House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Friday on MSNBC’s “Deadline ” that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito‘s legal reasoning in a leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was a “severe danger to the Constitution of the United States.”
Pelosi said, “We have to have clarity in what this draft decision means so that the final decision doesn’t go that far. The chief justice has said this is authentic, but it is not final. I don’t want to use the word authentic. It’s real but not final. Again, Lincoln said public sentiment is everything, and with it, you can accomplish almost anything, and without it, nothing. Women just have to weigh in. I don’t think there’s a good outcome here, but I think there’s a better outcome than what we have seen in the first draft, which is radical. It dispenses with precedent even though some of these candidates for when they were candidates for confirmation said they support it as what you’ve seen over and over and they support the precedent and what it means especially the precedent that has repeatedly been reinforced.”
She added, “We’re talking about your life, the life of women in our country, and how we have again, a calibration of all of this in Roe v. Wade and how we must have it be enshrined as the law of the land. They will make charges about it, and we have to stay very clear and very focused about what it is and what it means in people’s lives. This is a severe danger to women. It is a severe danger to the Constitution of the United States. It’s a severe danger to other rights of privacy that are in the Constitution, but again, it’s the here and now. The here and now and the focus that we must have.”
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