Schumer Floor Remarks On Supreme Court Decision Striking Down Louisiana Anti-Abortion Law

Washington, D.C.— Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer today spoke on the Senate floor, discussing the Supreme Court decision to block Louisiana’s restrictive abortion law. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

This morning, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that would have restricted abortion providers so severely that Louisiana would have been left with only a single clinic. These types of laws have popped up in state after state as a backdoor means of banning abortions—if not in law then in practice—an insidious campaign to undermine the rights of women to make their own medical decisions.

So today’s ruling is a thunderbolt of justice for millions of American women who were at risk of having their constitutional rights invalidated by a reactionary state legislature, as there are many across the country.

After surprising but very welcome rulings on DACA and LGBTQ rights two weeks ago, the Supreme Court has once again made the correct decision. The Supreme Court is entering Buffalo Springfield territory: there’s something happening here.

Truthfully, today’s ruling should not have been a surprise. The Louisiana law violated the Court’s precedent. In 2016, the Court struck down a Texas law that was virtually identical to the one in Louisiana. The newest addition to the Supreme Court, however, despite promising the Senate that he would respect precedent, dissented from the majority’s ruling today. Justice Kavanaugh told Senators that he believed Roe v. Wade to be “settled law,” but in his very first ruling on a related issue, he decided that the Court’s precedent was wrong, and that Roe v. Wade could be greatly undermined.

Thankfully, Justice Kavanaugh’s view was not in the majority. And today, America can breathe a sigh of relief that the Supreme Court kept the floodgates firmly shut against this particular attempt to nullify the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. 

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