Presidential historian Joe Meacham wondered on Tuesday if the United States is "up to democracy" after a Supreme Court opinion draft on Roe v. Wade leaked Monday evening, revealing the highest court in the U.S. is set to overturn the hotly debated decision.
The backlash to Justice Samuel Alito's authoring of the opinion has been severe, with pro-abortion protesters showing up at the Supreme Court Monday night to protest the opinion and other TV pundits dramatically claiming other rights are now in jeopardy.
"Well, the crisis of trust in institutions has just become universal in a way that is pretty much the nightmare scenario if you believe in the ultimate efficacy of the constitutional order to produce a more perfect union. Right? To protect the Jeffersonian assertion of equality, to protect the rule of law for all of its imperfections. The system has been worth defending for 250 years," said Meacham.
"Right now, if this draft decision, if the court were to go this far, you will have, as you were just saying, an extraordinary number of Americans believing that the system, in fact, cannot and is not capable of delivering justice, is not capable of reflecting the popular will even through the constitutional prism," he continued. "And I think that one of the great questions of the era, the great question of the era, is are you and I, are we, in this decade, are we up to democracy? Are we commensurate to the task? I worry that we're entering the darkest period of that test. Because if you have any reservations about the system's capacity to deliver justice, they have just been affirmed."
CNN Laura Coates warned previous Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage and interstate travel could now be overturned.
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"And I cannot believe that I'm sitting here, Jim, in the year of 2022, a right that I was born into a society that had, that my mother had, that my grandmother had, that my great-grandmothers in her lifetime had, that at the stroke of a pen, someone can simply say a fundamental right that is within a zone of privacy that the court has said should be hands-off for the government, with the stroke of a pen, can be taken away," she said.
