Yes, Obama does have an abortion litmus test

Surprise. President Barack Obama will name a supporter of legalized abortion to the Supreme Court to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens. Meeting with reporters at the White House April 21, Obama employed one of those rhetorical sleight-of-hands for which he’s famous, saying he’d have no “litmus tests” for the Supreme Court — and then announcing one.

It’s this: the nominee must be someone committed to women’s “ability to make often very difficult decisions about their own bodies and issues of reproduction.” Translated from the code language common on such matters these days, that means someone committed to uphold Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which for the first time ever legalized abortion in the United States. Surprise.

Obama’s description is said to fit the 10 or so candidates on the White House shortlist for the Supreme Court. The president’s decision is expected in a month or less, with Senate confirmation hearings during the summer, and the new justice presumably on the court by the time it starts up in October.

If, as seems certain, the nominee is pro-choice, pro-life groups will protest and some Republican senators will vote against confirming him or her. But there’s little or no chance the nomination will be defeated unless some other issue besides abortion comes up.

If there’s any small bright lining here for pro-lifers, it lies in the fact that Stevens, the 90-year-old justice who will step down from the court when its current term ends in June, also is adamantly pro-choice. The nomination and confirmation of a pro-choice successor therefore will leave the makeup of the court where it is now on legalized abortion, which is four opposed and five in favor (counting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s first Supreme Court pick, who hasn’t yet formally tipped her hand on the issue).