News Every Day | 23 May 2024, 14:36

‘Going for the jugular’: Legal scholar warns ‘Trumpers’ want to end major civil right

One of the nation's top constitutional scholars has issued a strong warning that the GOP will be working to overturn one of the most consequential, landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions in modern American history. Griswold v. Connecticut established the precedent for the right to privacy, laying the foundation for the right to contraception, abortion, same-sex intimate relationships, and same-sex marriage.

Two years ago next month, the right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v.Wade, which for nearly 50 years had established the constitutional right to abortion. In his concurring opinion, embattled Justice Clarence Thomas issued a call for cases to be brought before the nation's highest court, declaring that rulings that had also established the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage were, in his opinion, wrongly-decided. Justice Thomas declared the Court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — making clear he wanted the Court to overturn those rulings, and by doing so, strike down the constitutional rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage.

"All three cases—and numerous other landmark decisions—are built upon the right to substantive due process found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, which prohibit the government from depriving 'any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,'" as TIME reported in 2022.

Griswold, decided in 1965, established the right of married couples to use contraception. The Justices at the time cited various reasons for declaring a Connecticut law banning the use of contraception unconstitutional, including by establishing the right to privacy, which far-right justices on today's Supreme Court have indicated they do not support.

Months before the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling striking down abortion, U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who is now running for re-election, was attacking Griswold – and Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson along with it.

"Constitutionally unsound rulings like Griswold vs. Connecticut, Kelo v. the City of New London, and NFIB vs. Sebelius confuse Tennesseans and left Congress wondering who gave the court permission to bypass our system of checks and balances," Blackburn said in her 2022 video. "It is the 11th hour and Judge Jackson's stance on the Constitution remains a secret."

Now, as far-right groups and the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party's nomination for president work to advance opposition to the right to contraception, Blackburn's extremist video has turned up again – this time in a social media post Wednesday from the Biden re-election campaign.

Top Trump supporter Marsha Blackburn says Griswold v. Connecticut is “constitutionally unsound”
(Griswold v. Connecticut is the 1965 Supreme Court ruling that legalized birth control) pic.twitter.com/AxTL5Ds7J9 — Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 22, 2024

The Biden campaign on Wednesday also posted these videos from far-right activist and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, and from Donald Trump.

Left: Trump operative Charlie Kirk saying Trump needs to go after birth control because he says it “screws up female brains”
Right: Trump now saying he is “looking at” banning contraception including birth control pic.twitter.com/HsZn1lsSUQ — Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 22, 2024

University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, Laurence Tribe, a professor of law and top constitutional scholar who wrote a major textbook on the U.S. Constitution, responded to the Biden campaign's post featuring Sen. Blackburn by blasting "Trumpers," the MAGA Republicans.

"The Trumpers are now going for the jugular in attacking the great 1965 precedent on which nearly all federal rights of privacy and personal autonomy depend, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, upholding the right to use contraceptives when having sexual relations," Professor Tribe warned.

Watch the videos above or at this link.