Maddow: Republicans' 'single most important legislative priority' on abortion is illegal

On Monday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow discussed a federal judge in North Dakota's decision to overturn the state's draconian new anti-abortion law. The judge wrote that the ban on abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy is a “blatant violation of the constitutional guarantees afforded to all women" and that the law runs directly afoul of an "unbroken stream of United States Supreme Court authority."

Since the far-right insurgency of the 2010 elections, when dozens of tea party radicals infiltrated Congress and state legislatures all over the country, Republicans have been trying to close a vise on women's right to choose all over the country.

"And so in this era of Republican governance," Maddow said, "about, I don't know, once a week or so at the stroke of noon, some judge somewhere in the country has to do what a federal judge did today in North Dakota."

On Monday, Judge Daniel L. Hovland of Federal District Court in North Dakota said that he had no choice but to block the state's new abortion restrictions, passed in March, because the restrictions are "in direct contradiction to a litany of United States Supreme Court cases addressing restraints on abortion.”

In his decision, Hovland wrote that North Dakota's conservatives are begging for the state to be sued by plaintiffs who are backed up by a generation of reproductive health laws. “The state has extended an invitation to an expensive court battle over a law restricting abortions that is a blatant violation of the constitutional guarantees afforded to all women," he said. Therefore, the law must be struck down.

"What we are seeing today in North Dakota," said Maddow, "in terms of a judge having to step in and say 'You're kidding, right? This isn't even close to constitutional.' That is happening all over the country, repeatedly."

"The single most important legislative priority of the Republican Party in the era of Obama is a legislative priority that is illegal everywhere in this country," she said, thanks to the established legal precedents set by Roe v. Wade and other cases dealing with women's reproductive rights.

Watch the video, embedded below via MSNBC:

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