UNITED STATES: Kamala Harris called the US Supreme Court an “activist” institution after it barred all access to abortion nationwide earlier this year.
In an interview, Kamala Harris chastised the Supreme Court’s conservative majority for its June decision to overturn the seminal Roe v. Wade decision, which established the legal right to abortion.
Kamala Harris stated, “We have had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled.” She continued, “And this court took that constitutional right away, and we are suffering as a nation because of it.”
Kamala Harris claimed that the infamous Dobbs decision, which Republicans praised while her fellow Democrats mourned, disgraced the work of earlier justices who had ended school segregation.
She stated that the panel’s current makeup makes it “a very different” body from that of its predecessors and expressed her “deep concern about the integrity of the court overall.”
In their decision to overturn Roe, which effectively outlawed abortion in many states nationwide, Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined forces. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were all members of the court for less than two years when they were all appointed by the Trump administration.
Despite not supporting overturning Roe, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with that group of five in voting to uphold a Mississippi statute that forbids abortions after 15 weeks.
Although liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan dissented, they lacked the necessary support to uphold the national abortion rights that many Americans had relied upon for almost 50 years.
The comments made by Harris reaffirm earlier complaints of the country’s loss of universal access to abortion. Before this fall’s congressional midterm elections, she urged citizens to support abortion rights by voting for candidates.
Kamala Harris has questioned her about a recent news survey that revealed the supreme court’s favorability rating had dropped to 35% after its contentious ruling in June spurred worldwide public protests, prompting the vice president’s most recent remarks.
The results of the same survey indicated that about 4 in 10 voters have little to no faith in the judiciary. Less than two in 20 respondents in a network poll conducted just three years earlier claimed to have low confidence in the court, while 39% expressed high confidence in it.
Also Read: Justice Department Appeals for Special Master Ruling for Trump’s Documents
