Right-wing fundraiser Leonard Leo has floated a very personal theory about the timing of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Leo, who has close ties to Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, suggested to the authors of a new book that it may not have been a total coincidence that the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson came down on a Catholic holy day with special meaning for him.
In an interview with Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias, New York Times reporters and co-authors of The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America, Leo notes that Chief Justice John Roberts “would have decided the order of decisions that would come out that day”—June 24, 2022.
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“And I don’t think he… well, I don’t know. Maybe he knew it was the Feast of the Sacred Heart?” Leo is quoted as saying.
The Feast of the Sacred Heart is linked to a saint who shares a name with Leo’s daughter, Margaret Mary, who died in 2007 aged 14.
Leo’s words about Roberts and the Feast of the Sacred Heart, along with his comments about his friends Thomas and Alito, underscore his drive to stock the high court bench with right-wing Catholics.
That effort, and the events that led up to the court removing the federal right to abortion, are chronicled in the new book, which The Daily Beast obtained ahead of its official Tuesday publication.
A co-chair of the Federalist Society, a right-wing legal activist group, Leo has established an immensely powerful position in political fundraising, attracting huge donations but also making him a target for invective from Democratic and progressive figures.
He is currently resisting a subpoena from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which seeks information about gifts to right-wing justices and their families which have fueled a Supreme Court ethics scandal.
Leo does not give many interviews but he spoke to Dias and Lerer.
In describing what the Feast of the Sacred Heart has come to mean to Leo and his family, the authors wrote that Leo “rarely [speaks] publicly of his daughter” or “the miracles her parents and their friends believed followed her death, [becoming] a sign to Leo of the intervening love of Jesus.”
Of Dobbs v. Jackson, the authors write that Leo “said he never spoke about the case or timing of when it was released with his friends on the court,” a reference to Alito and Thomas, the two longest-serving justices who form the bedrock of the 6-3 conservative majority Leo helped establish by shepherding three appointments under one Republican president, Donald Trump.
Dias and Lerer continue: “The court probably didn’t pick the day it was announced to coincide with his daughter’s holy day, or the Catholic day at all, Leo said.” They wrote that he said the timing was most likely related to security concerns, before leaving open the possibility that Roberts, who is Catholic, wasn’t oblivious to the significance.
The Supreme Court did not comment to Dias and Lerer, or to The Daily Beast.
Leo told the Beast: “I have no insight into the timing of the release of the Dobbs opinion, but it’s laughably absurd or insanely conspiratorial to think that the Court intended the decision’s release to coincide with a Catholic feast day.”
From the ranks of Leo’s opponents, Caroline Ciccone, president of Accountable.US, an advocacy group that monitors special interest groups, said: “Leonard Leo’s coziness with Supreme Court justices is inappropriate and should concern every American—especially given his central role in the ongoing ethics crisis, which has caused public trust in the Court to plummet to record lows.”
Dias and Lerer, in their book, also consider the fallout from the fall of Roe v. Wade, prominently including a series of election wins for Democrats campaigning on the issue of threats to reproductive rights.
Among anti-abortion activists who knew about the Feast of the Sacred Heart “if not the intimate meaning it had for Leo”, the authors write, the timing of the ruling in Dobbs “was more proof that the fall of was, in fact, a miracle.
“The importance of that day, commemorating Jesus’ love for the world, was to them a sort of divine code, yet another sign their God acted to save America and sounded the victory.
“But in the pattern of the fall of Roe, the date they saw as providential might look to another part of America like a more earthly kind of coded message: a raw expression of political, legal, and Christian might.”
