Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said Sunday that the Supreme Court will likely eventually “swat away” Texas’ restrictive new abortion law, and claimed that the new law is being used to “gin up their base to distract from disastrous policies in Afghanistan, maybe for fundraising appeals.”
Cassidy, who reiterated his pro-life stance multiple times during the interview, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that SCOTUS’ decision on Wednesday to let the law stand “had nothing to do with the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade.”
“It was only on if the plaintiff had standing,” he continued. “People are using it to gin up their base to distract from disastrous policies in Afghanistan, maybe for fundraising appeals. I wish we would focus on issues…as opposed to theater.”
Cassidy downplayed the potential precedence of the Texas law, which prohibits all abortions after six weeks even in cases of rape or incest and allows individuals to sue clinics, doctors, nurses, and people who drive someone for the procedure for $10,000.
“I think the Supreme Court will swat it away once it comes to them in an appropriate manner,” he told Stephanopoulos. “If it is as terrible as people say it is, it will be destroyed by the Supreme Court. But to act like this is an assault upon Roe v. Wade is, again, something the president is doing I think to distract from his other
Stephanopoulos pressed the Louisiana congressman on whether he thinks the Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority (though the more moderate Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal minority in the Texas decision), would now move to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“We can always talk about eventualities, we can always about theoreticals,” he said. “It makes good fodder, but I’m kind of a guy who’s in the middle of a state in which 700,000 people don’t have electricity, in which we’ve got a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the administration is pushing a $3.5 trillion bill which will be to inflation what the withdrawal was to Afghanistan.”
Watch above, via ABC News.