Congressman Jamie Raskin calls the new Supreme Court leak 'full Handmaid's Tale'

Speaking to MSNBC on Monday evening, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) responded to a leaked Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade. According to Raskin, a Constitutional lawyer, this is a 'full-on example of The Handmaid's Tale," the notorious novel, written by Margaret Atwood, that describes a dystopian world in which women are forced to give birth by the state.

"The basic legal claim here is that the word 'abortion' doesn't appear in the Constitution, and of course, it doesn't appear in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court, in 1973, in Roe vs. Wade or Griswold vs. Connecticut, which was a 1965 decision by the Supreme Court striking down a law banning birth control, even for married couples in Connecticut," Raskin explained. "The Supreme Court said that the due process liberty clause includes a right to privacy, over into intimate decision-making. So, the point is that Justice [Samuel] Alito's decision would apply also, presumably, to the right to privacy in contraception."

"If Casey is to fall if Roe v. Wade is to fall, then Griswold vs. Connecticut, presumably is to follow as well," Raskin explained, "because the word 'contraception' or 'birth control' doesn't appear in the Constitution. Indeed, the phrase 'right to privacy' doesn't appear in the Constitution, so this would appear to be an invitation to have Handmaids Tale-type anti-feminist regulation and legislation all over the country. All that is perfectly in keeping with Justice Alito's opinion."

"If it does go forward with it, I believe that the court will have returned to its historic baseline, of being a reactionary conservative institution to the far-right of everything else at the federal level in the government," Raskin continued. "You know, it's still got this lingering fake halo around it from the rulings Brown vs. Board, and Roe v. Wade, Miranda vs. Arizona. But for most of our history —take it all the way up to the Civil War — the Supreme Court never did anything for enslaved Americans, other than to cement constitutionally the system of slavery in the Dred Scott decision, and declare that African Americans have no rights that the white man is bound to respect, and to declare that the constitution is indeed a white man's compacts."

Raskin noted that even after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson approved Jim Crow laws.

"So, there was that brief few decades — now the Roberts Court, the Supreme Court has returned to that traditional baseline," he said.

He went on to say that the most important thing in 2022 will be that people come out and vote in such significant numbers that the House and Senate majorities hold so that Democrats can pass laws reaffirming the right for all Americans to have medical privacy.

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