On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, author and President of the Judicial Crisis Network Carrie Severino joins Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway to break down the implications a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will have on the nation.
“The court, if it wants to uphold this law, doesn’t have a lot of options. We know they love to kind of take a small step-wise decision whenever they have the opportunity, and they’ve done that in many abortion cases thus far. This is not a case that presents that opportunity,” Severino said. “So the court would have to go in and either overturn Mississippi law … or they have to invent a new standard because it can’t survive under the Planned Parenthood v. Casey standard. They’d have to invent a new standard or they have to just acknowledge that Roe and Casey have no real constitutional footing.”
Severino said how the court rules will determine the integrity of the Supreme Court for years to come.
“This is really a question of whether our self-governance is still intact because if a court, a bare majority of five unelected judges can effectively rewrite those laws and that Constitution ratified by the American people, we are no longer governing ourselves, we’re being governed by an unelected judiciary,” Severino said. “If they flinch in the face of all of this pressure and say ‘well, we’re going to uphold this even though it’s bad law,’ I think that’d be very demoralizing for the movement that has really committed itself to the idea that we are a nation of laws and not of men, that we need to interpret these laws faithfully whether we like them or not.”
