“How dare they?”
—Vice-President Kamala Harris on June 24 referring to the U.S. Supreme Court on the anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. ruling that finally overturned Roe v. Wade.
This wasn’t the usual infantile babbling that characterizes most of Harris’s public appearances: Ethics Alarms has pledged to skip most of those in fealty to the Julie Principle. That quote is far worse, more significant and sinister. It’s so unethical and outrageous that I initially didn’t believe she could have been referring to the Supreme Court: most of the mainstream media accounts and even the edited videos left out the context of that outburst, so, giving the Vice-President of the United States the benefit of the doubt and assuming that surely, surely, she could not be framing a duly rendered majority ruling on the U.S. Constitution by the independent branch of the government charged with that duty by the Founders in such an ignorant, misleading and inflammatory manner.
She was, however. In fact, she had made the same fatuous, irresponsible and obnoxious statement before, a year ago, and is apparently so proud of her demagoguery that she deemed it worthy of an encore. I thought, and hoped, that her “How dare they?” was at least in the context she placed it in this past January, but no. (That is also an unethical and despicable bit of demogoguery, notable for Harris’s characterization of the famous statement in Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece as “A promise we made in the Declaration of Independence that we are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Huh. Sounds funny. Isn’t there something missing there? Something that unborn Americans might think is important? I’m sure I’ll think of it in a minute…
But no. I could find no news report that placed this “How dare they?” in the context Harris placed it last week, but a video I can’t embed, available here on the Washington Post website, makes it clear.
In order to make such a dangerous statement, Harris has to also mislead the public into believing that, as she falsely said in January and periodically since, the United States Supreme Court “took away… a fundamental right, a basic freedom from the people of America.” Whatever one thinks should be the law or laws regarding abortion, it was never “a fundamental right, a basic freedom.” It was a Court-made right, and the Supreme Court isn’t empowered to make rights. “Fundamental rights” are the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights and the subsequent amendments, passed by Congress and the states, in the Constitution. Roe was a bad, political, incompetent decision that most legal scholars, even those who favor abortion, admitted was wrongly decided. (If she ever had chosen to be candid about the issue, it is likely that even the sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized this.) Roe survived for so long because a parade of Justices lacked the votes and guts to overturn it.
