DOJ postpones abortion pill ban until after midterms; the justice who enabled it calls criticism 'quite damaging.'

…(cont) He also told CBS that criticism of the Court from political leaders is "quite damaging" to the institution, and he applied the complaint evenly: both Biden and Trump, he said, have been "very harsh." A justice offended in both directions sounds, on the page, like a model of evenhandedness. It is also a man measuring the temperature of the room he's sitting in rather than the fire he lit on his way out of it — because weeks before this interview aired, the 9th Circuit was still refusing to let a sitting federal judge in Idaho defy that fire, upholding Dobbs against an attempt to slow it down.

Nobody is slow-walking the ruling at the bench. Somebody is slow-walking it at the desk next to it. The Washington Sun reported Friday that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has told the Justice Department to hold off pushing a federal ban on abortion pills — the method behind nearly two-thirds of all U.S. abortions — until after the midterms. Attorney General Todd Blanche already called the current shipping rules "wrong" at his July confirmation hearing. An anti-abortion advocate put the quiet part plainly to the Sun: once the votes are counted, "the gloves will be off." Sixty-eight percent of the country opposes banning the pill right now, while it still counts as speculation rather than policy.

The Guardian noted last week that abortion has faded from the national conversation since Dobbs, and that Republicans prefer it that way. Alito calls the noise damaging to the institution. His own administration isn't making noise at all. It is simply waiting for the quiet to last through November.