Jamie Raskin Responds To SCOTUS Leak And He's On Fire
We need more allies like this in Congress.
Jamie Raskin was already scheduled to appear on The Rachel Maddow Show on Tuesday night. He was supposed to be discussing the latest developments in the January 6 investigation.
Breaking news intervened.
That's okay, because, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, Jamie Raskin is also a constitutional scholar. And he was on fire talking about this awful, awful draft of a ruling from Justice Alito.
Ladies, hide ALL of your birth control:
"The basic legal claim here is that the word 'abortion' doesn't appear in the Constitution, and of course, it doesn't appear in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court, in 1973, in Roe vs. Wade or Griswold vs. Connecticut, which was a 1965 decision by the Supreme Court striking down a law banning birth control, even for married couples in Connecticut," said Raskin. "The Supreme Court said that the due process liberty cause includes a right to privacy, over into intimate decision-making. So, the point is that Justice [Samuel] Alito's decision would apply also, presumably, to the right to privacy in contraception."
There's a domino effect coming. Because the Far Right has been working on these dominoes all along:
"If Casey is to fall if Roe v. Wade is to fall, then Griswold vs. Connecticut, presumably is to follow as well, because the word 'contraception' or 'birth control' doesn't appear in the Constitution. Indeed, the phrase 'right to privacy' doesn't appear in the Constitution, so this would appear to be an invitation to have Handmaids Tale-type anti-feminist regulation and legislation all over the country."
Think that's too extreme? Jamie Raskin says it's in black and white! "All that is perfectly in keeping with Justice Alito's opinion."
If this draft stands, says Raskin, it's very very bad. "I believe that the court will have returned to its historic baseline, of being a reactionary conservative institution to the far-right of everything else at the federal level in the government."
And that is traditionally what the high court has been. Make no mistake.
"You know, it's still got this lingering fake halo around it from the rulings Brown vs. Board, and Roe v. Wade, Miranda vs. Arizona. But for most of our history —take it all the way up to the Civil War — the Supreme Court never did anything for enslaved Americans, other than to cement constitutionally the system of slavery in the Dred Scott decision, and declare that African Americans have no rights that the white man is bound to respect, and to declare that the constitution is indeed a white man's compact."
We'd better vote in 2022.