Democratic lawmaker has an idea to save women's freedoms and keep the Supreme Court away from taking them again
Speaking to MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan on Sunday, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), a Harvard Law School graduate, explained that Congress could protect the freedoms of women and his plan doesn't have anything to do with an attempt to overthrow the government.
"I knew that we would arrive at this point," Jones explained. "My colleagues scoffed at me at the time that I introduced the bill, in April of 2021. Of course, the American people are on our side, when you look at poll after poll. And thankfully, we do have about 58 House members who are supportive of adding four seats to the Supreme Court, but that is not nearly enough. We can pass the Women's Health Protection Act, after getting rid of the filibuster, which we obviously need to do. But this Supreme Court has shown a willingness to strike down newly enacted laws by Congress. They did so with the decision after decision of the Voting Rights Act, which has been reauthorized nearly unanimously. I'm under no illusions anything short of court reform, specifically adding seats to the Supreme Court, is going to preserve fundamental rights permanently."
He disputed President Joe Biden's statement that adding seats to the court would be "polarizing." Already, the American people have the lowest opinion level of the Supreme Court in history. Jones said that the more polarizing thing is the degradation of the most fundamental rights in America: personal freedoms.
"Whether it is the right to abortion, which is a 50-year-old Constitutional right, or of course, imminently, the right to contraception, and the right to marriage equality, and the right to same-sex intimacy," Jones continued, citing key court decisions cited by Justice Clarence Thomas that he wants to see fall next.
Jones went on to say that one of his ideas with the new voting rights bill was to add a provision that would deprive the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to review the constitutionality and legality of the statute.
"We have seen that this supreme court majority, this far-right majority is hostile to democracy itself," said Jones. "If we are to vote on the Women's Health Protection Act for the second time this term, I am pushing to include a provision to deprive the Supreme Court of review of that statute. There is precedent for this, it has been done before, and it is a practice that has been upheld before. We know that most of the cases the Supreme Court decides, it is only able to decide because of the jurisdiction that Congress has explicitly legislated it to have. The Constitution is very narrow in terms of the scope of jurisdiction that it grants to the Supreme Court. We have tools at our disposal here."
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