‘The Hell with the Supreme Court’: Democrats Lash Out after Historic Ruling Overturning Roe

Zachary Evans
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Democratic lawmakers lashed out at the Supreme Court’s conservative justices on Friday after they issued a ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, casting the decision as a constitutionally “illegitimate” threat to American women.

The 6–3 majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and held that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established abortion access as a constitutional right, was wrongly decided.

“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito wrote.

“There’s no point in saying good morning because it certainly is not one,” House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told reporters at the opening of a press conference.

“Today the Republican-controlled Supreme Court has achieved their dark, extreme goal of ripping away a woman’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions,” Pelosi said. “Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican Party, their supermajority on the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers.”

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called Friday “one of the darkest days our country has ever seen.”

“Millions upon millions of American women are having their rights taken from them by five unelected Justices on the extremist MAGA court,” Schumer added.

Representatives Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) joined protesters outside the Supreme Court on Friday.

“Women are going to control their bodies no matter how they try and stop us,” Waters told journalists at the Court. “The hell with the Supreme Court—we will defy them. Women will be in control of their bodies.”

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez was filmed chanting with protesters that the Court’s decision was “illegitimate.”

Former president Barack Obama said the decision curtailed the “essential freedoms” of Americans.

“Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans,” Obama said in a statement on Twitter.

Attorney General Merrick Garland also condemned the decision.

“The U.S. Justice Department strongly disagrees with the Court’s decision,” Garland said in a statement, adding “it will be greatly disproportionate in its effect—with the greatest burdens felt by people of color and those of limited financial means.”

Garland said that the Justice Department “will work tirelessly to protect and advance reproductive freedom.”

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