Hotair
Alternate headline: Pope Nancy is not amused. Nancy Pelosi rushed to the microphone, acknowledging at one point that her staff was still reading the Dobbs decision, to accuse the Supreme Court of “ripping away women’s rights” and realizing Republicans’ “dark extreme goal.” Pelosi placed the blame on Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, but she left out an important player in how the Supreme Court got its current line-up:
Pelosi doesn’t spread the credit around enough. Let’s not forget the man who made all of this possible by dramatically altering Senate rules to eliminate the need for bipartisan cooperation on judicial confirmations:
We could put Chuck Schumer on the same pedestal. The current Senate Majority Leader led an indisputably stupid attempt to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 2017, which led to McConnell’s retributive rule change that used Reid’s precedent to free up Gorsuch’s confirmation vote. That led directly to the confirmations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett too, giving the court its current 6-3 conservative lineup.
Harry Reid’s dark and partisan extremism started it all, though. Congrats to all the Senate Democrats who fell into a completely obvious and predictable trap in 2013. Well done. Your names will be engraved on the pedestal, surely.
Pelosi wasn’t the only Democrat in Congress going into full freak-out mode over the Dobbs decision today. We’ll likely have a lot more on that, but the more measured reaction from Joe Manchin provides an interesting contrast to Pelosi’s overwrought emoting over a return of abortion to legislatures rather than courts. Manchin, who didn’t go along with either Reid or Schumer on the filibuster manipulations in 2013 and 2017, said he felt he’d been misled by Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett:
“I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided for two generations of Americans,” he said.
Neither of them promised to keep that “settled precedent” in place if it got called into question, though. There has been a cottage industry of perjury complaints since the leak of the draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in the beginning of May to oust Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett for testifying to their respect for stare decisis, but that’s “utter nonsense,” Jonathan Turley wrote at the time. If Manchin thinks he’s been betrayed by an acknowledgment that Roe was “settled legal precedent” — which it was, until today — then he clearly was fooling himself…
