Jodi Kantor:
So, one of our discoveries is that there were really extensive attempts to craft compromises. We don't know if they would have worked. We don't know what prospect they had at succeeding.
But Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Stephen Breyer, the first thing they did is they tried to stop the case from being heard. Then, when it went forward, Justice Roberts — and this is public. He's described this in oral arguments and in his opinion — he had a kind of 15-week compromise, where he wanted to uphold the Mississippi law, which restricted abortion to 15 weeks, but he didn't want to overturn all of Roe.
And he was all — even though that was a very lonely position this court, he only needed one more vote to make that happen. And, in fact, Justice Stephen Breyer was considering joining him in that position. That would have been just symbolic.
But if, say, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had joined that position as well, the entire outcome would have been different. And so the leak came just as those efforts were under way, and it rendered them hopeless. Justices' votes are secret for a reason, because they want room to change their minds, which sometimes they do, before the official opinion comes out.
And in this case, because everything became so public, it really cemented the results and locked them in. So we don't know who leaked this opinion, but we can say what the effect was, which was to really lock in the final result.
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