Kamala Harris lashes out at ‘activist’ supreme court over Roe v Wade decision
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Version 0 of 1. The vice-president blasts the supreme court’s conservative majority over abortion rights in an interview with NBC Kamala Harris has excoriated the US supreme court for being an “activist” institution after the court stripped away nationwide abortion rights earlier this year. The vice-president’s remarks criticizing the supreme court’s conservative majority for its decision in June to reverse the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that established the federal right to an abortion came during an interview with Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press. “We had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled,” Harris said during the interview, a clip of which aired Friday before it aired in full Sunday. “And this court took that constitutional right away, and we are suffering as a nation because of it.” Harris said the so-called Dobbs ruling – which her fellow Democrats lamented while Republicans hailed it – shamed the work done by past justices who struck down school segregation. She described having “great concern about the integrity of the court overall” and said the panel’s current composition makes it “a very different” body than its predecessors. Supreme court justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn Roe, which in effect outlawed abortion in many states across the country. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were all appointees from the Donald Trump White House and had been part of the court for less than two years. Chief justice John Roberts joined that group of five in voting to uphold a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, but he did not agree with reversing Roe. Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan dissented, but they did not have the numbers to preserve the nationwide abortion rights that many Americans had counted on for almost 50 years. Harris’s remarks echo prior criticisms over the country’s loss of nationwide abortion rights. In July, she urged voters to elect candidates who support abortion rights in midterm congressional races in the fall. The vice-president’s latest comments followed Todd’s question about a recent NBC News poll that showed the supreme court’s favorability rating had plummeted to 35% after its controversial decision in June sparked street protests nationwide. That same poll showed nearly four in 10 voters have very little or no confidence in the court. A poll from the network just three years earlier showed 39% had high confidence in the court, and fewer than two in 20 voters said they had low confidence. NBC said Harris in the full interview Sunday would also share her thoughts on the state of democracy in the US, among other topics. Earlier in September, Joe Biden delivered a speech in which the president said that Republican forces loyal to Trump imperiled American democracy. |