MSNBC Anchor Nicolle Wallace accused state Republicans Tuesday of colluding with the “far-right members” of the U.S. Supreme Court on abortion laws following the Court’s recent refusal to block Texas’ Heartbeat Act.
“What I don’t understand is that the Republicans have revealed themselves over and over and over again. If you want to know how radical today’s GOP is, it’s so radical that the man picked by my old boss [former President George W. Bush], Chief Justice John Roberts, sided with the liberals on the Court in the Texas abortion ban,” Wallace told MSNBC national-affairs analyst John Heilemann. “And what Joyce just described, I don’t know the legal term, but it sounds a whole lot like collusion between Republican-dominated, right-wing centric legislatures and the far-right members of the United States Supreme Court.”
“Whether it’s a crime, or whether it’s real, maybe [Robert] Mueller will look into it,” the host added.
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MSNBC’s Wallace: “Maybe Mueller will look into” whether Republican states are “colluding” with the Supreme Court against abortion pic.twitter.com/MgAiMKcV5g
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 7, 2021
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court refused several emergency requests by abortion providers to block Texas’ Heartbeat Act (S.B. 8), which bans abortion after a woman reaches her sixth week of pregnancy. Justices Roberts, Sotomayer, Breyer and Kagan wrote a dissent in which they referred to the most restrictive abortion-related legislation as “unprecedented.” (RELATED: Biden: Supreme Court Ruling ‘Insults The Rule Of Law’)
“The statutory scheme before the Court is not only unusual, but unprecedented. The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large,” Justice Roberts, along with Kagan and Breyer, said in their dissent. “The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the State from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.”
Heilemann told Wallace that the decision is not collusion, given that the nine justices currently serving on the Supreme Court went through confirmation hearings where they took a stance on Roe v. Wade, a 1973 Court decision that nationally legalized first-trimester abortions.
“The people on the United States Supreme Court went through confirmation hearings, and many of them, in their public comments, prior to being nominated in their confirmation hearings, subsequently made it pretty clear what their position was on Roe v. Wade.,” he said. “So I don’t think you need to do a lot of colluding for Republican State Legislatures to have confidence. There have been legislatures down through history that have passed laws in order to test a principle, in order to try to get the Supreme Court to make new laws.”