Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement warning that lawmakers representing beliefs held by a minority of voters are wielding disproportionate power in statehouses across the nation. Harris warns that these “extremists” are determined to limit a woman’s right “to make decisions about her own body” — a right and belief that the Vice President says is held by “the majority of Americans.”
Harris also celebrates what she characterizes as the rejection of the extremist agenda by citizens across the country.
Extremist elected officials continue to attack reproductive freedom.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) April 7, 2023
From pushing to ban abortion in all 50 states, to criminalizing doctors and nurses, they’re out of step with the majority of Americans and we will keep fighting back.https://t.co/luW5ScFYrR
“From pushing to ban abortion in all 50 states, to criminalizing doctors and nurses, they’re out of step with the majority of Americans and we will keep fighting back,” Harris writes in a tweet accompanying the release of the statement by her office.
Harris’s statement says: “After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters have rejected measures to take away reproductive rights and supported measures to strengthen them every time the measures were on the ballot.”
The statement, entitled ‘Statement by Vice President Kamala Harris on Americans’ Continued Rebuke of Attacks on Reproductive Rights’ comes after voters in Wisconsin elected liberal Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz in a landslide in what many see as a rebuke, to use Harris’s word, to attacks on reproductive rights.
Protasiewicz’s election gives Democrats their first majority in 15 years on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a state where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and then lost narrowly to Joe Biden, and where Democrat Tony Evers beat Trump-backed Tim Michels for governor in 2022.
Harris lists Kansas, California, Michigan, Montana, Kentucky, and Vermont as other states where voters have rebuked the “extremist” attempts to “undermine and attack reproductive freedom.”
In safely conservative Kansas, where no Democrat has won the presidential electoral votes since 1964, citizens voted to reject a proposed amendment and keep abortion legal in August 2022, after lawmakers there moved swiftly to challenge reproductive rights in the wake of the SCOTUS overturn of Roe v. Wade.
