(CNSNews.com) - Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion, could lead to Jim Crow laws being reinstated and the denial of service to blacks in the United States.
“You know, along with this, in terms of, you know, understanding that the Dobbs decision was about the right to privacy and, Madam Vice President, you know, I’m not a lawyer, but I do wonder, like: How far could they go? I mean, you know, Jim Crow laws? I mean, could business say, ‘Well, it’s my right to only allow certain people to come in’? How far — what are the implications?” Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) asked the vice president at an event on abortion rights in Los Angeles, Calif.
The vice president replied, saying that “everything that you can imagine, you should assume is possible.”
I mean, I think you should — that everything that you can imagine, you should assume is possible. It was unimaginable that the court of Thurgood Marshall would do what this court just did, and — and that’s, again, why I think that the point that you made about, you know, who is vulnerable to this moment: Everyone is vulnerable to this moment.
And we just — we have to understand that, I think, in so many ways, we are living in unsettled times. You think about it on the global stage, there is a war in Europe.
You know, for 70 years, there was an assumption that, in spite of the differences among nations, that there was still certain international rules and norms, including the importance of sovereignty and territorial integrity, but with Russia’s unprovoked aggression in Ukraine, we see that we can’t necessarily take that for granted. Unsettled times. Unsettled times.
The Voting Rights Act, guided by the United States Supreme Court in Shelby v. Holder, a decision they rendered in 2013, and then you look at what happened in 2020, which is historic numbers of people voted in the midst of a pandemic, including an historic number of young voters, and almost immediately thereafter — because that scared people — there are children here — they started passing laws making it illegal to give people food and water if they’ve been standing in line for hours to vote; passing laws making it intentionally more difficult for people to vote.
Unsettled times. We thought the issue of voting rights had been settled. Unsettled times. In this year of our Lord 2022, taking away a woman’s ability to make decisions about her own body.
So, I think we have to listen to the words of Coretta Scott King. You’ve heard me paraphrase her so many times on this. She famously said: The fight for civil rights — which is the fight for justice, it’s the fight for equality, fight for freedom — the fight for civil rights must be fought and won with each generation, because let’s always remember that these rights will not be permanent if we are not prepared to be vigilant.
And in that way, this is so much about a democracy. I think about democracy in this regard. I think — I think of democracy as there’s a duality to it, in that, when it is intact, it is strong in terms of what it does to create a system that preserves and fights for rights, civil rights, human rights.
So, there’s an aspect to it that is about strength in terms of what it can do to lift people up. On the other hand, it’s very fragile. It’s extremely fragile. It will only be as strong as our willingness to fight for it, and so, fight we will.