As I expected (point 4 here), the reporters who co-authored last Friday’s “inside story” on Dobbs have fooled a lot of their unwitting readers into thinking that Justice Gorsuch and other conservative justices signed on to Justice Alito’s majority opinion without carefully reviewing it first. The reporters invited that clickbait misunderstanding by leading their story by stating that Gorsuch “wrote back just 10 minutes” after Alito circulated his 98-page draft “to say that he would sign on to the opinion and had no changes.”
Three paragraphs later, the reporters use nefarious-sounding language as they observe that Alito “appeared to have pregamed [the draft] among some of the conservative justices, out of view of other colleagues.” They wait another three paragraphs—beyond the attention span, apparently, of many of their readers—to state that it is a “time-honored” practice at the Court to allow such “apparent selective preview of [a] draft opinion.”
To anyone who knows anything about the Court, the facts that the reporters set forth ought to make it obvious that Alito worked out his draft in exhaustive detail with Gorsuch and the three other justices who joined it. Indeed, given the magnitude of the case and the need to make sure that all four of his colleagues were fully on board, it would have been astonishing if he hadn’t.
But maybe I’m being too generous to some of the folks professing astonishment that Gorsuch would sign on so quickly. Some of them surely know better and are pretending otherwise in order to take a stupid whack at Gorsuch.
Well done, NYT!