'Clarion call': Sotomayor's 'defiant' statement tells analyst liberal justices have had it

The U.S. Supreme Court's liberal justices have fired a warning shot at the conservative majority.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited the 5-4 decision striking down abortion rights two years ago to assert that her conservative colleagues were threatening marriage rights, and fellow liberals Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined in her dissent in a low-profile case about a Salvadoran husband’s immigrant visa, wrote CNN senior Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic.

"Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the 6-3 decision in the visa case Friday, deemed Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion an overreaction to a straightforward immigration dispute, which landed before the justices on appeal by the Biden administration," Biskupic wrote. "The case may indeed be confined to the immigration realm. Yet, the right-wing pattern of diminishing individual rights lurks in the background. And the liberals’ defiant statement may foreshadow divisions this week as the justices try to complete their 2023-24 session."

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Anti-abortion conservatives had sought to undo Roe v. Wade for decades but were unable until Donald Trump appointed three reliably conservative justices to join Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, and the resulting Dobbs decision has set off new debates over in-vitro fertilization and other reproductive issues.

"As much as it has permeated American life, Dobbs has been rarely cited at the high court, especially by the conservative justices who made it the law," Biskupic wrote. "When liberals have quoted from their dissent in the case, it has mainly been to admonish the majority’s approach to precedent ... What they wrote Friday, however, ratcheted up the rhetoric and could be a clarion call for what they see on the horizon for substantive rights, if not in the next few days, then in upcoming sessions."