Why Republicans secretly hope the Supreme Court rules in favor of the abortion pill

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments as anti-choice activists seek to overturn the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a drug commonly used to terminate pregnancies.
61% : Mifepristone surviving might enrage anti-abortion activists, but it would allow Republicans to have a better chance than they otherwise would have in 2024.
45% : Trump nominated Kacsmaryk, the judge who suspended mifepristone’s FDA approval last year.
43% : In addition, allowing keeping mifepristone on the market prevents uncomfortable questions about resurrecting the Comstock Act, the 1873 law that prohibited mailing contraception, pornography or drugs “intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.”
39% : Just this week, Democrat Marilyn Lands flipped a seat in Alabama’s state legislature in a district that had voted for Trump in 2020.
37% : Congress and Roe v Wade weakened the law, but Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who authored the Dobbs decision, both mentioned the Comstock Act when doing so.
23% : As my colleague Alex Woodward explained in his write-up of the oral arguments, even some of the conservative jurists that former president Donald Trump nominated to the bench seemed to express skepticism about reversing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone that happened in 2000.
8% : But Trump and McConnell turning the Senate into a judicial confirmation factory — indeed, McConnell got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations because of Democratic opposition to Gorsuch — has been disastrous for Republicans politically.

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