Alito's strategy for undercutting the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade.

This latest memo comes from Alito's tenure in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration, and once again, abortion is central. He wrote: "No one seriously believes that the court is going to overturn Roe v. Wade."

But Alito also explained that convincing the Court to allow state regulation of abortion would "advance the goals about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and in the meantime, of mitigating its effects."

In short, Alito was saying a good strategy would be to chip away at the law, piece by piece rather than trying to flatly get rid of Roe.

This latest Alito revelation has some Democrats concerned. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) said, "I don't think we've come by a nominee for the Supreme Court, certainly, who has stated things so directly and baldly and even talked about a strategy as a way of overturning Roe v. Wade."

Conservatives say this effectively proves that Alito's nomination fight will be centered on abortion, and that means that it could potentially be the fight that both Republicans and Democrats anticipated when Alito was nominated – the fight that could trigger a filibuster and an all-out battle for the Supreme Court.

The memo came the same day that Alito turned in his Senate questionnaire. In his 64-page response, he said that judges must be careful not to become judicial activists saying "our constitutional system relies heavily on the judiciary to restrain itself."

He also wrote that "judges must also have faith that the cause of justice in the long run is best served if they scrupulously heed the limits of their role rather than transgressing those limits in an effort to achieve a desired result in a particular case."

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