OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Three pro-abortion women interrupted oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. The women announced that they were opposed to the Court’s major abortion ruling earlier this year that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Our right to choose will not be taken away,” one of the women said minutes into the court’s proceedings before she was whisked away by court security. “Women vote for the right to choose.”
“We will restore our freedom to choose,” another woman said a few minutes later.
The high court was hearing arguments in an unrelated case dealing with the Bank Secrecy Act. Neither the justices nor the attorney arguing reacted to the three consecutive interruptions.
"We will restore our freedom to choose," one of the protesters said Wednesday as the high court heard argument in a case about banking regulation.
— USA TODAY Politics (@usatodayDC) November 2, 2022
Over the summer, the Supreme Court released its decision in the highly-anticipated case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The Court voted in favor of overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark case that legalized abortion.
In early May, a draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to Politico and it set off a firestorm.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
“We, therefore, hold the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito writes in the document, labeled the “Opinion of the Court.”
Soon after Alito’s draft majority opinion leaked, it’s assumed there were at least 5 votes in favor of overturning Roe v Wade, leaving state legislators to weigh their own abortion policies.
Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz also offered his opinion of who he believes the “leaker” could be.
“I had several reporters ask today ‘what if it was a justice that did this?’ I gotta tell you, I just don’t believe that,” Cruz said, ruling out the Obama appointee herself. “It is such a grotesque violation of trust, to me, it is beyond imagination that a justice would do this.”
“To use the nuclear code example, it’s like the president handing the nuclear codes to Putin, it’s just…I cannot believe that even the most left-wing justice would do this,” he added.
“I think it is very, very likely a law clerk,” he said. “And it is very, very likely a law clerk for one of the three liberal justices, that means there are twelve human beings who are your likely suspect pool, that’s not a big likely suspect pool.”
“It is likely to be someone who is a hard partisan, and who was willing to burn the place down because he or she was so upset about what happened,” Cruz continued, “If I were to guess, the most likely justice for whom the law clerk is clerking is Sonia Sotomayor.”
“Because she’s the most partisan of the justices, and so, she’s the most likely to hire wild-eyed partisans as clerks,” he answered, adding that “I have no evidence of that. I’m just making an inference.”
Cruz then went on to address the gravity of the leak itself, which he and many other Republicans have called extremely serious.
“It is difficult to overstate how destructive it is to the Supreme Court, to the independence of the judiciary, to the integrity of the court, to have a draft opinion leaked during the process of deciding the case,” Cruz said.
“In over 200 years of our nation’s history, that has never happened, and there was one woke, little left-wing twit who decided to hell with his or her obligations to the justice they work for, to hell with their obligations to the court, to hell with their obligations to the rule of law, that they would instead try to sneak it out in order to put political pressure on the justices and intimidate them into changing their votes,” he added.
