Clarence Thomas says the leaking of opinions on Roe’s ouster is like an “infidelity” that has undermined belief within the Supreme Courtroom

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said the leak of a draft opinion in a case signaling that the conservative majority of the court would remove constitutional protections for access to abortion was “enormously bad” and an “infertility.” ‘ that undermined the institution and revealed its fragility.

Judge Thomas, speaking at a May 13 conference hosted in Dallas by the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute, said the leak of conservative Judge Samuel Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “is incomprehensible, or at least to everyone imagination.”

“I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions to the extent that we’re undermining them,” he said. “And then I wonder what we’ll have as a country when they’re gone or destabilized.”

Judge Thomas’s comments — the court’s longest-serving judge and a staunch conservative — echo his statements about the leak when he spoke at a conference in Atlanta earlier this month, when he said government institutions are not “intimidated” into theirs should make a decision.

“And look where we are, where that trust or belief is gone forever,” Judge Thomas said Friday. “And when you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I am in, the institution changes fundamentally. You start looking over your shoulder. It’s … a kind of infidelity that can be explained but not undone.”

A final statement on the case — which could undo decades of U.S. protections of abortion rights by overturning the landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade and its affirmative decision in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — will be forthcoming weeks expected.

The end of roe protection could “trigger” state-level legislation outright banning the process in at least 13 states. More than half of the US is expected to quickly or immediately introduce restrictions or outright bans on abortion without overarching federal protections.

John Yoo of Berkeley Law School — a former Justice Department attorney who advocated the use of torture after 9/11 — interviewed Judge Thomas at the American Enterprise Institute event; Mr. Yoo did not ask him about the controversy surrounding Supreme Court decisions related to the 2020 presidential election or his wife Virginia Thomas’ text messages to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows urging him to dismiss the election results.

Judge Thomas was also the sole dissenter in the Supreme Court’s January decision to dismiss Mr Trump’s efforts to withhold documents from a congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Judge Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs case was echoed by Judge Thomas and three other Republican-appointed conservatives on the court, according to Politico, which first reported on the draft.