Democratic Strategist Basil Smikle said Wednesday on CNN that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s desire to govern by what the Constitution actually says is “scary.”
CNN’s Poppy Harlow brought up previous comments made by Johnson about the Supreme Court’s decision Dobbs v. Jackson. While speaking on the Todd Starnes Show in June of 2022, Johnson criticized substantive due process, which allows the courts to determine other rights that are guaranteed under the Constitution even if they are not enumerated.
“There’s been some really bad law made,” Johnson said. “They’ve made a mess of our jurisprudence in this country for the last several decades. And maybe some of that needs to be cleaned up, And what Justice Thomas is calling for is not radical, in fact it’s the opposite of that.”
Harlow then referenced Justice Clarence Thomas’ Dobbs v. Jackson concurrence in which he said that the court should review other substantive due process precedents such as those in Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell, which guaranteed contraception and same-sex marriage.
“To me, it’s very scary stuff,” Smikle said. “It harkens back to – some of his interpretations, that is the speaker’s interpretation– of some of this goes back to some of the original thinking in this country which is incredibly scary. But what he’s done bringing it forward is criminalize doctors, criminalize women. And when you tie it to some of the conversation that we just had in terms of being able to stretch across to Democrats in a general election, there are many Republicans that are trying to find a way to be better general election candidates.”
“When you have someone like the speaker with these kinds of comments and the fact that if not the leadership but the grass roots Republicans are sticking with Donald Trump, there seems to be this larger inability to be able to shed a lot of this rhetoric and a lot of these policies,” he continued.
Thomas argued in his concurring opinion that substantive due process “is an oxymoron that ‘lacks any basis in the Constitution’.” (RELATED: MSNBC Chief Legal Analyst Makes Bold Claim About Clarence Thomas’ Opinion)
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
Thomas, however, noted that “nothing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”