Roberts, in his first public appearance since the bombshell decision to overturn the 1973 landmark Roe v Wade decision, warned against linking contested rulings to the court’s legitimacy, telling an event Friday night: “The court always ruled on controversial cases and decisions have always been heavily criticized and that’s absolutely right.” But in her first network interview since becoming vice president, Harris told NBC News that she now believes the high court is an “activist court” after the establishment stripped abortion rights nationwide. “We’ve had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their bodies as an extension of the privacy rights that all people are entitled to,” Harris said during the interview with Chuck Todd for The Meet the Press, aired in full on Sunday after watching Friday. “And this court immediately took that constitutional and we are suffering as a nation because of it,” he added. Harrissaid: “I think the government shouldn’t be telling women what to do with their bodies. I believe the government should not tell women how to plan their families…should not criminalize health care providers…should not say “no exceptions for rape or incest”. Before becoming a U.S. Senator and then the first female U.S. vice president, Harris was the attorney general of California and, before that, the district attorney of San Francisco. “As a prosecutor, a former prosecutor, who specialized in child sexual abuse cases, understanding the violence that occurs against women and children and then to further subject them to these kinds of inhumane conditions — that’s what I believe,” he said. The vice president also noted that she has “great concern for the integrity of the court as a whole.” Since the Trump administration secured three appointments to the nine-member bench, the court has swung sharply to the right with a conservative six-three supermajority. He voted in June to overturn Roe, returning power over abortion rights to the states and leaving 58 percent of U.S. women of childbearing age, or 40 million women, in states hostile to abortion rights. And Roberts defended the court. He added, at Friday’s event: ‘I don’t understand the connection between the views that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,’ he said, while being interviewed by two judges from the Denver-based 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals at his conference in Colorado Springs, the Gazette reported. “If the court does not retain its legitimate function of interpreting the constitution, I am 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 as to what the appropriate decision is,” Roberts said. Roberts said the fence around the courthouse in Washington, put up amid intense abortion rights protests, has come down. And that when the high court’s next term begins in October, arguments will once again be open to the public in person, since the building was closed due to the pandemic.
