Claire McCaskill GOES OFF About SCOTUS Not Blocking Texas Abortion Law
MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) went off on Thursday over the Supreme Court declining to intervene late Wednesday night to stop the Texas abortion law.
“I think Texas has ignited the vast majority of Americans in this country with what they’ve done,” she said during a segment alongside National Review editor Rich Lowry on Meet the Press Daily. “Let’s be clear here. This isn’t about polarization as it relates to the Texas law, this is about that 15 percent that wants abortion illegal in all cases, including a young girl who’s been repeatedly raped by her father who has no idea she’s pregnant until after six weeks.”
The 15 percent figure appears to refer to a Pew poll in 2013 that had that percentage for those who think abortion should be illegal in all cases.
“And in Texas, they put out private bounty hunters for her. I mean, that is beyond the pale extreme,” continued McCaskill. “I bet if you took a poll on that factual scenario … it would be 90-10 that that is wrong. That’s what the Supreme Court said was okay last night. I think this will have major repercussions in our elections. And it should.”
However, contrary to McCaskill’s claim, the Supreme Court did not take a stand on the law itself, rather it simply declined to block the law, which prohibits an abortion “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child,” which is usually at six weeks of pregnancy.
In response to host Chuck Todd’s question over whether Roe v. Wade should be “codified in Congress,” McCaskill said:
I just got to tell you, my heart is is beating so fast now. It is very hard for me to stay calm, to equate the False Claims Act with setting extreme anti-abortion factions after young girls who have been raped because they didn’t know they were pregnant until after six weeks I found outrageous. This is not a workaround. It shouldn’t be a tip of the hat. It should be condemnation that they are trying to take 50 years of Supreme Court precedent and throw it out by creating a private police that can invade women’s life at the most personal, private and difficult moment they ever face. And many of those women are very, very young. I want bounty hunters after the people who are raping their children. I want bounty hunters after them.
If this is the way, the road we’re going down in America, that we’re going to hire private police in order to avoid constitutional precedent, I am so tired of conservatives talking about value of precedent until they don’t. And I mean really, I’m sorry to get so upset. Rich is my friend, but he is so flat wrong here about the impact this will have on women in this country.
McCaskill also said that the law was “a trick” in “trying to to take it out of the state’s hands so somehow they could overrule 50 years of constitutional precedent.”
“I can’t wait for [Justice Brett] Kavanaugh’s hearing, where he went on and on about respect for precedent. They blew it up on religious freedom case just a few months ago. This is all about situational precedent for the far-right,” she continued. “They have gone too far on this. There will be huge political ramifications for private bounty police going after women who want to terminate a pregnancy as soon as they find out they’re pregnant which many times is after six weeks.”
McCaskill called for Congress to codify Roe.
“The extreme position they’ve taken in Texas, that they are hanging their hat on, is not supported by America. It’s not supported by people in Wisconsin or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Georgia or any of the battleground states or suburban districts that will be the battlegrounds in House races,” she said. “I am not willing to say this was a good thing in any way because it’s a terrible thing. But there will be political benefits to Democrats as a result of what the Supreme Court did late last night.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
