Nothing To Lose?

Mark Tushnet thinks out loud about the downfall of conservatism and the impact on the Supreme Court:

A common intuition, sometimes voiced, is that a conservative-dominated Supreme Court hasn't overruled Roe because the Court's conservatives knew that doing so would be a disaster for the Republican Party, splitting the party's coalition and reducing its attractiveness to moderates and independents who agreed with Roe's "core holding," as the joint opinion in Planned Parenthood put it...

But what if the coalition has already been split, and the Republican Party has already suffered a political disaster?

There's nothing left to hold the Court's conservatives back.  Indeed, the prospect of a long run of Democratic appointments to the Court -- true, the initial appointments to the Court are likely to be replacements for some of the liberals on the Court today, but that can't last forever -- gives the conservatives reasons to take their best shot sooner rather than later.  Elsewhere I've called this the "shoot the moon" strategy -- perhaps a high risk strategy, but with a better payoff if it succeeds than alternatives, and in the face of unattractive alternatives anyway.