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(WASHINGTON) — More than 110 days after Justice Samuel Alito authored a first draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court deliberations over a final ruling have entered a critical phase, four weeks before the justices recess for summer and as an internal probe into a leak of the draft intensifies.

A decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — the Mississippi case challenging Roe — could come as soon as Monday, but most veteran court watchers expect an opinion rolling back constitutional protection for abortion rights will likely be released in late June.

The unprecedented publication of Alito’s leaked draft last month upended the court’s traditional workflow, an iterative process marked by frank and private exchanges of ideas between justices over the course of months.

“What happened at the court is tremendously bad,” Justice Clarence Thomas said this month of the leak’s impact on court dynamics. “You begin to look over your shoulder. It’s kind of an infidelity.”

Several former Supreme Court clerks, once intimately involved in the opinion drafting process, told ABC News the Dobbs majority opinion — and related concurring and dissenting opinions — are all likely in the midst of tense and frenzied rounds of revision.

“The more everyone else’s temperature goes up, the more Chief Justice Roberts insists on business as usual — even when the building is on fire,” said Sarah Isgur, an ABC News legal analyst. “What that means for Dobbs is not clear at this point.”

How the opinion drafting process works

On Dec. 3, two days after oral arguments in the abortion rights case, the justices met for their scheduled weekly conference when preliminary votes are taken on cases heard that week. Each was asked to weigh in on the central question posed in Dobbs: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”

Five conservative justices — with the exception of Chief Justice Roberts — voted ‘no’ at that time, according to the leaked first draft opinion. Justice Thomas, who as the most senior among them had responsibility to assign the majority author, assigned Justice Alito to put their views into writing.

More than two months later, according to the time stamp on the leaked draft, Alito shared with his colleagues a 67-page majority opinion. Legal experts have characterized the document, dated Feb. 10, as an opening bid in the opinion writing process, as it does not reflect any input from dissenting justices and may not reflect input from other justices on Alito’s side of the case, legal experts point out.

Over the past three and a half months, the justices have likely been providing feedback to Alito in the form of electronic and paper memos between chambers, former clerks said. Only around 80 people — the justices, clerks and administrative staff — have access to draft opinions and dissents as they circulate, sources say.

“We had two different computer systems — one for internal materials where draft opinions were held, and another for research through one of the online resources,” said Thiru Vignarajah, a former clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer.

It is not clear how many subsequent draft opinions and dissents may have been circulated to date.

Roberts in a May 3 statement on the leaked Alito draft noted, however, that “it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case.”

Revising opinions, changing votes

The Supreme Court says some opinions may be revised a dozen or more times before publication, sometimes including a dramatic shift in vote alignment on the outcome of a case.

“It is a common experience that dissents change votes, even enough votes to become the majority,” the late Justice William Brennan once said, according to the Supreme Court Historical Society.

Roberts famously changed his position several times behind the scenes in 2012 during the first major challenge to the Affordable Care Act. After initially voting to strike down the heart of the law — the individual insurance mandate — and uphold the law’s expansion of Medicaid, Roberts ultimately flipped on both late in the drafting process, CNN’s Joan Biskupic, the Chief’s biographer, reported at the time. The shift narrowly saved the ACA.

While most legal analysts expect the Court will uphold Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortions at the center of the Dobbs case — and in turn, rollback nearly 50 years of precedent, as reflected in the Alito draft — the scope of the ruling and its legal rationale could still be in flux behind the scenes.

“There may be people that after they read [Alito’s opinion] say, I don’t really agree with that, or it’s not as strong an argument as I thought, and so they may decide to write separately [in a concurrence],” said Rachel Barkow, vice dean of NYU Law School and a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia.

“Sometimes people take an even more extreme position and say, I was wrong. I thought I was going to vote to uphold this law, but I can’t do it, so I’m going to join the dissent, or I’m going to wait and see what the dissent has to say and see which one is better,” Barkow said.

Chief Justice Roberts, who has long signaled opposition to Roe and its reasoning, notably did not join the majority in the initial vote on Dobbs and has reportedly been lobbying fellow conservatives to join him in taking a narrower approach than the one advanced by Alito.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer have all previously supported constitutional protection of a woman’s right to end a pregnancy before a fetus is considered viable outside the womb, around 24 weeks. They are certain to author a vigorous dissent.

Barkow said draft dissenting opinions will likely seek to pressure the majority justices by calling out alleged inconsistencies, flawed reasoning, and overlooked impacts of their decision.

“Each side goes back and forth until everybody feels like they’re ready to release the decisions. That’s why we wait so long,” Barkow said. “The justices are usually very respectful of each other in terms of hearing the feedback, giving the other side time to respond to the extent they want to, and it’s only when everyone agrees that an opinion is ready to go out.”

Publication and release of opinions

Complicating the process in major cases is the likelihood that each justice will want to write an individual opinion — concurring or dissenting — to emphasize a special point. Those drafts are circulated along with the majority opinion and primary dissent and can evolve over time.

The Dobbs decision is also overshadowed by an ongoing internal investigation into how a first draft of the Alito opinion was leaked to Politico. The probe, ordered by Chief Justice Roberts and led by Court Marshal Army Col. Gail Curley, has strained relations inside the court and exacerbated divisions around one of the most contentious cases in years, several justices and court insiders have said publicly.

When all revisions are complete, traditionally before the end of the court’s term on June 30, a master proof of the opinions is sent to the Court’s Reporter of Decisions for final processing before release.

The Reporter writes a summary of the ruling — called a “syllabus” — and copy edits the text of the opinions before having physical copies of the case documents printed, a step that can take several additional days after a decision is technically finalized.

Prior to the pandemic, the justices would announce decisions in-person from the Supreme Court bench. Today, the releases happen electronically on the court’s website not long after physical printing is complete. It is not publicly known in advance which cases will be decided on a designated opinion release day.

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(WASHINGTON) — As mass shootings continue to rock the nation, President Joe Biden delivered prime-time remarks on guns Thursday evening from the White House, imploring the nation to “For God’s sake, do something.”

“This time we must actually do something,” he said, calling for a ban on assault weapons.

“We need to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. And if we can’t ban assault weapons, then we should raise the age to purchase them from 18 to 21, strengthen background checks, enact safe storage law, and red flag laws. Repeal the immunity that protects gun manufacturers from liability, address the mental health crisis,” he said in an impassioned address.

The latest mass shooting on Wednesday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leaving four dead, follows a massacre of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, as well as an apparently racially-motivated attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, leaving 10 Black people dead.

“We spent hours with hundreds of family members who were broken, whose lives will never be the same,” Biden said. “They had one message for all of us. Do something. Just do something … After Columbine, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Orlando, after Las Vegas, after Parkland, nothing has been done. This time that can’t be true.”

Biden taking the national spotlight on Thursday evening comes amid questions over why he has not yet lobbied lawmakers personally and more forcefully as they aim to find a compromise on gun control legislation.

Biden told reporters earlier this week he “will meet with the Congress on guns — I promise you,” but did not provide details on when such a meeting might take place. On Thursday, he once again made the case for legislative action.

“This isn’t about taking anyone’s rights. It’s about protecting children, ” he said. “It’s about protecting families, it’s about protecting whole communities, it’s about protecting our freedoms to go to school, to a grocery store to a church without being shot and killed. According to new data just released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention guns are the number one killer of children in the United States of America. The number one killer. More than car accidents, more than cancer. Over the last two decades, more school-aged children have died from guns than on-duty police officers and active-duty military combined.”

“Think about that,” he said, adding, “How much more carnage are we willing to accept? How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say enough, enough?”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back Thursday against the notion that Biden hasn’t been involved in negotiations, arguing he’s been involved since taking office and repeating a sentiment from earlier this week that he “wants to give it some space” as the talks continue.

Biden’s making the speech Thursday, Jean-Pierre said, because he wants to make sure “that his voice is still out there and that the American people know that he’s fighting for them.”

Jean-Pierre also said the president is “encouraged” by what he’s seeing on Capitol Hill, even though Biden himself cast doubt that legislation will be passed, telling reporters he’s “not confident” as he recounted his first-hand experience in the Senate.

While serving as then-President Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden was tasked in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting to lead the administration’s effort to enact tougher gun control laws — but in the nearly decade since the nation mourned for Newtown, no action on gun control has passed at a federal level.

The last meaningful gun reform legislation passed on Capitol Hill was the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004 due to a “sunset” clause in the legislation. Similar legislation has failed for decades in the Senate due in large part to the filibuster rule, which requires 60 senators for a measure to advance toward a final vote. Though Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in Congress, they cannot push legislation through the Senate without the support of at least 10 Republicans.

The American public is widely supportive of universal background checks, which have already passed through the House’s Democratic majority. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in September 2019 found 89% support for universal background checks, including at least eight in 10 Republicans and conservatives.

Ahead of Biden’s speech, Vice President Kamala Harris offered brief remarks Thursday afternoon on the mass shooting in Tulsa and urged Congress to pass gun safety laws.

“No more excuses,” Harris said. “Thoughts and prayers are important, but not enough. We need Congress to act.”

As Biden prepared for his speech on Thursday, funerals were underway in Uvalde, where he visited families of victims.

He claimed earlier this week to have visited more aftermaths of mass shootings than any other American president.

In impassioned remarks from the White House last week after the Uvalde shooting, Biden expressed outrage at lawmakers who are blocking “common-sense” gun laws and rejected the argument often heard from Republicans that gun violence is a mental health issue.

“These kinds of mass shootings never happen with the kind of frequency they happen in America. Why? Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” Biden said with outrage. “Where in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with and stand up to the lobbies?”

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(NEW YORK) — A spate of deadly gun attacks across the country has reignited the national debate on gun reform in the United States. Lawmakers are arguing over what to do, if anything, to regulate guns.

Many are pointing specifically to a 2008 Supreme Court decision that was the first time the Supreme Court ever held that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to gun ownership. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, has been cited as one of the reasons why big gun reform may not be possible.

“The Supreme Court had not decided before Heller whether the Second Amendment created an individual right,” said attorney John Bash, who was a clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia on the landmark case.

Bash pointed to the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment as examples of other protected individual rights.

“They had never decided whether it was just the right to serve in a militia or a right to have a gun for self-defense. And what the majority decided was that it is an individual right, and it includes a self-defense component,” he added.

Kate Shaw, a professor of law at Cardozo Law School in New York and ABC News legal analyst, and Bash, an attorney in private practice in Austin, Texas, were clerks on opposing sides of the decision. On Tuesday, Shaw and Bash penned an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “We Clerked for Justices Scalia and Stevens. America is Getting Heller Wrong.”

“Kate believes in a robust set of gun safety measures to reduce the unconscionable number of shootings in this country. John is skeptical of laws that would make criminals out of millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens who believe that firearm ownership is essential to protecting their families,” read the New York Times article.

Bash assisted Justice Scalia on the majority opinion and Shaw helped Justice Stevens argue the dissenting opinion. Bash and Shaw spoke to ABC News’ podcast, “Start Here” on Thursday morning.

“We’re required to say, and it’s actually true in this case, that the justices themselves did the most important work, but we did assist them in preparing their opinions,” said Shaw.

Due to the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975, provisions of the District of Columbia Code made it illegal to carry an unregistered firearm and prohibited the registrations of handguns. The chief of police could issue one-year licenses for handguns. The code also contained provisions, including requiring owners of lawfully registered firearms to keep them unloaded and disassembled, unless the firearm was located in a place of business or for legal recreational activities.

Dick Anthony Heller, a D.C. special police officer, was authorized to carry a handgun while on duty. He applied for a one-year license for the handgun he wished to keep at home, but his application was denied. In 2007, Heller sued the District of Columbia, arguing that parts of the code violated his Second Amendment right to keep a firearm in his home without a license.

The Supreme Court held that the ban on registering handguns and the requirement to keep guns in the home disassembled or nonfunctional with a trigger lock mechanism violates the Second Amendment. Justice Scalia delivered the opinion for the 5-to-4 majority.

Shaw said the Heller decision is used to argue that gun regulations impede on an individual’s right to self defense, often incorrectly. She said the decision was to protect the Second Amendment as an individual right, but the actual specific holding of the case was quite narrow.

“[The] total prohibition just wasn’t consistent with the individual right that the court announced in Heller and, as John said, had actually never been identified or identified previously,” said Shaw.

Bash agreed with Shaw that the court had explicitly left room for reasonable regulations.

“[The court] gave a lot of historical examples of what it called ‘presumptively lawful regulations.’ [What is] really relevant nowadays is prohibitions on felons and the mentally ill getting their hands on guns and they didn’t disturb those at all and essentially signaled that they were probably OK,” said Bash. “Although there may be some wiggle room or debate there, they pretty much signaled that.”

Shaw also pointed out that the Heller opinion doesn’t call into question the ban on guns in sensitive places like schools or bans on carrying other “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

“There’s been a lot of attention paid to Heller’s announcement of an individual right to own a gun, but much less attention paid to the language in Heller. Making clear the government can absolutely regulate that,” she said.

As lawmakers look to what can be done, Bash said they still have the power to create new laws about gun reform, “if crafted correctly.”

“Background check laws and what’s called ‘Red Flag laws,’ meaning you have some indication that someone’s a threat, you afford them due process and temporarily take their firearm until a fuller hearing can be had. And there are variations on that,” he said. “Some of them may be OK. Some of them may not be OK.”

For now, the country stands in the wake of tragedy. Last month, 10 people died in a shooting at a Buffalo supermarket in what law enforcement authorities described as a racially motivated attack. Last week, 19 students and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. On Wednesday night, four people died in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, hospital shooting. Shaw said that the real question she and Bash ask in the op-ed is if legislators can pass gun legislation before the next tragedy.

“I think it’s right that reasonable minds can disagree about limitations on particular types of weapons and how those would fare under Heller… I think that our point is Congress has done nothing on guns since Heller was decided in 2008,” said Shaw. “If they want to decide to do nothing, I think they just need to take ownership of that decision as opposed to pointing to something external to themselves.”

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