'Intellectually bankrupt': Alito's Roe v Wade opinion trashed by constitutional scholar
On Sunday, constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe had little good to say about a draft opinion from conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that attempts to make the case that the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling should be overturned.
The first draft, which was leaked to Politico earlier this week by persons unknown has set off a firestorm leading to protests and legal scholars weighing in on the merits of Alito's argument.
According to Tribe, the Harvard University Professor Emeritus, the ruling isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Speaking with MSNBC host Alex Witt, the legal scholar shredded Alito's rationale for dismantling Roe v Wade.
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Asked about the draft, he began, "I think it is intellectually and historically bankrupt. The founding document did not list all of the rights we have. It doesn't say anything about our right to marry, our rights to decide how to bring up our children, our freedom to think what we will. It protects liberty in very broad terms. It protects equality."
"This idea by Justice Alito -- he is backed by the right-wing of the court and by many right-wing activists, this idea that the Constitution protects only those rights that are listed and those rights that are rooted in a misogynist history that really did not take account of women at all," he continued. "It is simply a prescription for turning the clock back, not just to the 1950s, but to the 1850s. It is a regressive approach, it is not consistent with our trajectory of constitutional rights, which have expanded and expanded."
'This will be the first time that the Supreme Court has taken away by a majority vote of people who were put on the court by someone who did not even win the majority of the American people, the first time that a basic right has been taken away, that people have built their lives around for 50 years," he elaborated. "Justice Alito says, 'Oh, there has not been any big reliance on it, women have the vote now, women are all over the place, they are in the workplace' they don't need this right.' That's ridiculous."
"Women have risen into positions of approximate equality largely because the Supreme Court 50 years ago, or nearly 50 years ago, affirmed for them the right that we have long had, which is the right to control our own bodies and our own destinies," he added before concluding, "To roll that back is really to go back to the dark ages. We really should not let that happen."
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