When the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning the constitutional right to an abortion was leaked to the media last month, it tore through Washington, D.C. with the force of a category five hurricane. The draft set off a mad scramble to pronounce the dynamic of the congressional midterm election had been irrevocably altered and the Republican wave momentum blunted.
Despite it being a draft document — a working opinion subject to change — peddlers of conventional wisdom promoted it as the inevitable outcome of the court’s deliberations and the 50-year-old abortion rights ruling was about to be discarded, returning decisions on regulating the procedure to the states.
Abortion rights would, pundits intoned, become the turning point in national campaigns - an outcome, they said, that largely favored Democrats.
