If the Supreme Court doesn't strike down Roe v. Wade now, it's unlikely it ever will

This strategy eventually runs out of time, not just because the justices age but because Roe does as well. Pro-lifers are well aware of the admonition that if you don’t overturn a court decision within 20 years, you never will. And Roe long ago passed that milestone. This dovetails into another set of stakes in the Mississippi case, which have to do with internecine conservative politics. There are some on the right who have despaired of this achingly slow strategy, measured not just in years but in human lives. They’ve grown suspicious of the Federalist Society, or FedSoc, the legal group that grooms conservative court nominees. They worry FedSoc is too establishment and not focused enough on social issues like abortion. This has resulted in challenges to FedSoc’s regnant judicial philosophy of originalism, most notably from the legal scholar Josh Hammer who is working on an alternative called “common good originalism.” What hasn’t been proposed is a practical strategy to overturn Roe that doesn’t involve waiting on the current Court. The skeptics thus haven’t parted ways with the right-of-center legal movement—not yet—but a misfire in the Mississippi case could cause them to reevaluate. They’re already annoyed over what they view as Gorsuch’s betrayal in Bostock v. Clayton County, which saw him peer into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and magically discover that its anti-discrimination protections on the basis of “sex” also covered gay people and the transgendered. All this from a textualist, an originalist—hence the skepticism. Yet ironically, it’s that same assertiveness in Bostock that makes Gorsuch more likely than Roberts to throw out Roe…even though Roberts agreed with Gorsuch in Bostock…yet didn’t agree with him on last year’s abortion case. It’s like herding cats, this.