Chief Justice Roberts wanted to go slow curbing Roe v. Wade. His colleagues were in a hurry.
- Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t join the court’s majority in overturning Roe v. Wade.
- The chief justice wrote an opinion saying he supported Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
- Roberts lost his status as the swing vote when Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the high court.
WASHINGTON – In the weeks leading up to the Supreme Court’s monumental decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, speculation began to swirl around a man who for years literally and figuratively sat at the center of the nation’s highest court: Chief Justice John Roberts.
No longer the court’s median justice, and without any real power over his eight colleagues, the 67-year-old jurist had nevertheless demonstrated a prowess of building slim majorities around narrow rulings in the past – the kind of incremental outcomes that left neither liberals nor conservatives particularly happy when the court wrapped up each term.