The U.S. Supreme Court waded into the fraught debate over abortion rights Wednesday, as the court heard arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo. The case, which concerns the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that sharply limits access to legal abortion, has the potential to curtail abortion rights across the country if the court upholds the law—and true to the case’s intensely political nature, it sparked some drama even out of the courtroom. Speaking at a rally outside the Supreme Court building Wednesday as the case was heard, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went after Donald Trump-appointed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch for their presumed stances against abortion rights, an issue that has been a primary concern for SCOTUS-watching Democrats since the president first nominated the justices to the bench. “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price,” Schumer said, as he talked about the war being waged by Republican legislators against abortion rights. “You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, however, did not take kindly to Schumer’s attacks on his coworkers, issuing a rare public statement that slammed Schumer for his perceived threats against the Trump justices. “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening comments of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous,” Roberts wrote. “All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”
Schumer then hit back against Roberts’ statement with a response of his own, as a spokesman for the senator accused the chief justice of playing into right-wing talking points by mischaracterizing Schumer’s remarks as personal threats. “Sen. Schumer’s comments were a reference to the political price Senate Republicans will pay for putting these justices on the court, and a warning that the justices will unleash a major grassroots movement on the issue of reproductive rights agains the decision,” Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman said in a statement. “For Justice Roberts to follow the right wing’s deliberate misinterpretation of what Sen. Schumer said, while remaining silent when President Trump attacked Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg last week, shows Justice Roberts does not just call balls and strikes.” Indeed, in Schumer’s subsequent comments after telling the conservative justices they would “pay the price,” the senator did make clear that his intended course of action was focused on the ballot box. If the Louisiana law gets upheld, Schumer said, “we will stand with American women. We will tell President Trump and Senate Republicans who have stacked the court with right-wing ideologues that you’re gonna be gone in November, and you will never be able to do what you’re trying to do now ever, ever again.”
The public sparring between the Democratic senator and chief justice—a George W. Bush appointee who’s viewed as conservative-leaning, if more moderate than colleagues like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Justice Clarence Thomas—comes as the Supreme Court has become increasingly drawn into the partisan political arena in recent weeks. The White House has repeatedly turned to the Supreme Court to weigh in on unfavorable decisions it receives in the lower courts, which recently provoked Justice Sonia Sotomayor to overtly call out her conservative colleagues for unfairly coddling the administration and its agenda. “Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent of a court decision on a Trump immigration policy. “Perhaps most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant [the Trump Administration] over all others.”