Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) walks out of a senate luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on October 22, 2019. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he believes that the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion “was wrongly decided, in part because it took away a vital question for the American people to vote through their elected representatives, be they Congress or their state legislatures.”
During an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” host Jake Tapper asked whether Judge Amy Coney Barrett should follow Cotton’s example and be forthright and candid about how she would vote on Roe v. Wade.
“I’m pro-life, and I have long believed that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, in part because it took away a vital question for the American people to vote through their elected representatives, be they Congress or their state legislatures,” Cotton said.
“Now, that said, I mean, I can’t speculate about hypothetical cases that may happen years from now, probably not even filed yet, but I am heartened that the president nominated Judge Barrett to the Supreme Court, and that Judge Barrett explained yesterday that the late, great Justice Scalia’s judicial philosophy was hers as well,” he said.
“She understands the judge’s role is not to impose her own preferences, not to cast her wishes as the law of the land, but, rather, to uphold the Constitution and the law as it is written. That’s exactly what I expect her to do,” the senator added.
Cotton said the big difference between him and most of the people on President Donald Trump’s list of potential judicial nominees is that the senator is not a judge.
“I’m not a sitting judge. I’m not bound by canon of judicial ethics. So, I can speak my mind on the great public questions of the day. Judges obviously cannot, just like Justice Kagan and Justice Sotomayor, President Obama’s picks to the Supreme Court, did not either,” he said.
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