The leaked draft opinion signaling the Supreme Court's intent to overturn Roe v. Wade is such a political earthquake, such a momentous policy shift, that of course one of the biggest debates is over who leaked it.
Republicans have insisted from the start that the leak represents an attack on the court from the left.
"It is very, very likely a law clerk for one of the three liberal justices," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on his podcast this week, adding that he suspected Justice Sonia Sotomayor's clerks in particular.
"She is the most partisan of the justices and so she's the most likely to hire wild-eyed partisans as clerks," he said.
Cruz is himself a former Supreme Court law clerk, so he knows something about how draft opinions are handled. But he added an important caveat to his theory.
"I have no evidence of that, I'm just making an inference," Cruz said.
Of course he has no evidence – nobody does! Except that it has to be the work of my enemies!
One reason Republicans are focused on the leak is that overturning Roe v. Wade, which would outlaw abortion in half the country, is terrible politics. We found this week that some Republican senators did not want to talk about outlawing abortion, even though that kind of seemed like a high priority goal of theirs the past few decades.
But what if the leak came from the right? Some have argued that the leak came from a conservative clerk as part of an effort to prevent the five justices who voted to overturn Roe from joining a plurality opinion that doesn't go as far as Justice Samuel Alito's draft.
There's another possibility: multiple leakers. Tom Goldstein, an experienced Supreme Court practitioner, suggested a conservative Supreme Court source leaked news of the opinion to the Wall Street Journal in April, to pressure the court from the right, and that this leak may have prompted a liberal source to leak the whole opinion to Politico.
Millions of people's lives are at stake, but we're going to get to the bottom of this!
– Arthur Delaney (Email arthur@huffpost.com, Twitter @ArthurDelaneyHP)
