CNN analyst forecasts legal effects of McCain win

• By STEVEN WARD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 3, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The controversial Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling will be overturned if John McCain is elected president, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told a Baton Rouge audience Friday.

“It’s gone,” Toobin, also a legal affairs staff writer at The New Yorker, said after giving a speech about the U.S. Supreme Court at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center.

“Maybe not during his first year or second year, but it will be overturned,” Toobin said of the possible election of McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and a U.S. senator for Arizona.

Toobin said overturning the case won’t mean all 50 states will outlaw abortion, but many of the so-called “red states,” or more-conservative states, would adopt abortion bans.

“We’re talking maybe 15 to 20 states, including this one,” Toobin said of Louisiana.

“But you will still have no change in states like California, New York and Illinois,” he said.

Toobin is the author of the 2007 book “The Nine — Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.”

In the book, he examines the personalities of the nine justices on the nation’s top court.

Toobin’s prediction about McCain and the abortion issue is just one outgrowth of the theme his book — the rise of the conservative movement.

“The U.S. Supreme Court is clearly more conservative under George W. Bush,” Toobin said.

Bush’s two appointees — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. — are two of the four most-conservative judges on the court, Toobin said.

The other two conservative justices are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, he said.

The four more-liberal justices are John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.