Weekend thread: What's going on?

Alito says leaker--who he knows--made SCOTUS "targets of assassination." North Carolina Supreme Court re-implements gerrymander. Montana gov, dismissing LGBTQ son, signs anti-trans bill.

In a whining and angry rant in an interview with the members of the archconservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, Justice Samuel Alito claims he has a "petty good idea" of who leaked the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, though it’s not "the level of proof that is needed to name someone."

How convenient. Of course he claims it is an enemy of his and the conservatives on the court—shocker—and that the person made the conservative justices into "targets of assassination," giving someone the rationale to try to stop the decision by "killing us." He says this is proof it wasn’t a conservative clerk or justice who leaked the decision because they’d never turn themselves into targets. But in making this melodramatic claim, Alito is ignoring the dynamics on the court, which I’ll break down below.

Speaking of court corruption, the North Carolina Supreme Court, now dominated by elected Republicans, has completely reversed the decision of the previous court, which ruled the legislature had created gerrymandered districts and threw them out. It was a breathtaking example of judicial activism.

And in Montana, after the House of Representatives censured the only transgender lawmaker, Zooey Zephyr—silencing her for the rest of the term—as they moved to pass horrendous anti-trans legislation, GOP Governor Greg Gianforte waved aside pleas from his own non-binary son and signed into law a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans minors.