Biden blasts ‘radical’ draft on Roe v. Wade
Chief justice orders investigation into leak of February document Youngkin says he’ll await final ruling; activists see state as ‘safe haven’
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Tuesday blasted a “radical” Supreme Court draft opinion that would throw out the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling that has stood for a half-century.
The court cautioned no final decision had been made, but Biden warned that other privacy rights including same-sex marriage and birth control are at risk if the justices follow through.
Chief Justice John Roberts said he had ordered an investigation into what he called the “egregious breach of trust” in leaking the draft document, which was dated to February. Opinions often change in ways big and small in the drafting process, and a final ruling has not been expected until the end of the court’s term in late June or early July. Across the nation, Americans grappled with what might come next.
The Democratic-controlled Congress and White House both vowed to try to blunt the impact of such a ruling, but their prospects looked dim.
A decision to overrule Roe would have sweeping ramifications, leading to abortion bans in roughly half the states, sparking new efforts in Democratic-leaning states to protect access to abortion, and potentially reshaping the contours of this year’s contested midterm elections.
The draft was published by the news outlet Politico late Monday.
Biden said he hoped the draft wouldn’t be finalized by justices, contending it reflects a “fundamental shift in American jurisprudence” that threatens “other basic rights” like access to birth control and marriage.
“If this decision holds, it’s really quite a radical decision,” he added.
“If the court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose,” Biden also said.
Leaders in California and New York rolled out the welcome mat to their states for women seeking abortions, and other Democratic states moved to protect access to abortion in their laws.
The court’s ruling would be most acutely felt by women who don’t have the means or ability to travel from states that have or stand poised to pass stiff abortion restrictions or outright bans.
Whatever the outcome, the Politico report represented a rare breach of the court’s secretive deliberation process.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” the draft opinion states. It was signed by Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority who was appointed by former President George W. Bush.
The document was labeled a “1st Draft” of the “Opinion of the Court” in a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks.
The draft opinion in effect states there is no constitutional right to abortion services. It would allow individual states to more heavily regulate or outright ban the procedure.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” it states, referencing the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey that affirmed Roe’s finding of a constitutional right to abortion services but allowed states to place some constraints on the practice. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The draft opinion suggests that when the justices met in private shortly after arguments in the case Dec. 1, at least five — all the conservatives except perhaps Roberts — voted to overrule Roe and Casey, and Alito was assigned the task of writing the court’s majority opinion.
Votes and opinions in a case aren’t final until a decision is announced or, in a change wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, posted on the court’s website.
Politico said it received “a copy of the draft opinion from a person familiar with the court’s proceedings in the Mississippi case along with other details supporting the authenticity of the document.”
The report comes amid a legislative push to restrict abortion in several GOP-led states — Oklahoma being the most recent — even before the court issues its decision.
The leak jump-started the intense political reverberations that the high court’s ultimate decision was expected to have in the midterm election year. Politicians on both sides of the aisle were seizing on the Politico report for fundraising and to energize supporters.
Maine Republican Susan Collins, who supports abortion rights but was a pivotal GOP vote for the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, said if the draft reflects the final opinion of the court, “it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.”