On Friday, July 8, President Biden read aloud a statement entitled "Remarks by President Biden on Protecting Access to Reproductive Health Care Services." He read the statement from the teleprompter. I have no idea who actually wrote the statement. (If you watch the video, you will clearly see that he is reading it.)
It's possible for the President to disagree with a Supreme Court decision without denigrating the Court and the justices who did not vote the way he would have liked them to. The easier and cheaper course of action is to badmouth the Court, to call its decision illegitimate, and to call into question the integrity and the loyalty to the Constitution of those justices with whom the President disagrees. That cheaper course was the one taken by Biden on Friday.
The President declared that the Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization "was not a decision driven by the Constitution.” Indeed, according to Biden, the Court’s decision “wasn’t about the Constitution or the law.” Biden goes even further, asserting that “what we’re witnessing wasn’t a constitutional judgment. It was an exercise in raw political power.”
It’s important to understand what Biden is claiming here: that the majority of the Supreme Court justices are not committed to honestly interpreting the Constitution and the laws of the United States as written: “It was an exercise in raw political power.” That’s a terrible accusation to make! And a potentially very damaging accusation to make – damaging to the reputation and to the authority of the Supreme Court. What we have here is one branch of our federal government, the executive branch headed by the President, openly attacking another branch of our federal government – the judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court – as illegitimate. In effect, Biden has accused the Supreme Court of breaking faith with the people of the United States and with our Constitution.