Joe Biden told Democrat donors that a conservative-leaning Supreme Court believes “there is no such thing as a right to privacy” and suggested other progressive policies could be threatened.
Biden spoke Wednesday night at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser in Chicago and tapped into progressives’ concerns after Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft opinion suggesting the high court may be prepared to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide.
“If you read the opinion — if it turns out to be the same opinion — basically says there is no such thing as a right to privacy,” Biden said at the Marriott Marquis Chicago.
“Mark my words: If that decision holds, it’s not only we’re going to be fighting for a woman’s right to control her own body and the brutality that goes along with having to give birth in a circumstance that is something beyond what — that can be tolerated, but what else is going to happen?
“Mark my words: They’re going to go after the right of the — Supreme Court decision on the right of same-sex marriage. They’re going to go after — they’re going to — we’re going to be back to Griswold vs. Connecticut, where there was a time in Connecticut law where it said a married couple, in the privacy of their own bedroom, cannot use contraception; it was a decision — the government can make the decision you can’t do that.”
As he did last week during a press conference in which he called former President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement “the most extreme political organization in American history,” Biden told donors of being the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who helped torpedo Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987.
“I said, ‘Judge, you believe that the Constitution — the Ninth Amendment is an inkblot in the Constitution and, secondly, that there is no such thing as a right to privacy in the Constitution,” Biden said of his interrogation of Bork. “And you believe the rights you possess are because the government gave them to you. They gave them to you.
“I believe the rights I possess are because I’m a child of God, because I just exist. And I, by implication, gave up some of those rights to the government for purposes of making society function.’ And I went on from there. And he said, ‘I agree, it’s exactly the difference.'”