Vice President Harris on Friday said she is concerned about the integrity of the Supreme Court in the wake of the decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, which had protected the right to receive an abortion for decades.
“I think this is an activist court,” Harris told NBC’s “Meet the Press” when asked about her confidence in the court.
“It means that we had an established right for almost half a century, which is the right of women to make decisions about their own body, as an extension of what we have decided to be, the privacy rights to which all people are entitled,” Harris continued. “And this court took that constitutional right away. And we are suffering as a nation because of it.”
“That causes me great concern about the integrity of the Court overall,” Harris added, calling it a “very different court” from the one served by Justices Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall and Sandra Day O’Connor.
Harris has taken a leading role in the Biden administration in pushing back on the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. The vice president, who is the first woman to hold the role, has met with health care providers and activists in recent months to voice support for abortion access and reproductive health.
Democrats have ridden the wave of outrage over the court decision to wins at the ballot box, including in Kansas, where voters rejected a referendum that would have stripped abortion protections from the state constitution.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, even with the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who joined the court in July upon the retirement of former Justice Stephen Breyer.
An Associated Press poll released in late July found that 43 percent of Americans don’t have any confidence in the Supreme Court, an increase of 16 percentage points since April.