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- The Supreme Court confirmed a leaked draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade is authentic.
- The ruling — which hasn’t been finalized — would throw out a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.
- President Joe Biden urged voters to elect pro-choice lawmakers during the upcoming midterms.
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Chief Justice John Roberts has a pattern of warning Supreme Court clerks and staff to maintain confidentiality in court dealings. Roberts would highlight to the clerks that leaking information could mean blows to their careers, clerks told Insider.
Legal experts called the breach — which is almost unprecedented — “highly disturbing.”
Roberts has instructed the court marshal to start an investigation into the leak. He called it a “betrayal of the confidences of the court.”
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Some US companies are taking steps in response to increasing restrictions on abortion access.
Amazon, Apple, and Citi, for example, are covering travel costs for employees seeking abortion in different states.
At least half of US states are “certain or likely” to ban abortion if the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling is struck down, according to analysis by the Guttmacher Institute.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Sen. Kyrsten Sinema “an obstructionist” and slammed the Arizona lawmaker for refusing to support changes to the Senate filibuster to codify abortion protections.
“We could protect Roe tomorrow, but Sinema refuses to act on the filibuster. Until that changes she can take a seat talking about ‘women’s access to health care,'” Ocasio-Cortez said, calling for Sinema to be primaried.
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Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement that “the rights of all Americans are at risk” as the Supreme Court seems set to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“If the right to privacy is weakened, every person could face a future in which the government can potentially interfere in the personal decisions you make about your life,” Harris said.
She added: “Republican legislators in states across the country are weaponizing the use of the law against women.”
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed Republicans for “plotting” to get a conservative Supreme Court and overturn Roe v. Wade.
“The Republicans have been working toward this day for decades,” Warren told reporters Tuesday. “They have been out there plotting, carefully cultivating these Supreme Court justices so they could have a majority on the bench who would accomplish something that the majority of Americans do not want.”
She said she’s “angry and upset and determined,” after the leaked draft opinion appearing to signal the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling will be overturned.
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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is standing by her support of the Senate filibuster, busting Democrats’ hopes of codifying Roe v. Wade into law.
“Protections in the Senate safeguarding against the erosion of women’s access to health care have been used half-a-dozen times in the past ten years, and are more important now than ever,” she said in a Tuesday statement.
The filibuster requires most legislation to get a three-fifths majority to head to debate, meaning Democrats can’t pass many policy items in an evenly divided Senate.
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The Supreme Court confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft opinion that would overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling guaranteeing abortion rights.
“Although the document described in yesterday’s reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the Court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case,” the court said in a statement.
Chief Justice John Roberts announced the court will investigate to find out who leaked the document.
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Republican Sen. Susan Collins slammed conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in the wake of the leaked draft opinion that would overturn the right to an abortion.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said in a statement.
Collins — who supports abortion rights — has previously defended her decision to vote for Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmations.
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President Joe Biden urged voters to elect pro-choice lawmakers in the wake of a leaked draft opinion seemingly suggesting that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Biden in a Tuesday statement said at a federal level, the country needs “more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House” so he can pass legislation to codify Roe v. Wade.
“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,” the president added. “And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November.”
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell slammed Democrats over their reactions to the leaked draft opinion showing the Supreme Court is set to undo abortion rights.
“By every indication, this was yet another escalation in the radical left’s ongoing campaign to bully and intimidate federal judges and substitute mob rule for the rule of law,” McConnell said in a statement.
He also called the leak “an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court.”
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Democrats plan to make abortion a main talking point ahead of the fall midterm elections if the Supreme Court overturns existing protections for women’s reproductive rights.
If the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling is overturned, pro-choice groups say outrage could help inspire people to vote.
“The reality is abortion is absolutely going to be on the ballot in 2022, no ifs, ands, or buts about it,” Kristin Ford, vice president of communications at NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Insider in March.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
The leaked draft opinion seemingly showing that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade is certainly unprecedented.
An entire draft opinion has never been leaked like this before.
But details about justices’ deliberations have been made public before — for example a 1972 memo about Roe that was leaked to the Washington Post before it became public.
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In the wake of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion, Democrats have quickly organized to codify Roe v. Wade and make it a law.
One thing stopping Democrats’ efforts, however, is the Senate filibuster.
Democrats are currently focusing on the Women’s Health Protection Act as a way to protect women’s’ federal right to abortion.
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Amending the Constitution is extremely difficult and rare. An amendment protecting abortion rights is nearly impossible.
Abortion rights amendments have previously been proposed by both supporters and opponents.
In the 233-year-long lifespan of the Constitution, it has only been amended 27 times — most recently in 1992 — and would require massive support in Congress and among states.
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Legal experts have expressed shock at the fact that a draft opinion from the Supreme Court was leaked to Politico.
“The fact that it leaked is, to me, the most surprising thing,” Harvard Law School professor I. Glenn Cohen told Insider.
Mark Kende, a law professor at Drake University, told Insider that it’s “highly disturbing that the opinion was improperly leaked in an unprecedented way, presumably by someone at the Court.”
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer slammed the potential Supreme Court ruling as “one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.”
Their remarks came in response to a leaked draft opinion published by Politico that appears to show the Supreme Court is set to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade case.
“If the report is accurate, 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,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.
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Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, late on Monday night after Politico published a leaked draft opinion suggesting that Roe v. Wade was poised to be overturned.
“I got down here early, right, cause I got home from a long day kicked off shoes my shoes, opened Twitter, saw that Roe v. Wade was trending to be overturned, put my shoes back on, and came right back from east of the river,” Rev. Wendy Hamilton, a Democratic congressional candidate from DC, told Insider.
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A leaked draft opinion obtained by Politico appears to show that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that granted women the constitutional right to an abortion.
Politico late Monday published the 98-page initial draft majority opinion, purportedly authored by Justice Samuel Alito who said Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.”
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” the draft opinion says, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court,” according to the report.
The decision — if finalized — would mark a momentous shift in constitutional rights. Over a dozen GOP states have laws that would immediately restrict abortion access if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
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