 Hi folks, I was working on the content for Tomorrow when I decided to take a break, browsed Twitter for a little bit, and then it turns out Politico's Twitter account shared this bombshell of an article. Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights draft opinion shows. We hope that Roe and Casey must be overruled, Justice Alito writes, in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court. I mean, I can't say that this is surprising. Nonetheless, to see it actually take place, I'm a little bit shell shocked, to be honest. Now, keep in mind that this is only a draft. It's possible, theoretically, that one of the justices could have changed their votes, but I don't really think that that is indeed the case. It's also possible that this leak is not authentic, but there's a lot of people who have combed through it were saying it appears as if this is the real deal. And there's a lot of indications that basically confirm, yeah, this is what happened, just somebody leaked it earlier. Now, minutes after this report went public, they put up a barricade in front of the Supreme Court anticipating protests, knowing probably that what they did was just insane. And before we dive into the details of the article here, I've got a point to this from SCOTUS blog. It's impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the court in terms of the destruction of the trust among the justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin, as Emma Vicklin points out. Yeah, the leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin. I mean, they overturned abortion. I mean, what this means is that abortion is still going to happen in the United States. The difference is that women are just going to get unsafe illegal abortions. And really, when I say that, I've talked about that before, but disproportionately, what we're talking about here is poor women, wealthy women. As always, we'll have access to abortions. They can fly to a blue state. They can fly to a different country if they need to. But we're talking about poor women. Poor women here. So let's dive into the article. The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by Politico. The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision. Planned Parenthood v. Casey that largely maintained the right. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, Alito writes. We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled, he writes in the document labeled as the opinion of the court. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives. Deliberations on controversial issues have in the past been fluid. Justice can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinion circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote trading. Sometimes until just days before the decision is unveiled, the court's holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months. Now we won't get the actual verdict for maybe a month. It could come anytime, really. But I mean if you want to see it, it's right here. Probably not the final draft. It is a draft, but I mean we have no reason to doubt this. Now I've just got to real quick before we get back to the article here. Point out as left flank vets shared on Twitter. This is what the American people think about abortion. 60% want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade. 58% oppose legislation to make it harder for clinics to operate. When it comes to whether a woman can have an abortion, 75% of Americans think that it should be left to the woman and her doctor. So what's happening in this country currently is our country has been taken over by a minority of reactionary psychopathic extremists. And the reason why they're able to do this is because our political system was designed in the most idiotic way imaginable. So smaller or conservative states have an outsized influence on what happens, right? States like California has the same amount of senators as states like West Virginia. It's just, it's truly ridiculous. Now back to the article here. The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half century. Jesus, it's been that long. Of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It's unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft. Now real quick, what I want to make clear is that for those of you unaware, this doesn't mean that abortion is banned all across the United States. What this means is that states can enact their own abortion bans as we've kind of been seeing now Republicans want to change that. So they're already saying that in the event they win the House, they will be introducing federal legislation to ban abortions at six weeks. Now that's not going to pass because Biden can easily veto that. But in 2024, assuming Trump gets in and Republicans have the Senate and the House, they're saying we're going to ban abortion in all 50 states. Do you understand how extreme that is and what the implications of that are? And it's not just that they want to ban abortion. If you don't care about this issue, we'll guess what's next. Gay marriage. They have the votes to overturn it now. Any worker rights, they can overturn that. Fuck, they can overturn Brown v. Board of Education if they want to. They can do whatever they want because they have a majority for the foreseeable future. And they are going to ruin this country more so than it's already ruined. So buckle up, folks, because this is only the beginning. No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term. The draft opinion offers an extraordinary window into the justice's deliberations in one of the most consequential cases before the court in the last five decades. Some court watchers predicted that the conservative majority would slice away at abortion rights without flatly overturning a 49-year-old president. The draft shows that the court is looking to reject Roe's logic and legal protection. So they're brazen, right? They're not mincing words. They're not allowing states to do more restrictions. They're just saying, Roe's done. Think of how insanely shameless they are. They don't care. They are extremists and they have hijacked our country. A person familiar with the court's deliberations said that four of the other Republican-appointed justices, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, had voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices after hearing oral arguments in December, and that lineup remains unchanged this week. So the three Democratic-appointed justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Alina Kagan, are working on one or more dissents according to one person, how Chief Justice Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already-written opinion or draft, his own is unclear, because he's going to sit on the fence. Now, speaking of this here, I just want to point out some of these names here. Really interesting that Susan Collins, when she voted for Kavanaugh, this is what she said. I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh will overturn Roe. He noted that Roe had been reaffirmed 19 years later by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and that it was precedent on precedent. He said it should be extremely rare that it be overturned, and it should be an example. So you have obviously full confidence. I do. We talked about whether he considered Roe to be settled law. He said that he agreed with what Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearing, in which he said that it was settled law. I could not vote for a judge who had demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because it would indicate a lack of respect for precedent. What Judge Kavanaugh told me, and he's the first Supreme Court nominee that I've interviewed out of six who has told me this, is that he views precedent not just as a legal doctrine, but as rooted in our Constitution, and he reveres our Constitution. I asked him, is it sufficient if five current sitting justices believe that Roe should be overturned? And he said no. I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because that would mean to me that their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions. Judge Kavanaugh is the first Supreme Court nominee to express the view that precedent is not merely a practice and tradition, but rooted in Article III of our Constitution itself. I will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. It's almost like the Supreme Court justices will say anything to get confirmed, and then once they're on the court, then they have a lifetime appointment, and you can do fuck all about it if you dislike their decisions. Back to the article here. The document labeled as a first draft of the majority opinion includes a notation that it was circulated among the justices on February 10th. If the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in the closely watched case over that state's attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment or make another representative of the court available to answer questions about the draft document. Politico received a copy of the draft opinions from a person familiar with the court's proceedings in the Mississippi case, along with other details supporting the authenticity of the document. The draft opinion runs 98 pages, including a 31-page appendix of historical state abortion laws. The document is replete with citations to previous court decisions, books, and other authorities, and includes 118 footnotes. The appearances and timing of this draft are consistent with the court practice. I mean, it's 99% likely the actual draft. It's time to like stop pretending as if the Supreme Court is apolitical. It is explicitly political. And until Democrats behave in that way, then things like this will continue to happen. The country will continue to get worse because this is a political institution explicitly so. These are activist judges. Remember when gay marriage was affirmed by the Supreme Court? And we had Ted Cruz and all these Republicans screeching about activist judges? This is what you call activist judges to overturn almost 50 years of precedent where you had this right to an abortion affirmed by two cases. That's activist judges. The disclosure of Alito's draft majority opinion, a rare breach of Supreme Court secrecy and tradition around its deliberations comes as all sides in the abortion bait are girding for the ruling. Let's go to the actual arguments here. So a George W. Bush appointee who joined the court in 2006, Alito argues that the 1973 abortion rights ruling was an ill-conceived and deeply flawed decision that invented a right mentioned nowhere in the Constitution and unwisely sought to wrench the contentious issue away from the political branches of government. Alito's draft ruling would overturn the decision by the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Mississippi law ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent by seeking to effectively ban abortions before viability. Rowe's survey of history range from the constitutionally irrelevant to the plainly incorrect Alito continues adding that its reasoning was exceptionally weak and that the original decision has had damaging consequences. The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation's history and traditions. Alito approvingly quotes a broad range of critics of the Rowe decision. He also points the liberal icon such as the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe who at certain points in their careers took issue with the reasoning in Rowe or its impact on the political process. Speaking of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it would have been really nice for her to retire when she was still alive rather than just die on the court and fuck over the country for generations. Alito's skewering of Rowe and the endorsement of at least four other justices for that unsparing critique is also a measure of the court's right-word turn in recent decades. Rowe was decided 7-2 in 1973 with five Republican appointees joining two justices dominated by Democratic presidents. The overturning of Rowe would almost immediately lead to stricter limits on abortion access and large swaths of the South and Midwest with about half of the state set to immediately impose broad abortion bans. Any state could still legally allow the procedure until Republicans take control of then its ban and then the Supreme Court will reaffirm that and will go two steps backwards. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each state from regulating or prohibiting abortion. The draft concludes Rowe and Casey irrigated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives. The draft contains the type of caustic rhetorical flourishes Alito is known for and that has caused Roberts his fellow Bush appointee some discomfort in the past. At times Alito's draft opinion takes an almost mocking tone as it skewers the majority opinion in Rowe written by Justice Harry Blackmon, a Richard Nixon appointee who died in 1990. Rowe expressed the feeling that the 14th Amendment was the provision that did the work but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Constitution that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance Alito writes. I've got to say that this line is sticking out to me the one where Roberts is really like he's discomforted by the things that Alito says. Okay, well then write the wrong and retire, right? Retire. So there's one more liberal justice, right? You can change that. He's not going to do that though. And even if he were to do that, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema would make sure that they hold that seat open until Republicans take over the Senate whenever that is. 2022-2024, they'll make sure that a liberal is not going to be his replacement. Let's see here. Alito declares that one of the central tenets of Rowe, the viability distinction between fetuses not capable of living outside the womb and those which can make no sense. In several passages he describes doctors and nurses who terminate pregnancies as abortionists. When Roberts voted with liberal jurists in 2020 to block a Louisiana law imposing heavier regulation on abortion clinics, his solo concurrence used the more neutral term, abortion providers. In contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas used the word abortionist 25 times in a solo descent in the same case. So for whatever reason, Alito is virtue signaling and shifting further to the right rhetorically, which is bizarre for a Supreme Court Justice. Alito's use of the phrase egregiously wrong to describe Rowe echoes language Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart used in December in defending his state's ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The phrase was also contained in an opinion Kavanaugh wrote as part of a 2020 ruling that jury convictions and criminal cases must be unanimous. In that opinion, Kavanaugh labeled two well-known Supreme Court decisions egregiously wrong when decided the 1994 ruling upholding the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II, Korematsu v. United States, and the 18, excuse me, 96th decision that blessed racial segregation under the rubric of separate but equal Plessy v. Ferguson. The High Court has never formally overturned Korematsu but did repudiate the decision in a 2018 ruling by Roberts that upheld then-President Donald Trump's travel ban policy. So, you know, I think that we've got the gist of it, right? It's over. Rowe's over. I'm pretty certain that this is the real deal. I think that most people acknowledge that this is the real deal. So, yeah, here we are in the United States. We're going back to the age where women have to get coat hanger abortions in back alleys because, you know, only blue states will allow abortions for now. Red states will overrule them very quickly. There's a lot of red states that have passed trigger laws, meaning that if Rowe is ever overturned, then immediately abortion becomes illegal in that state like that. But just wait until Republicans take control. Once they have all three branches of Congress, all 50 states, baby, because that's what they are already telling us that they're going to do. And one thing about Republicans that's different than Democrats is that they actually get their agenda carried out. And we've got to say abortion is only the beginning, right? Because they will go for marriage equality next and every other civil right and civil liberty that we've spent decades fighting to achieve. They will undo all of it. And while they take our country back decades when other countries are moving forward, all you're going to hear on mainstream media is how the far left is the problem. The far left is extreme. Yeah. Absolutely ridiculous. The far left wants health care. The far right, which is the entire Republican Party and its base, is taking away fundamental civil rights. And if this doesn't shake you to your core, then I don't know what to say, you know? If you don't care about abortion again, it's going to be a different civil right that they go after. Who knows? Maybe they'll try to ban legal weed in states that have legalized it, like my state. There's no limit to the moral depravity of this extremist far right death cult known as the Republican Party and their base. Who votes for this? So yeah, I'll leave that there. I didn't want to wait until tomorrow to talk about this because this is happening right now. And it's just, it's honestly disturbing. It's nauseating. And this country is circling the drain and we're basically down the drain at this point. Like we're falling down the drain as I record this video. It's just, what a fucking shit show this country is. Wow.