Pressley warns high court may take aim at more precedents, protections
The U.S. Supreme Court may move to overturn other long established constitutional protections, according to a member of the state’s congressional delegation.
“I think they’re forecasting. It is not a drill,” U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said.
The Boston congresswoman, speaking with WCVB’s Jessica Brown and Ed Harding during weekend politics show On the Record, said that assertions made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurrence with the decision to overturn the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade that the justices should take a close look at other standing precedents are not just idle legal speculation.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, respectively, prevent states from outlawing abortion control, implementing sodomy laws or declining marriage licenses to same sex couples.
The removal of the protections provided by those decisions, like Roe, which legalized first term abortion nationally, “is very possible” under the current court, Pressley said.
“This Supreme Court has been — in an unprecedented way — legislating from the bench,” she said. “It is far right, it is extreme, it is imbalanced. It has overturned the majority will of the people on everything from voting rights, to housing rights, to reproductive rights and abortion justice and bodily autonomy.”
According to the Representative from Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District, any protections which may remain in the wake of an imbalanced court will be up to Congress.
“We’re going to have to stand in the gap for as long as we are in the present and the aftermath of the far right extremism and imbalance of this Supreme Court,” she said.
It is unclear what Democrats in Congress may be able to do, however, as Republicans, who by and large greeted the ruling in Dobbs with celebration, control the House and with it the lawmaking agenda.