Vice President Kamala Harris says she ‘never believed’ Gorsuch or Kavanaugh would leave Roe intact

In an interview with CBSNews’ Face the Nation this week, Vice President Kamala Harris said she “never believed” either Justice Neil Gorsuch or Justice Brett Kavanaugh when they said in their respective confirmation hearings that they would not seek to overturn Roe v Wade.

On the heels of a Supreme Court ruling last month that overturned Roe and stripped the right to abortion away from millions of Americans, Harris told CBS’ Robert Costa that as a United Senator, she never believed either Associate Justice when they said they believed Roe was established law and they would not seek to strike it down if appointed to the bench.

Asked whether she believed the men should be impeached from their SCOTUS positions for lying to Congress under oath about Roe, the Vice President declined to answer directly, but said, “I start from the point of experience of having served in the Senate. I never believed them. I didn’t believe them. It’s why I voted against.”

In his 2017 confirmation hearing, when asked directly whether he believed Roe v Wade should be overturned, Gorsuch answered, “Part of the value of precedent – and it has lots of value, it has value in and of itself, because it is our history and our history has value intrinsically. But it also has an instrumental value in this sense: it adds to the determinacy of law.” He added, “Once a case is settled, that adds to the determinacy of the law. What was once a hotly contested issue is no longer a hotly contested issue. We move forward.”

Kavanaugh gave a similar response at his confirmation hearing in 2018 when asked about the landmark ruling. “It is an important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times,” he said in the Senate. “It is not as if it is just a run of the mill case that was decided and never been reconsidered, but Casey specifically reconsidered it, applied the stare decisis factors, and decided to reaffirm it. That makes Casey a precedent on precedent.” 

Later in the interview, Harris defended Democrats’ failure to move to codify Roe into federal law before SCOTUS was able to overturn it. “I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believed that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled,” she said.