Original Intent?

If Amy Coney Barrett had failed to rule out any change to the abortion law, then Republican Senators would block her confirmation. Not Democrats. Republicans. The ones who voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh only after he had promised Susan Collins that he would uphold Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Obergefell v. Hodges. They gave Collins's speech a standing ovation, and Kavanaugh has been as good as his word.

There are not really all that many "social conservatives" in the United States; as a proportion of the population, then you would still find far more of them in somewhere like Germany, where, among other signs of their influence, abortion remains illegal. Such American "social conservatives" as there are, do not usually live on electoral battlegrounds. Politically, they are just not important.

In any case, Coney Barrett's legal philosophy is that of her mentor, Antonin Scalia. The Constitution must be interpreted as its authors intended, or as it would have been understood by a reasonable person at the time of its ratification. A far newer idea than most people seem to to realise, that is rather redolent of Protestant fundamentalism, and it provides no protection at all from those who hold that they may and must bring the whole of their personal and societal experience to bear on their rulings.

Now, I am not going to get into the debate around People of Praise. But what if a judge who were a member of People of Praise were to apply the theory of the Living Constitution, which has far more of a Catholic feel to it? What if she were to do so in unison with John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh (in spite of the above), Neil Gorsuch on a good day, and perhaps even Sonia Sotomayor on a very good day? The issue need not necessarily be abortion. But it might be.

It is not going to happen, though. At best, the ruling would be that the Constitution did not specify a right to abortion, so the matter should be sent back to the states, few of which would now restrict abortion very much, and none of which would now ban it. Nor does the Constitution specifically ban abortion, or provide for Congress to do so. Therefore, no matter what had come to be known about, for example, fetal sentience, a federal ban on abortion by Act of Congress would still have to be struck down as unconstitutional.

All for the sake of fidelity to whatever could be divined of the intentions of the long-dead authors of a document that it was intentionally almost impossible to amend. And forget the odd flourish of Deist period rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence, which has never been the law. There are no such words in the Constitution, and those men would certainly have identified as atheists if they had been alive today.