Roe vs. Wade is under attack. Sean has the latest on the controversy surrounding the leaked documents showing the US Supreme Court may overturn Roe vs. Wade! What does the law say is right here? What do Americans say?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markovich.
And I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday.
Normally on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Day number 262.
Day 275.
By the way, is the number when you're thinking about, oh, Joe promised he'd never do this, and he abandoned Americans behind enemy lines, and and that's what Joe does.
That's what Democrats do.
Let me start with the obvious today, or top story is this leak that is now confirmed by the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
He confirmed the authenticity of Justice Samuel Alito's leaked majority opinion foreshadowing the possible overturn of Roe v.
Wade and Casey.
And the Supreme Court released a statement uh earlier today acknowledging that the political publication of the opinion draft, which sparked this uproar uh on the left, and by the way, that this is now going to be demagogued, unlike anything you've ever seen, because the left has nothing else to run on.
This is it.
And already I uh uh as I predicted last night, is this this literally broke five minutes before I went on on the show last night.
And and we were able to, you know, get everything out there and in record time and and get down, dig down pretty deep into the opinion and and so on and so forth.
Anyway, they released a draft um acknowledging that it's real.
Uh as I read it, I wanted to be very careful.
Um I thought, number one, if it's political, political's not gonna they're not gonna print this if they've not confirmed it.
That was my gut.
Um, however, it's also the first time that this has ever happened that I've ever heard of in Supreme Court history.
Um we had some really interesting conversations last night.
Well, we'll get into some of those in the course of the program today, among which are Alan Dershowitz's theory that this was done, and I I believe this will probably be proven true uh by somebody that has a political agenda, more than likely from the left that is doing this for the purpose of hoping to intimidate members of the court,
number one, before the final decision is made, and number two, um it just it seems too orchestrated to me.
Um that they wanna they they wanted this this statement out there and they wanted a reaction.
It's also, you know, takes every other issue off the table, at least for the time being.
Uh, but anyway, the statement said that the document is authentic.
It does not represent a decision by the court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case.
The statement also included remarks from the chief justice who condemned the leak and said the marshal of the court will investigate the matter to the extent this betrayal of confidences of the court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations.
It will not succeed.
Now the work of the court will be not be infected in any way, Robert said.
Court employees have an exemplary and important tradition of respecting the confidentiality of the judicial process and upholding the trust of the court.
This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the court and the community of public servants that work here.
Um Roberts now is confirmed the leak draft is there.
Um and while confirming the authenticity of the leak, Roberts also stressing the draft ruling does not represent the court's final decision.
And let me give you a case in point.
My sources had been very clear that Justice Roberts was going to be the deciding vote on repealing Obamacare when that issue came before the court, and at the last minute changed his mind.
By the way, he is in the minority here.
Um, in case you didn't know.
So, you know, there's here's where we are politically, and I think you gotta you gotta look at the big picture here, and and you know, you gotta kind of be like a drone and hover above the noise because there's a lot of noise and and demagoguery out there by the left.
This decision does not make abortion, if it were to come down this way, would not make abortion illegal in this country.
The decision would allow the people of the respective 50 states and their elected state officials to make that decision.
In other words, every state would decide whether or not they will have restrictions or bans on abortion.
And there are places that will have more rigid restrictions than others.
Now remember, one of the things that has happened with the left, especially with abortion, is you know, let's go back and take you through time a little bit here.
You might remember Governor Northam, Commonwealth of Virginia.
And when that issue came up before that state, I mean things got very, very interesting, and I I frankly couldn't believe it at the time.
Um, but what we had is lawmakers in Virginia and conservatives across the country attacking Ralph Northam and state Democrats after they defended a failed bill that sought to reduce any restrictions on late-term abortions, and it escalated very quickly.
If you recall, there was a video of uh uh Kathy Tran, if I remember her name, acknowledging that her bill, like current law would allow abortions up to the point of delivery in cases of when a mother's life is at risk, health is at risk, or any other serious risk.
Northam, who was a pediatric neurologist, was asked about this issue in a radio interview, and he gave this answer.
If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly uh what would happen.
Um the infant would be delivered, uh, the infant would be kept comfortable, uh the infant would be resuscitated if if that's what the uh mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
Then a discussion.
It's a it is now a viable child.
That would be called murder.
You know, or you know, when you get to the point, if you follow the science when a child growing inside of a mother's womb uh is viable outside of the womb, not needing the mother, not needing to be inside uh the mother, is that a human life?
I think at that point.
Now, what's interesting, if you look at polls, polls are pretty interesting and and divided on this, but when it comes to the issue of whether or not Americans, Gallup now had their most recent poll that I saw, according to Gallup, not exactly known to be conservative, 48% of adults now think abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances.
A full 19% think that abortion should be outlawed altogether.
32%, only 32% think it should be legal, quote, under any circumstances.
So if you add the 48% who favor restricting abortion, and the 19% that want it outlawed, that's 67% that want or favor either restricting or outlawing abortion altogether.
That's a pretty big number.
Now, if role is overturned, abortion is still going to be legal in four out of five of America's most populous, California, for example.
You want to run through the list, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, there'll be different restrictions.
Like, for example, in the state of New York, the last time I checked, I think I think you can have an abortion even up to the week before delivery for crying out loud.
Um, and at that point, uh, how can any reasonable intelligent person that follows the science say that that's not a human being and that's not a life and that's not worth preserving.
We have the whole issue of the leak, which we're gonna get to.
Then you've got the hyperbole of the mob in the media, we'll get to that too.
Fake news CNN analysts predicting same-sex relationship, interstate travel is all gonna be on the chopping block after this decision, if it comes out this way.
We don't know what the decision's gonna be quite yet, but we'll we'll get to that in good time.
This has been an issue that has been demagogued by Democrats any chance they get.
Now, if, for example, abortion, we have very liberal abortion laws in California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and and every liberal state in between, uh, it's not gonna prohibit people from going to those states.
I'm sure those state legislatures being so radical left, uh, those that would even support, you know, ninth month abortions when you clearly have a viable baby that's living inside a mother's womb.
They're not gonna, they're not gonna not allow people out of state from getting that level of abortion.
And I think most states probably will have some restrictions, and some might be more restrictive than others, but it's not what they're going to claim it is.
You might remember when uh Robert Bork was appointed to the Supreme Court, and eventually eventually they derailed his nomination.
But Robert Bork was demagogue then by the likes of Senator Ted Kennedy, you may recall.
Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors and midnight raids, and school children could not be taught about evolution.
Writers and artists would be censured at the whim of government.
This is the guy with Mary Joe Copeckney, but put that aside.
Uh, then you might recall that Chucky Schumer on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices.
Now remember, the left has wanted to pack the courts.
The left historically has always wanted those things they would never accomplish legislatively or at the ballot box, in other words, advocating to be elected on.
Uh they would always look to the courts and judicial activism as a means of having justices legislate from the bench because they know they could never convince enough of the American people to do the radical things they want done.
Here's Chucky Schumer.
I want to tell you, Gore Zach, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
You won't know what hit you.
You will release the whirlwind.
You will pay the price.
Sounds to me like they're trying to intimidate a Supreme Court justice to me, but uh that's my take.
Um apparently, I guess the vice president Kamala Harris has decided to address the uh pro-choice group Emily's list.
Here's where we are, though, politically, and this is what I want to this is the this is the satellite view that I want you to have on this issue.
Abortion's not going away.
It's not gonna be made illegal if in fact this becomes the decision.
They want to demagogue this issue because they've got nothing else.
Democrats can't run on how they've handled COVID.
They ran out of COVID tests over Christmas.
They've never produced enough monoclonal antibodies or antivirals, or ever followed the science towards therapeutics when you have fully vaccinated, boostered, boostered, and even people with previous infections still getting COVID.
These are the people that have created chaos at the border, the likes of which we've never seen 25, 30 year record in terms of illegal immigrants because of their policies.
These are the people whose economic policies have resulted in a 41-year high, inflation high in this country.
These are the people that are responsible for the highest price you've ever paid for a gallon of gasoline in your life.
These are the people that have caused an economy where everything you buy and every store you go to costs more because of their climate alarmist religious cultism.
These are the same people that were responsible for the disaster in the pull out in Afghanistan.
These are the same people that want to defund dismantle and no bail laws in this country.
These are the same exact people that have never had the urgency or the understanding to arm Ukraine so they could actually beat Putin and win the war.
These are the same exact people that have failed on every single solitary issue.
There's not one thing we can point to that they're successful at.
So they're looking at this as like, oh, we're gonna cling to this.
The reality is the country's kind of split down the middle.
Most Americans are pretty reasonable people.
And most Americans don't try not third trimester abortions or second trimester abortions for that matter.
Now, even if you say that you're pro-choice, the people that I know in my life that say that, they like they even take Bill Clinton's line.
Abortion should be legal but rare, and they add one other word.
Early.
Now there are other conservatives that are are real even get mad at me for saying I make exceptions for rape, incest in the mother's life being in danger.
That's fine.
I don't care if you people disagree with me.
But the reality is if they think this is their manna from heaven that's gonna cross the finish line and get them over the plane and they'll kick the field gold and win the election over this, they're dreaming.
But they're going to try.
Institutionally, what has happened here is so dangerous to this country.
I'll get to that when we get back.
I want to get into how the left...
They love judicial activism.
They don't believe in co-equal branches of government or separation of powers.
You know, Chuck Schumer never got into release the whirlwind.
You're gonna pay the price, Gorsuch and Alito, whoever else he was attacking.
You won't know what hit you.
So this starts last night, about five minutes before I go on the air, and the headline on political is Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, a draft opinion shows.
And they voted to strike this down.
It's been in law since 1973.
And also the uh subsequent 1992 decision that's that's Planned Parenthood versus Casey, uh, that largely maintained the rights spelled out in Roe v.
Wade.
Conservatives have always believed it was never the role of the federal government to create a right that was not enumerated and specified in the Constitution.
It's very, very important that you keep that in mind.
That's why that's why the left things they cannot get done at the ballot box, convincing voters to vote for them because they will do these very radical things.
They they support judicial activists that will legislate from the bench and do it for them.
And and they're even go willing in the case of Schumer to go as far as even threaten Supreme Court justices.
The fact that this institution now has been attacked in a way that it's never been attacked before should alarm every single American.
This is dangerous beyond words.
I'll explain that when we get back.
I'll explain that when we get back.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hammond.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
Music When fake news gives you lies, Hannity supplies the truth.
Sean Hannity is on right now.
I want to tell you, Gorsuch.
I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
You have released the whirlwind.
You will pay the price.
Uh, you won't even know what hit you.
Wow.
Trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices.
On the steps of the Supreme Court, Chucky Schumer.
So let me let me let me start from the beginning again here.
So it's five minutes before showtime last night.
Politico drops this article.
Headline, Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.
It's not the final decision.
And it starts out says as the Supreme Court voted to strike down the landmark Roe v.
Wade decision according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, circulated inside the court, obtained by politico.
The draft opinion is bully throated, unflinching, a repudiation of the 1973 Roe v.
Wade decision, which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights, and the subsequent decision in 1992, Planned Parenthood versus Casey, and largely maintained the right quote, Roe was egregiously wrong from the start, Justice Alito writes.
Now, if you're a constitutionalist and you believe in the Constitution, you don't believe that it is the role of that court to legislate from the bench.
You don't find in the Constitution any rights enumerated that addresses this issue, nor I can, I think you logically can't find any place that even remotely infers such rights.
But let me go back to the text.
We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled Alito rights, labeled the opinion of the court.
It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives.
In other words, to the states.
Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid.
Now, this gets into the process.
Here's what happens.
So they take an initial vote, people are here, they're there, and then justices actually try to convince each other that their opinion is more right than the other one.
So we don't know where this eventually lands or whether this is going to be the final decision.
The way it's written, it would seem that the odds are pretty high that it very well could.
And they deliberate on these cases, and justices can and do change their votes on uh as draft opinions circulate, as arguments are made within the Supreme Court.
But the one thing that has never happened, and I think this is very, very key to all of this, because this is an assault on this institution that has never happened before.
No draft decision in modern history of the court, the U.S. Supreme Court has ever been disclosed publicly while a case is still pending.
The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what is already the most controversial case on the docket this term.
We've known forever that this is coming.
We know they took this case up.
We know that the court is uh more conservative.
Um, and the immediate impact is you know, this would allow every single state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion.
And as I pointed out, Gallup points out, most Americans favor some restrictions or even an outright ban of abortion.
That's that's 67% of Americans, and Gallup is hardly a conservative organization.
Anyway, it does give us some insight, as the political article points out into the deliberations into one of the most consequential cases before the court in the last five decades.
And Alito writes, in regards to this, Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.
Its reasoning was exceptionally weak.
The decision has been had damaging consequences, and far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have inflamed debate and deepened division.
Now, they cited a person familiar with the court's deliberations that the four other Republican appointed justices would be Clarence Thomas, no surprise.
Neil Gorsuch, no surprise.
Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett would be the other two.
I I still have not settled on where I think they are in the court in terms of their voting.
I don't expect, although there were reports today that John Roberts might support the Mississippi 15 week provision.
In other words, um, if the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in this closely watched case over the state's attempt to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
That's what their decision is.
And the three Democratic appointed justices, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, et cetera, are working on one or more dissents, et cetera.
And we really don't get a feel for where the chief justice is in this particular case.
Again, it's only a first draft, and first drafts are known to change quite often.
It's not uncommon.
I had people tell me, really good sources that up until the last minute, it looked like John Roberts was going to vote to overturn Obamacare and changed his mind at the last minute.
For what reason, I don't know.
My suspicion was if it's true over politics and how historically the Roberts court would be viewed.
I I you know, if you want to kill your career, if you want to be a politician, and you start thinking about your legacy, that usually means that you become useless because every decision is made through the prism of how will I look a hundred years from now?
You'll look like everybody else that's dead a hundred years later, nobody will care.
Um, not to be so cruel.
That's for anybody.
Um, anyway, so it is a breach now we've got to get to because extraordinary in terms of the danger to the institution of the court.
We have co-equal branches of government.
We have an executive branch, we have a legislative branch, we have a judicial branch.
This has not happened ever before in our lifetime.
Never happened in any way, shape, matter, or form.
Now, is this designed of this leak to intimidate the justices?
Yeah, I think just like Chuck Schumer's comments were designed to intimidate Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
Those are very intense.
Now he's never held accountable for it, but I think he should have been held accountable for it.
Um, do I believe that Democrats are going to use this for their as the one issue that they can run to for the midterm election?
They're already talking about that.
Will they use it to try and again bring up the issue of court packing?
Probably.
Joe Biden, if the Supreme Court decision on Roe holds, it's quite a radical decision.
Oh, gee.
And then Joe said, if you codify Roe, it makes sense, but I'm not prepared to talk about the filibuster now because you have Bernie Sanders out there saying he wants to end the filibuster.
You have Elizabeth Warren saying Roe v.
Wade will be on the ballot in 2022.
It's on the ballot every year.
It always has been for 49 years.
No big shock here.
Elizabeth Warren, as I predicted, now we need to get rid of the filibuster.
Roe is example A. You have Blumenthal and Schumer.
They want to make abortion an issue in the midterm.
This is the only issue they're going to want to talk about because they can't talk about anything else, as I was just mentioning.
You know, Democrats, Supreme Court leak ruling, it's an attack on fundamental freedom.
It's not freedom.
Because the freedom will be given to the states to decide.
The states will make that decision, not the federal government.
And, you know, then you have the typical media reaction to the report.
You know, it's like you you would believe they're demagoguing this.
It's just gonna sound just like former Senator Ted Kennedy and Robert Borg's America with segregated lunch counters and back alley abortions, blah, blah, blah.
Um, none of which is true.
Now, do I think that the justices are going to be intimidated here?
I hope not.
I don't think so.
That would be my best guess.
Um, and it what's so amazing about this is how the left has always looked to this other branch of government to do their do the work for them.
Democrats cannot win elections running on their radicalism.
The reason they're likely to lose badly in November is because of their radicalism.
So they've always looked to the courts.
But this modern Democratic Socialist Party, the new Green Deal Socialist Democrats, the climate alarmist religious cult Democrats, all of them now fully understand at least if you look at the numbers, and if any of them, some of them are acknowledging, uh oh, we're we're in a heap of trouble here.
Because the polls show that Joe Biden is upside down on every single issue facing this country.
You can't name a single thing that he's done successfully.
But what happens when this type of leaks takes place in the U.S. Supreme Court?
Now, I would argue, remember the hearsay whistleblower, non-whistleblower, became a big hero of the left.
And I brought this up last night.
I would argue that when this person's identified, they already have a name and a suspect.
I I just am not prepared to go with it yet.
Um this person's name comes out, they're going to be glorified by the left.
That's what they're going to do.
Now, the price we pay in terms of an institution and an assault on the Supreme Court.
You know, it's interesting words used both by Ari Fleischer and by Governor Mike Huckabee.
Um insurrection that was the word that they use.
This is an attempt now to intimidate the United States Supreme Court by the hard left in America.
It was amazing last night how quickly protesters formed outside the court.
Who knew what when I don't know?
I think that's something a question we we really need to dig down into.
Um the Democratic Party, we know they want judicial activists.
They want this decision.
They're acting as though this right, as they call it, will go away.
Ask yourself, how many states will actually put an end to all abortion?
I don't think if any, yeah, not that many.
It's just not going to happen that way.
I know they would like us to think that way, but it that that's not the way this is going to come go down.
I can tell you that 100% is true.
Um we have uh already Congresswoman Omar is calling for court packing after this draft opinion release.
AOC says the Supreme Court is coming for gay marriage, civil rights, and abortion after this abortion ruling, wrong again.
Democrats condemn the court draft as an abomination.
Now they're pushing Congress to codify Roe v.
Law weighed into law.
By the way, that could put a lot of conserv uh conservative Democrats, the few that are left, uh, in a position which guarantees a Republican pickup.
So that's going to be interesting to watch from from that standpoint.
And that's all that Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee wants to talk about because that's the only issue they've got left to run on.
As Democrats condemn the Supreme Court abortion draft is an abomination.
And that'll be their number one fundraising tool as well against Republicans.
Democratic governors, attorney generals, you know, now they're gonna have to weigh in on it, but they're also gonna have to listen to their constituents.
And I think most Americans, if you look at it, I think the probably the Gallup poll captures that Americans don't believe in late-term abortions.
There are many Americans still that are pro-life.
Those numbers actually have been rising in recent years, which which I found interesting in the course of my research this morning.
Um what Alan Dershwitz said on my show last night, I thought was very, very interesting.
He had a theory, said it's only a theory.
He thinks it was probably leaked by a liberal law clerk, which is looking more likely in my view, who was trying to change the outcome of the case, either by putting pressure on some of the justices to change their mind, or by getting Congress to pack the court even before June,
which is very unlikely, or to get Congress to pass a national right to abortion law, which would all apply to the which would apply to all states, and that would have to come to the Supreme Court to see whether it would be upheld under the Commerce Clause, but I think this is real.
He was right in that sense.
My theory is that it was leaked by someone that wants to change the outcome.
Well, what are they doing?
They're trying to intimidate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
What does that do for this?
What does that do to this country?
Do you understand how profound that is?
I have plenty of court decisions over the years I've not liked.
Um the leak itself is a massive attack on the Supreme Court as an institution because they're supposed to be an independent body.
You know, Jonathan Turlier watched what he said.
He said it's a malicious act.
And he literally said some on the left are totally cool with burning the entire system.
Whoa.
That was a pretty powerful statement on his part.
There are different opinions as uh in regards to whether or not it's an illegal leak.
I don't know the answer to that question as of now.
We'll find out.
You know, we're looking into it even as we speak.
Um, Amazon responds, they will cover $4,000 in travel costs for employee abortions.
Okay.
Um, but that would be the free market.
Nobody's gonna stop people from going to California or New York that will have the most liberal abortion laws in the country.
Guaranteed they already have them now.
That's not gonna change.
Anyway, 800-941 Sean.
If you want to be a part of the program, uh, we're gonna see what impact this will have on the 2022 midterms with our polsters coming up.
Later on, Dr. Oz is gonna uh join us.
He wants to, you know.
I see these ads about Dr. Oz.
Just like Donald Trump, same thing.
I know Oz, I knew Trump, and they're literally I don't even recognize the guy that they're portraying him in ads.
Who the hell wants to run for office?
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
Now I'm Carol Markovich, and I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations, thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.