Joy Reid Slams Alito’s Dissent in Abortion Drug Ruling, Says He’s Trying to ‘Play Mullah’

The Supreme Court granted an emergency request from the U.S. Department of Justice on Friday to preserve access to an abortion drug authorized by Food and Drug Administration in 2000.

The court’s ruling effectively overturned two recent lower court decisions that placed restrictions on mifepristone, which is typically taken in tandem with misoprostol in what is the most common method of abortion in the United States. Some five million women have used it.

The emergency grant allows the drug to remain accessible as before, but appeals will be forthcoming.

Only two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, voted in favor of restricting the drug.

Joy Reid took Alito to task on Friday’s edition of The ReidOut shortly after the ruling dropped.

She read part of the justice’s dissent, which said that “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections.”

“[T]his reads to me like that he’s admitting, ‘We don’t have an army, we don’t have the ability to enforce our decisions, and we’re not sure if the government would even obey,'” Reid said. “That’s a pretty glaring admission of weakness and a pretty churlish thing to write down in your dissent. This guy seems to be all in his feelings that the American people oppose his attempts to play mullah instead of Supreme Court justice and ban abortion.”

Friday’s shadow docket decision is the first major abortion-related ruling by the high court since it struck down Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion. That decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was written by Alito.

Watch above via MSNBC.