Did Republican Supreme Court justices lie about abortion?

Some recent comments here imply or state that some or all of the Republican judges on the Supreme Court lied about their opinion on abortion in their Senate confirmations. Apparently some people elsewhere feel the same way. An opinion piece in the Washington Post comments:

They lied.

Yes, I’m talking about the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and the abortion rights those justices have now made clear they will eviscerate.

They weren’t just evasive, or vague, or deceptive. They lied. They lied to Congress and to the country, claiming they either had no opinions at all about abortion, or that their beliefs were simply irrelevant to how they would rule. They would be wise and pure, unsullied by crass policy preferences, offering impeccably objective readings of the Constitution.

It. Was. A. Lie.

We went through the same routine in the confirmation hearings of every one of those justices. When Democrats tried to get them to state plainly their views on Roe v. Wade, they took two approaches. Some tried to convince everyone that they would leave it untouched. Others, those already on record proclaiming opposition to abortion rights, suggested they had undergone a kind of intellectual factory reset enabling them to assess the question anew with an unspoiled mind, one concerned only with the law.

Unfortunately, that lie was and is still enabled by the news media. Even in the face of what we saw at the court on Wednesday — when at least five of the six conservatives made clear their intention to overturn Roe — press accounts continued offering euphemisms and weasel words, about “inconsistencies” or “contradictions.”

But sometimes the right puts its purposes in the open. There was a particularly striking exchange between Laura Ingraham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Fox News, where Ingraham grew inexplicably enraged over the mere possibility that Roe might not be overturned.

“If we have six Republican appointees on this court,” she said, "after all the money that’s been raised, the Federalist Society, all these big fat-cat dinners — I’m sorry, I’m pissed about this — if this court with six justices cannot do the right thing here,” then Republicans should “blow it up” and pass some kind of law limiting the court’s authority.

“I would do that in a heartbeat,” Cruz responded.

In other words: We bought this court, and we’d better get what we paid for.

Like his Republican colleagues, that same Ted Cruz repeatedly insisted at confirmation hearings that the very idea that a Republican appointee might have a political agenda was deeply offensive to whatever fine nominee was before them. So let’s review what those justices — now treating women’s bodily autonomy with such naked contempt — had to say during their confirmation hearings.

The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, was already on record stating that abortion is a moral evil. But in her hearing, she insisted, “I don’t have any agenda.” Asked by a Republican senator whether it would be possible to predict how she might rule on subjects like abortion, Barrett responded: “It’s not possible.”

Then there’s Brett M. Kavanaugh, who insisted in his hearing that Roe was “settled as a precedent,” because “it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) emerged from a meeting with Kavanaugh and said he’d assured her that Roe is “settled law." She gave him her vote.

Neil M. Gorsuch was as pure of mind as the others. Asked whether the Constitution protects intimate personal decisions on subjects like abortion and marriage, he said, “I have never expressed personal views as a judge on this subject, and that is because my personal views do not matter.”

Confronted at his hearing with a previous written statement that the Constitution does not protect the right to abortion, Samuel A. Alito Jr. vowed that as a judge, he would “put aside” the opinions he had as a lawyer and "think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues.”

Taking the cake was Clarence Thomas, who swore he had never had a conversation about Roe. He answered a Senator’s question by declaring, “Your question to me was ... do I have this day an opinion, a personal opinion on the outcome in Roe v. Wade; and my answer to you is that I do not.”

It was all a lie, a scam, a con: the assurances that they were blank slates committed to “originalism” and “textualism,” that they wouldn’t “legislate from the bench,” that they have no agenda but merely a “judicial philosophy.”

Somehow that philosophy nearly always produces results conservatives want: undermining voting rights, enhancing corporate power, constraining the rights of workers, enabling the proliferation of guns, and now most vividly, allowing state governments to force women to carry pregnancies to term against their will.

That recitation of events makes it sound like the Republicans either lied or intended to subtly deflect from their actual feelings about abortion. 

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to believe that the Republican justices lied to the Senate and the American people to deceive them and get accepted as federal judges?

2. Is it reasonable to believe that the “judicial philosophy” that Republican justices bring to bear at least on political cases is one that usually produces results conservatives want, and cases are decided first on political grounds and then the legal rational is ginned up to try to make a political decision look like a legally principled decision?[1]

Footnote: 

1. As discussed here yesterday, some critics of the secrecy the Supreme Court hides behind when it decides cases believe that some decisions are made first and then the decision written to look as legally principled as it can be made to look. In a 1973 paper, two critics wrote:

Our thesis may be simply stated: basic democratic theory requires that there be knowledge not only of who governs but of how policy decisions are made. Only if it can be demonstrated that certain other fundamental Values are jeopardized or transgressed should secrecy continue to be the norm. We maintain that the secrecy which pervades Congress, the executive branch and the courts is itself the enemy.

 
A third reason for the failure of an opinion to depict the process may be found in the probability that judges work back from conclusions to principles rather than 

“forward” from principles to conclusions. Jerome Frank once said that this conception of the judicial process is “so heretical that it seldom finds expression.” The “so-called opinions,” he explained, “will not reveal anything remotely resembling a statement of the actual judging process because decision takes place by an intuitive flash rather than conscious application of formal logic of ratiocination.” This intuitive approach to decision making, by nature and definition, precludes full explanation of the decision-maker's experience, for it is not made up of “little bricks of sight, sound, taste, and touch.”