Pelosi Statement on Supreme Court Shadow Ruling on Texas Reproductive Rights Case

SEPTEMBER 2, 2021  PRESS RELEASE 

Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement after the Supreme Court ruled in the middle of the night to leave SB8, the most restrictive abortion ban in fifty years, in place:

“The Supreme Court’s cowardly, dark-of-night decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women’s rights and health is staggering.  That this radically partisan Court chose to do so without a full briefing, oral arguments or providing a full, signed opinion is shameful.

“SB8 delivers catastrophe to women in Texas, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities.  Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional right to basic health care.  SB8 is the most extreme, dangerous abortion ban in half a century, and its purpose is to destroy Roe v. Wade, and even refuses to make exceptions for cases of rape and incest.  This ban necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade.

“Upon our return, the House will bring up Congresswoman Judy Chu’s Women’s Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America.  

“SB8 unleashes one of the most disturbing, unprecedented and far-reaching assaults on health care providers – and on anyone who helps a woman, in any way, access an abortion – by creating a vigilante bounty system that will have a chilling effect on the provision of any reproductive health care services.  This provision is a cynical, backdoor attempt by partisan lawmakers to evade the Constitution and the law to destroy not only a woman’s right to health care but potentially any right or protection that partisan lawmakers target.

“When the Supreme Court takes up its reproductive rights case this year, we urge it to uphold, as Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, ‘its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.’”

This post originally published Feb. 2020 refers to DTs nomination to the Supreme Court of Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice and prior to that his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

An excellent article by Laura Bassett in the Atlantic magazine o out lines the history that led up to these shameful events. Let the protests continue. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-supreme-court-abortion-ban/619963/

My words:

Nancy Pelosi dressed in white holds up her copy of DTs speech and standing tears it in two. Then she puts it down quietly, deliberately. It’s a slow, slow dance she is doing. It is Kabuki. 

I feel I can hear the paper ripping

She is acknowledging something broken. Some trust, some unity which we have always reached back for in the United States is revealed as a lie. We are divided and jumbled together. White sheets with black writing. We make as much sense jumbled as we did in the supposedly together presentations.

Did the republicans or democrats touch each other as they were pronouncing their “testimony”? No, they did not.  That was a room devoid of oxytocin, devoid of living plants, light or anything which makes life worth living. Just one woman nursing a baby could have made a difference. One gurgle of delight.

The only things that touched were the pages as they got handed from one person to another. A theater of question asking, which at least stretched out a silence. When people could contemplate the words being transubstantiated would they realize a farce was being enacted? 

How will we look back at this week a year from now? Will we see the opening of a funnel forming that will suck us all down. Or will we see the opening that will make way for fifty brave women dressed in white and Romney ( who would’ve thunk it?) turned into a superhero by drinking chocolate milk.  

Could oxytocin reconcile me to DT republicans? I don’t believe so.

I will comfort myself with the sound of slow ripping, with the soft edges of the pages. No hard lines, no splits, no graphs. 

I want a softer world.