Mazie Hirono: “I want to thank all my colleagues who came to the floor of the Senate yesterday and today with the fierce urgency of now…”

“I want to thank all my colleagues who came to the floor of the Senate yesterday and today with the fierce urgency of now to urge passage of the Right to Contraception Act. This month marks almost 2 years since the Supreme Court's disastrous Dobbs decision, resulting in women in half the country having fewer rights than women in the other half of the country. What kind of a country is that? I thought this was a country founded on equal protection and equal rights--not according to this Supreme Court. Dobbs wreaked chaos in its own right, overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating a constitutional right that I had for almost 50 years. But it also foretold more chaos to come. In his concurrence in the Dobbs case, Justice Thomas specifically called for ``reconsidering'' Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case protecting the right to contraception. When a Supreme Court Justice says he wants to ``reconsider'' a case, that is a signal that he wants to overturn it. It is bad enough that they overturned Roe v. Wade's 50 years of a constitutional protection. Now they want to overturn Griswold. That is a 59-year precedent protecting our right to contraception. We have what I have described as an out-of-control Supreme Court majority that has no problem overturning decades here, there, and just about everywhere based on their ideological agenda.…”