Erik Wemple Calls Out WaPo Colleague Kathleen Parker for Predicting the Supreme Court Wouldn’t Overturn Roe
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple curated an entertaining collection of takes from the last few years with the same essential gist: Roe v. Wade is not in danger of being overturned. Few high-profile authors in the genre were spared – not even longtime Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker.
Of course, those predictions turned out to be drastically wrong. Last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, thus ending abortion’s 49-year run as a constitutionally protected right.
In 2018, Parker wrote a column in which she blasted CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. Upon hearing the news that Justice Anthony Kennedy would be retiring, Toobin predicted Roe was doomed.
On Thursday, here’s how Wemple summarized Parker’s column:
Post columnist Kathleen Parker didn’t share Toobin’s forecast, to put it mildly. “If Chicken Little and Cassandra had a baby, they’d name him Jeffrey Toobin,” Parker wrote in a July 2018 column headlined: “Calm down. Roe v. Wade isn’t going anywhere.” Lamenting the “unloosing of hysteria upon the land,” Parker relied on anonymous sources to challenge the gathering consensus that Roe was toast.
“What new justice would want to be that man or woman, who forevermore would be credited with upending settled law and causing massive societal upheaval?” Parker asked. “As for other conservative justices, only Clarence Thomas would likely vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the most important voices in this discussion, echoed the thoughts of close-to-the-court sources, who told me that neither Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. nor Neil M. Gorsuch would likely want to wade into that swamp and weigh in on a Roe v. Wade reversal.”
Remarkably, Wemple noted that Parker still stands by her view. Her reasoning?
If protestors hadn’t gathered outside of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house after a draft of the Dobbs opinion was leaked to the public, he may have voted not to overturn Roe.
Asked whether she stands by her column, Parker responded, “One hundred percent. At the time it was written, it was accurate — it was on the nose.” Timing is critical to her point, she argues: The column appeared two years before Ginsburg’s death and Barrett’s confirmation, which proved pivotal in tilting the landscape against Roe. “I have had excellent sources on the Supreme Court for many, many years,” said Parker, who sees Gorsuch, Roberts and Kavanaugh as incrementalists disinclined to undo important precedents in a single ruling. Had the “jackals” of the abortion rights movement not protested at Kavanaugh’s house, Parker said, he might well have switched sides in the Dobbs case.
