Biden rips ‘radical’ Roe draft and warns other rights at risk
President Joe Biden says other privacy rights, including same-sex marriage and birth control, are in jeopardy if the justices follow through on draft opinion in abortion case
President Joe Biden on Tuesday blasted a “radical” Supreme Court draft opinion that would throw out the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling, which 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 of the states, sparking new efforts in Democraticleaning states to protect access to abortion, and potentially reshaping the contours of this year’s hotly contested midterm elections.
The draft was published by the news outlet Politico late Monday.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One, 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,” such as 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 said. “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.”
Though past efforts have failed, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he intended to hold a vote.
“This is as urgent and real as it gets,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “Every American is going to see on which side every senator stands.”
Speaking at the EMILY’s List political action committee conference Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris said the draft opinion showed “women’s rights in America are under attack.”
“Women’s issues are America’s issues and democracies cannot be strong if the rights of women are under attack,” she added. “Let us fight with everything we’ve got.”
Leaders in New York and California 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 late Monday represented an extremely rare breach of the court’s secretive deliberation process, and on a case of surpassing importance.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” the draft opinion states. It was signed by Justice Samuel Alito, who is a member of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority and 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, which 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 strongly suggests that when the justices met in private shortly after arguments in the case on Dec. 1, at least five — all of the conservatives except perhaps Chief Justice 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 coronavirus pandemic, posted on the court’s website.
The report of the leaked draft comes amid a legislative push to restrict abortion in several Republicanled
states — Oklahoma being the most recent — even before the court issues its decision. Critics of those measures have said low-income and minority women will disproportionately bear the burden of the new restrictions.
The leak jumpstarted the intense political reverberations that the high court’s ultimate decision was expected to have in the midterm election year. Already, politicians on both sides of the aisle were seizing on the report to fundraise and energize their supporters on both sides of the issue.
Democrats contended that several conservative justices misled senators about their feelings.
And 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.”