Trigger warning: This email will address the Supreme Court's attacks on the rights of women, girls, non-binary, and trans folks.

Dear John,

I'm outraged by the news out of Washington—but I'm not surprised.

Join us later today at the federal building near Civic Center to raise our voices in defense of reproductive liberty and the right of women to control their own bodies!

Some of us saw today's attacks on Roe v. Wade coming well over a decade ago. I published a proposal in 2008 to stop it, and am running for office to remove an incumbent complicit in the rise of the right-wing Supreme Court and finally implement that plan in Congress.

The right to control one's own body is fundamental. No government has any right to dictate the terms of pregnancies, or to impede healthcare or family planning decisions, including the choice to have an abortion.

It’s a matter of self-control, and respect for individuals to make their own choices and live their own lives.

It's also a matter of appropriate limits on the role of the state, and the reeking hypocrisy of right-wing voices—including multiple Justices of the Supreme Court—who mouth empty words about "liberty" and "conservative" values while launching reactionary attacks on rights on which hundreds of millions of Americans depend.

That’s why we’ve warned for years that Roe was at risk, starting in 2007 when the Supreme Court overruled it—without admitting it had done so—in Gonzales v. Carhart. In the words of Pamela Karlan, the Court “circumruled” Roe, effectively overruling it through circumvention.

This afternoon, we're converging on the federal building at 450 Golden Gate at 5pm to raise our voices in defense of reproductive liberty, and the rights of women, girls, non-binary, and trans folks to control their own bodies. Join us!

When the Supreme Court decided Carhart in 2007, few voices in the press mustered the insight to observe the broader implications of the ruling. Most journalists lack the independence to critically examine the institutions on which they report, reducing them to covering what the Justices admit to doing, rather than the reality of their rulings and their functional impact on the ground.

My views of law and policy are informed by legal realism. It remains painfully absent across most of the institutional landscape: most policymakers distract themselves—and voters—with buzzwords. But I pay too much attention to policy, jurisprudence, and history to be distracted by political theater.

That’s why, over a decade ago, I proposed a way for Congress to check and balance the Supreme Court in order to constrain its arbitrariness and offer greater protections for our rights.

Want a voice in Congress that sees problems coming ten years in advance? I’ve been seeing the future for twenty years, and doing everything possible to defend it from the past. Join us today at the federal building!

Before explaining the solution that I offered over a decade ago, it’s worth examining the record of the incumbent who we’re challenging in the upcoming election.

Nancy Pelosi has been the Speaker of the House at two different points in our nation’s history. When she led the House a decade ago, she chose not to codify Roe v Wade, deferring to Obama’s decision to de-prioritize that campaign promise. While the House more recently did vote to codify Roe, it did so only after the Senate was co-opted by the partisan gridlock that has made it a graveyard for everything from economic stimulus plans to proposals for worker rights, civil rights, voting rights, and more.

That’s not all. In addition to slow-walking the codification of reproductive liberty, Pelosi has also taken political positions undermining it, by endorsing anti-choice conservatives in races against progressive women who favor the right to choose. That’s a pattern that has recurred for several years, and continues in 2022: Pelosi recently endorsed Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who faces an impending run-off in a challenge from Jessica Cisneros.

Want a voice in Congress who has stood for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and worker rights when Pelosi refused? We’ll do so again this afternoon, and invite you to join us.

San Francisco’s octogenarians in Washington have also been complicit in the rise of the right-wing Supreme Court in other ways. When Justice Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by President Trump in 2020, Senator Dianne Feinstein—who once served as San Francisco’s conservative mayor—praised Barrett’s confirmation hearings as “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in,” ignoring the writing on the wall that so many are only now coming to recognize.

Meanwhile, Pelosi had the unique power to force the Senate to suspend Barrett's nomination hearings in order to focus instead on Articles of Impeachment. That could have imposed enough delay to block the nomination, as the GOP did with Merrick Garland's four years earlier. But rather than allow the impeachment process to proceed, or include all the charges, Pelosi slow-walked the process to give the Senate time to confirm Barrett, before then limiting the Articles of Impeachment to exclude the corruption charges on which Trump was most vulnerable.

Are you tired of a dynastic oligarch standing in the way of your rights? Together, we can end this madness.

As the only grassroots Democrat to ever reach the general election against Pelosi, I've been proud to champion your rights despite lacking any position of authority. Can you join us today to share our outrage as those rights hang in the balance?

After Justices Alito and Roberts joined the bench in 2007, I wrote a series of articles on Huffington Post explaining the tremendous import of their decisions in Carhart and Parents Involved. It was just a few years after I’d graduated from Stanford Law School, but I’d already had the chance to represent Jason West in a groundbreaking marriage equality case in the State of New York and was working on the senior staff of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy in Washington, DC.

My series culminated with a proposal for Congress to end judicial life tenure in order to force turnover on the bench. In the years since then, our proposal has attracted support from figures including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

I’ve tried for years to warn Americans about the issues that millions are coming to recognize only now.

Today's attacks on Roe are not the end. Having worked in the courts to establish LGBTQ marriage equality long before Obergefell v. Hodges finally put an end to our struggle and enshrined marriage equality as the law of the land, I have no doubt that the right-wing has its sights on Obergefell next.

Its attacks on voting rights are already well-established: the Shelby County v. Holder decision (which in 2013 struck down the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement provisions) plays a key role in insulating the political establishment in Washington from electoral accountability.

From women’s rights to LGBTQ rights, and from voting rights to other civil rights, all of our rights are threatened today.

Can you join us later today at the federal building to stand with women, the right to choose, and overdue limits on the right-wing Supreme Court?

Thanks for standing with us! Having fought for the future for over 20 years, I’m grateful to see more and more Americans coming to recognize our concerns every day.

In solidarity,

Shahid

PS -- Not in the Bay Area? Even if you can't join us today at the federal building, you can volunteer with us from wherever you live in a range of other ways, from phone banking (to inform either voters about their choices on the ballot, or local volunteers about upcoming events) to writing emails inviting journalists to cover our race, supporting hosts of virtual outreach gatherings, and more! Sign up today to make sure you receive updates & invitations going forward.