Why the Supreme Court Really Killed Roe v. Wade - POLITICO

Abortion opponents gained an ally in Leonard Leo, an attorney who had helped Thomas during his 1991 confirmation hearings. By 2001, Leo had become the head of the Federalist Society's lawyers' division, was profoundly opposed to legal abortion and wanted to dethrone the American Bar Association from its traditional role rating judicial nominees — which activists saw, as Leo put it, as rejecting conservative judges "on ideological grounds." In building new networks between movements and judges, and devising more sure-fire selection methods, Leo became both a patron and an entrepreneur… 

Following the election of George W. Bush, Leo joined three other men in a group that called itself the Four Horsemen; the group included not only Republican legal veterans like C. Boyden Gray and Edwin Meese III but also prominent Christian conservative Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice. Leo, who had long worked as a Republican Party liaison with Catholics, helped steer John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination through the Senate… 

Leo, meanwhile, went on to gain further influence, helping choose the three Trump Supreme Court picks who would ultimately overturn Roe. The money has also flowed: He obtained a $1.6 billion donation last year from a wealthy conservative businessman named Barre Seid for his legal network, likely the largest political gift in American history… 

A critical facet of this story is that a number of conservative grassroots objectives are broadly unpopular, from the recognition of an almost unlimited right to bear arms to the recognition of fetal personhood that would make abortion unconstitutional nationwide. This is an important reason why judicial entrenchment is so attractive to minoritarian interests: They can win by appealing to a handful of judges even when they lose decisively and repeatedly through the political process…

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/25/mag-tsai-ziegler-movementjudges-00102758