Jake, you raise two questions, so let me take them separately:

(1) Regarding abortion rights: While I think it’s safe to assume a five-conservative SCOTUS would be hostile toward reproductive rights, we can only speculate as to how they might approach the issue in terms of rulings. You are correct that certain states have state-level protections for the right to abortion, as they did prior to the ruling in Roe. You don’t mention (but I hope you are aware) that 14 states currently have laws on the books (either pre-dating the Roe ruling or written since) that would make abortion illegal literally the moment the Roe ruling was struck down. Ten other states have Republican-majority legislatures that have announced intentions to make abortion illegal should the opportunity arise. So it’s a decidedly mixed bag.

There are many ways a conservative-majority court could attack abortion rights. It’s true that simply overturning Roe would return the decision to the states; an alternative approach would be a Supreme Court decision that says a fertilized egg is a human life, and that abortion is therefore murder — which would immediately outlaw abortion across the US and its territories. There are too many possible paths to explore them all, but I think it’s dismissive and dangerous to imagine the damage might “only” be limited to those states without specific protections.

There’s also the fact that a nation where 24 or more states outlaw abortion, and others protect it, won’t stand long, nor will it protect the fundamental rights of its citizens. But again, too many possibilities to keep speculating.

(2) As to precedent — you make a valid argument, there is good reason stare decisis is NOT a law, and we should all be thankful it is. You cite Plessy, which stood for 40+ years — another example is Bowers v Hardwick, which stood only ten years before the court reversed it with Lawrence.

The fact is that stare decisis, as a principle and norm, doesn’t say that all precedents are set in stone; it says that precedents should not be reversed without very good reason.

Clearly, what I’m concerned with here is not the idea that any precedent might fall, it’s that conservatives have stacked the courts with Justices who will discard precedents when they disagree not with contemporary American ethical majorities, but with a specific conservative vision of what American ethics should be.

There’s little point in arguing what is “Constitutional,” because varying philosophies of Constitutional interpretation lead to dramatically different conclusions. The chief concern here is that we move from jurists who are at least philosophically consistent — which Anthony Kennedy was, for example — to jurists whose principal interest is not Constitutionality or consistency, but adherence to a conservative agenda.

I won’t like a politically conservative, fair-minded justice who adheres to a consistent constitutional interpretation, but I don’t fear one. But what we have now is four Justices who are more partisan than consistent (arguably, three and a half — there may be some shred of hope for Justice Roberts) and a fifth of those is what I really fear.