Andrew Yang Slams Democrats Over Fallout From Roe v. Wade

Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang criticized Democrats on Friday after the Supreme Court released a ruling that overturns the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade.

Yang, who also ran as a Democratic candidate for New York City mayor in 2021, announced he was leaving the Democratic party in October.

"It feels like Democrats owe their people an apology for being bad at their jobs," Yang tweeted on Friday, adding that they "had a long time to codify Roe v. Wade, defend a balanced court, get RBG [Ruth Bader Ginsburg] to step down, etc. Instead they got played and trounced. 'Help undo our failures!' is not a compelling rallying cry."

"The people who are going to get hurt by this the worst will be poor women in red states, while the folks who played politics with this will glide along and email people for money," Yang continued.

After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, died while still serving on the court in 2020, Former President Donald Trump appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, as her replacement. Ginsberg faced criticism for not retiring while former President Barack Obama was in office so that he could appoint her successor. As a result, conservatives now have a 6-3 majority on the court.

In the lead-up to the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, Democrats in Congress sought to pass legislation that would codify abortion rights at the federal level.

But they faced opposition from Republicans. In May, Republican senators blocked the abortion legislation and were joined by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. With 51 senators opposing the legislation and 49 supporting it, Democrats fell shy of the 60-vote threshold needed to pass it.

On Friday though, Manchin said he would "support legislation that would codify the rights Roe v. Wade previously protected," and that he was "hopeful" Democrats and Republicans would put forward legislation to do so.

When Yang left the Democratic Party in October, he said that while had been a member of the party his entire adult life, he was "confident that no longer being a Democrat is the right thing." He announced that he had founded a new political party, the Forward Party, that month.

Newsweek has reached out to the Democratic National Committee for comment.

On Friday, several high-profile Democrats slammed the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

Writing on Twitter Friday, President Joe Biden said it's "a very solemn moment for the United States."

"The Supreme Court expressly took away a Constitutional right from the American people that it had already recognized. They simply took it away. That's never been done to a right that is so important to so many Americans," Biden said.