(House Speaker Pelosi, announced last week that the House of Representatives will vote later this month on a bill that would protect the right to abortion across the country. Below is her statement on the Supreme Court’s decision.)

The Supreme Court’s cowardly, dark-of-night decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women’s rights and health is staggering. That this radically partisan Court chose to do so without a full briefing, oral arguments or providing a full, signed opinion is shameful.

SB8 delivers catastrophe to women in Texas, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities. Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional right to basic health care. SB8 is the most extreme, dangerous abortion ban in half a century, and its purpose is to destroy Roe v. Wade, and even refuses to make exceptions for cases of rape and incest. This ban necessitates codifying Roe v. Wade.

Upon our return, the House will bring up Congresswoman Judy Chu’s Women’s Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America.

SB8 unleashes one of the most disturbing, unprecedented and far-reaching assaults on health care providers – and on anyone who helps a woman, in any way, access an abortion – by creating a vigilante bounty system that will have a chilling effect on the provision of any reproductive health care services. This provision is a cynical, backdoor attempt by partisan lawmakers to evade the Constitution and the law to destroy not only a woman’s right to health care but potentially any right or protection that partisan lawmakers target.

When the Supreme Court takes up its reproductive rights case this year, we urge it to uphold, as Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, ‘its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.’

The diverse coalition that was instrumental in electing Biden would serve its own interests to actively support the many positive measures – legislative and otherwise – of his administration. So far this coalition, with a few exceptions, has done too little to acquaint and even less to activate tens of millions in support of these measures.  Hopefully, this will change this fall as Biden, Pelosi, and Congressional Democrats attempt to strike a legislative blow against 30 years of neoliberalism and secure legislation – a new New Deal – that will make a difference in the lives of tens of millions.

While I can’t explain why the main organizations and leaders stretching from the center to the progressive to the left haven’t activated their constituencies, standing still shouldn’t any longer be an option. Too much is at stake – jobs, health and child care, climate mitigation, infrastructure renewal, voting rights, and the likely winners and losers in next year’s midterm elections.

On the left, we love to talk about “street heat,” sometimes to the exclusion of other forms of struggle. But at this moment, “street heat” in support of the many progressive and novel features in the $3.5 trillion budget moving through the Congressional reconciliation process is exactly what is missing and urgently needed.

Strategically speaking, this isn’t a socialist moment, and it’s mistaken and harmful to think so. The necessary constellation of political-social forces, for one thing, is nowhere near the level of organization and understanding to make socialism a near term possibility.

But it is a moment, notwithstanding immense dangers, when – at long last – the effective political-social forces are growing and maturing to the point where a substantive turn, still within capitalism, toward more democracy, equality, economic sufficiency, peace, and sustainability is within reach.

But, of course, it won’t happen on its own, not without well thought out tactics and a soberly crafted strategy, plus – and this is crucial – a much higher level of mass mobilization than is now evident.

Biden’s decision to end a long war as well as his efforts to enact a progressive domestic agenda should earn him the vigorous support of all democratic minded people. The logic is simple: if the white nationalist authoritarian network, in the center of which is Trump and the Republican Party, take down Biden and his progressive agenda, it will sooner rather then later take down the coalition that elected him, beginning in the fall elections next year and then two years later in the presidential elections. Don’t think that if Biden and Pelosi sink, we can still rise.

Las Vegas will give you long odds on that bet. What probably will – and you will get much better odds in Vegas on this bet – is a long night of authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist rule.

What keeps Republicans up at night and motivates them during the day isn’t the fate of Afghanistan or its people. What does is their thirst for power. Without it, they know, they can do little. With it they believe they can transform, the country and state into a white nationalist, authoritarian, anti-democratic, sectarian fortress – irredeemably hostile to any democratic and egalitarian voices and visions.

It’s no surprise then that they are all over Biden for his decision to withdraw US soldiers from Afghanistan and the execution of that decision, even though they said not a word when Trump negotiated the treaty that Biden is essentially carrying out and even though everyone knows (or should know) that there is no such thing as a seamless and smooth way to end a war in which you are the defeated party.

We shouldn’t let allow this Republican demagogy to go unanswered. By the same token, we should take issue as well with critics of Biden’s decision in the Democratic Party.