Former President Donald Trump on Friday lauded the Supreme Court’s seismic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying, “I believe, in the long run, that is something that may work out for everyone.”
“This brings every part back to the states where it has at all times belonged,” he added, in an interview with Fox News. “That is following the Structure, and giving rights back once they must have been given way back.”
Friday’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization fulfilled one in every of Trump’s signature presidential campaign guarantees: that he would nominate Supreme Court justices who were ideologically against abortion rights and would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Within the 5-1-3 decision, his three nominees to the Supreme Court — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — provided the crucial votes to overturn the federal right to abortion.
Trump was a supporter of abortion rights before he sought to be the presidential nominee for the Republican Party. He once described himself as “very pro-choice.” But as a candidate for president, in exchange for electoral support from the party’s far-right grassroots groups, he publicly pledged his opposition to abortion. In March 2016, he went thus far as to say “there must be some type of punishment” for individuals who receive abortions illegally.
He later walked back those comments, but not his commitment to supporting conservatives’ 50-year project to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“That … will occur robotically in my view because I’m putting pro-life justices on the court,” he said in an October 2016 debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “One other two or perhaps three justices.”
On the behest of Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, candidate Trump also promised to attempt to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding and make everlasting the Hyde Amendment, which curtails the usage of federal health care funds to cover abortions.
In return, SBA List and its super PAC lavished thousands and thousands of dollars and mobilized a whole lot of hundreds of conservative voters to support Trump’s election and to preserve a Republican majority within the Senate during his presidency.
Trump’s nominees were crucial to provide a drastic power shift on the court.
Only a yr before he was elected president, the court had rejected a Texas law posing a significant challenge to the rights established in Roe v. Wade. Without the votes of Trump’s justices, it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court would have even taken up Dobbs v. Jackson, since the Mississippi law at its core was such an extreme violation of previous precedent.
In 2016, Trump acknowledged that overturning the fitting to abortion would likely force thousands and thousands to acquire abortions illegally and maybe dangerously:
“You return to a position like that they had where they might perhaps go to illegal places,” he said on the time. “But you’ve to ban it.”
