Scalia used to liken Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott, the 1857 ruling that also created a right — slaveholders’ rights to their property, human beings — out of a general invocation of “liberty.” Rather than stabilize a country on the verge of civil war, the court’s intellectual and political overreach destabilized it.

What may have been most destabilizing about Dred Scott, though, was not the new right it so sloppily created, but the rights it abolished: those of African Americans, both enslaved and free, and of anti-slavery whites.

Taking rights away is risky political business. People get mad — which means the Republican Party better get ready.