Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi led a chorus of outrage over a leaked Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
The Democratic congressional leaders denounced the draft opinion reportedly prepared by a five-judge conservative majority that declares there is no constitutional right for a woman to choose.
“The Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past fifty years — not just on women but on all Americans,” Schumer and Pelosi wrote late Monday. “(It) would go down as an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.”
If the leaked decision proves accurate, they said it could open the door to bans on abortion in Republican-controlled states from coast to coast.
“Tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century,” Schumer and Pelosi said.
The leaders pointed out that several recently appointed justices, most notably Justice Brett Kavanaugh, told senators they believed Roe was “settled law” during their confirmation hearings.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution, and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation,” the statement said.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, infamously assured Americans that Kavanaugh told her he would not vote to overturn Roe when she announced her deciding vote in favor of confirming him to a lifetime appointment on the top court.
The draft Supreme Court decision in a Mississippi abortion case was reported by Politico late Monday.
Written by Justice Samuel Alito, it declares that Roe and other decisions that upheld it were wrongly decided.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes in the draft decision that was circulated to other justices in February. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Previous conservative decisions on abortion chipped away at the right to choose by permitting states to regulate abortion earlier and earlier in a woman’s pregnancy. But the new ruling would allow states to ban the practice altogether.
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