Sen. Josh Hawley said he refuses to support any nominee for the Supreme Court who believes in the legality of the landmark case Roe v. Wade, in which the high court ruled that abortion was a right protected by the Constitution.
“I will vote only for those Supreme Court nominees who have explicitly acknowledged that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided,” Hawley told the Washington Post in an interview. “By explicitly acknowledged, I mean on the record and before they were nominated.”
The Missouri Republican is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees nominations to federal courts, including the Supreme Court. In an interview with LifeSiteNews in 2016 when he was running for Missouri attorney general, Hawley referred to himself as “100% pro-life,” opposing the termination of a pregnancy at any stage of development.
Ahead of the next Supreme Court nomination fight, Hawley said he wants to focus on abortion because he believes “Roe is central to judicial philosophy” and was an “unbridled act of judicial imperialism.”
The freshman senator added that he believes the 1973 decision that protects a woman’s right to an abortion marks the point at which the modern Supreme Court felt it no longer had to follow the Constitution.
“I don’t want private assurances from candidates,” Hawley said. “I don’t want to hear about their personal views, one way or another. I’m not looking for forecasts about how they may vote in the future or predications. I don’t want any of that. I want to see on the record, as part of their record, that they have acknowledged in some forum that Roe v. Wade, as a legal matter, is wrongly decided.”
