Democrats Horrified by Draft Opinion Overturning Roe : ‘Ripped Up the Constitution’

Prominent Democrats reacted with horror to the Monday night leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that, if adopted, would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion on a national level.

The draft Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health opinion, which upholds Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, was written on February 10 by Justice Samuel Alito, with Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh concurring. Chief Justice John Roberts does not plan to join the majority in overturning Roe, CNN reported.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely – the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito wrote. “That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’”

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey excoriated the Court in response to the draft ruling, first reported by Politico, alleging that Republicans stole the five out of nine Supreme Court seats now occupied by conservative, originalist justices while calling for overhauling the institution via court-packing.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released a joint statement accusing the High Court of being undemocratic and discarding the Constitution in a rogue ruling.

“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 Democratic leaders wrote. “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.”

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Rather than outlaw abortion immediately, the ruling would mean that the Supreme Court has deferred the major question of abortion to state legislatures.

President Biden published a statement Tuesday stating the importance of Democrats’ retaining and expanding their majority in Congress in the midterm elections to pass pro-abortion legislation. The GOP is poised to win back control in 2022 of at least the House of Representatives if not also the Senate, which is currently evenly split.

“And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November. At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law,” he said.

The radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party urged swift action in Congress to codify the right to abortion into federal law amid the Supreme Court leak.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez urged her Democratic colleagues to support legislation that would codify the right to an abortion nationally: “People elected Democrats precisely so we could lead in perilous moments like these- to codify Roe, hold corruption accountable, & have a President who uses his legal authority to break through Congressional gridlock on items from student debt to climate. It’s high time we do it.”

Senator Bernie Sanders also demanded immediate legislative action, vowing to eliminate the filibuster, the 60-vote hurdle necessary to advance a bill, currently standing in the way. Centrist Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, crucial swing votes in an evenly divided Senate, have repeatedly refused to support killing the filibuster to pass abortion legislation. In February, Democrats’ first attempt to enshrine Roe failed with the Women’s Health Protection Act when the Senate was unable to invoke cloture and proceed with a vote.

“Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW. And if there aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not, we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes,” Sanders said.

A number of pundits and Hollywood celebrities tweeted their outrage, making dystopian comparisons and implying that the Supreme Court has been co-opted by the Republican Party.

Actor Seth MacFarlane said, “As the staggeringly partisan, right wing-dominated SCOTUS nudges America closer to Handmaids Tale status, the importance of voting in EVERY election becomes even more obvious. One would hope today’s news erases any further delusions that ‘both parties are pretty much the same.’”

Liberal MSNBC commentator Elizabeth Spiers wrote, “Just a reminder that adoption is not the beautiful solution to all of this that conservatives like to pretend it is.”

“And btw, if you’re an adoptive parent I can see how you might be tempted to reply to this sort of thing with an insistence that adoption is wonderful. And I’m sure it is *for you.* It is not so great for women who relinquish children, even when they do not want them,” she added.

Following the leak, MSNBC host Joy Reid retweeted a New Yorker article titled “The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It.” She wrote “Gilead” in a quote tweet, referring to the autocratic, oppressive sexual regime in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which some progressives have likened to the judicial philosophy of some of the religious justices on the bench. Reid blasted Alito’s central point that abortion doesn’t fall under the Supreme Court’s purview, noting that the court has rectified many historical injustices, such as racial discrimination, even though they weren’t mentioned in the original Constitution.

“Mr. Alito? You know what else the Constitution doesn’t reference? Racial equality, the right of Black people or women to vote, desegregation, LGBTQ rights, including to marry, and interracial marriage. Yet all of those things were affirmed by previous SCOTUS decisions. Oh, right,” she said.

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