MSNBC contributor Neal Katyal said Wednesday on MSNBC’s coverage of the oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before the Supreme Court that it was “offensive” lawyers defending the Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy compared overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to racial segregation.
Anchor José Díaz-Balart asked, “Neil, how do you see this and what are we going to see going forward? What will happen? How long will they take for them to make a decision one way or the other?”
Katyal said, “So before doing that I do have to get one thing off my chest. The Mississippi solicitor general repeatedly make the argument today that this is like Brown versus Board of education which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 cases that said separate but equal cars on the train were constitutional. I find that offensive.”
He continued, “This guy concluded his argument by saying that. This is not Brown versus Board of Education. This is the opposite of Brown. I mean Brown versus Board of Education overruled one of the worse Supreme Court cases in American history, that was so fundamentally in tension with our nation’s ideals. What did Brown do? It said actually we don’t leave that up to a majority vote. It said we the Supreme Court, we get into the thicket and say this is off of the table in our democracy.”
Katyal added, “That is actually the opposite of what Justice Kavanaugh was trying to say today. Justice Kavanaugh was saying let’s just leave this up to the people and let them decide.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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