OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts tore into opponents of the court who believe it has become partisan and political, which includes Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats.
“If the court doesn’t retain its legitimate function of interpreting the Constitution, I’m not sure who would take up that mantle. You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is, and you don’t want public opinion to be the guide about what the appropriate decision is,” he said at an event on Friday night, The Guardian reported.
They were his first public comments since the Supreme Court ended the 1973 Roe V Wade precedent.
On Saturday a preview of Vice President Harris’ interview on the NBC show “Meet The Press” was shared and it included her swipe at what she said was an “activist court.”
“How much confidence do you have in the Supreme Court?” host Chuck Todd said to the vice president.
“I think this is an activist court,” she said.
“What does that mean?” the host said.
“It means that we had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled. And this court took that constitutional right away, and we are suffering as a nation because of it,” she said.
“That causes me great concern about the integrity of the court overall. Especially as someone who my life was inspired by people like Thurgood Marshall, and by the work on that court of Earl Warren to bring an unanimous court to pass Brown v. Board of Education,” the vice president said.
“This is the court that on once sat Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall and Sandra Day O’Connor. It’s a very different court,” she said.
EXCLUSIVE: Vice President Kamala Harris says the Supreme Court is “an activist court” for overturning Roe v. Wade.@VP: “We had an established right for almost half a century. … This court took that constitutional right away. And we are suffering as a nation because of it.” pic.twitter.com/Tmv955n4Bx
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 9, 2022
In June, during a press conference in Madrid, Spain, on Thursday when he was asked about the Supreme Court decision, inflation, and mass shootings.
“How do you explain this to those people who feel the country is going in the wrong direction, including some of the leaders you’ve been meeting with this week who think when you put all of this together, it amounts to an America that is going backward?” The Associated Press reporter Darlene Superville said.
“They do not think that. You haven’t found one person, one world leader, to say, ‘America is going backward,'” he said.
He also continued his incorrect claim that the United States has the lowest inflation in the world.
“America is better positioned to lead the world than we ever have been. We have the strongest economy in the world. Our inflation rates are lower than other nations in the world,” the president said.
Fox News fact-checked him and said, “In reality, the U.S. inflation rate of 8.3% was among the highest in the developed world in April and May, far out-pacing Japan, France, Germany, the U.K., Italy, and Canada.”
Then, standing in a foreign nation, the President of the United States attacked the Supreme Court.
“The one thing that has been destabilizing is the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in overruling not only Roe v. Wade but essentially challenging the right to privacy,” he said.
“We’ve been a leader in the world in terms of personal rights and privacy rights. And it is a mistake in my view for the Supreme Court to do what it did,” he said.
He went on to talk about the war between Ukraine and Russia and that Americans would have to bear the cost of higher gas prices for “as long as it takes.” because Russia, “cannot, in fact, defeat Ukraine and move beyond Ukraine. This is a critical, critical position for the world.”
“Putin thought he could break the transatlantic alliance,” the president said. “He tried to weaken us. He expected our resolve to fracture. But he’s getting exactly what he did not want. He wanted the Finland-ization of NATO. He got the NATO-ization of Finland.”
“We are going to stick with Ukraine, and all of the alliance is going to stick with Ukraine as long as it takes to, in fact, make sure that they are not defeated,” he said.
