Pelosi And Schumer Melt Down Over SCOTUS Overturning Roe V Wade: “Lied to the U.S. Senate, an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer melted down after a leaked document showed the Supreme Court overturning Roe V Wade. The leaked draft of the opinion to end Roe has the left in total freakout mode.
Pelosi and Schumer released a joint statement that said: “If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years – not just on women but on all Americans. The Republican-appointed Justices’ reported votes to overturn Roe v. Wade would go down as an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation – all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century.
“The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has now completely devolved into the party of Trump. Every Republican Senator who supported Senator McConnell and voted for Trump Justices pretending that this day would never come will now have to explain themselves to the American people.”
Politico obtained a leaked copy of a draft majority opinion written by Samuel Alito that overturns Roe and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Alito writes: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”
“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes.
“Roe expressed the ‘feel[ing]’ that the Fourteenth Amendment was the provision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Constitution and that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance,” Alito writes.
“Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” Alito writes. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect. A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.”
“For our part, we do not question the motives of either those who have supported and those who have opposed laws restricting abortion,” he writes.
From Politico:
A person familiar with the court’s deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices – Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that line-up remains unchanged as of this week.
The three Democratic-appointed justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – are working on one or more dissents, according to the person.
How Chief Justice John Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already written opinion or draft his own, is unclear.
The document, labeled as a first draft of the majority opinion, includes a notation that it was circulated among the justices on Feb. 10.
If the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in the closely watched case over that state’s attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
A Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment or make another representative of the court available to answer questions about the draft document.
Read @SenSchumer and My Full Joint Statement on Reported Draft Supreme Court Decision to Overturn Roe v. Wade here: https://t.co/KikZO6J873
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) May 3, 2022
If the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years – not just on women but on all Americans.
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) May 3, 2022