we re watching the white house where the president is set to deliver a speech any moment now. touting what he calls the achievement of the last 18 months. and while, yes, there are plenty of achievements for the biden administration to harold, like any leader, he faced his share of setbacks. if he runs, would he have the political momentum needed to win re-election. regardless, any 2024 plans announced by president biden will come under a cloud of covers. the doj s investigation into the handling of classified documents is just getting started. we re learning more about why president biden and his top aides chose to keep the first discovery a secret for almost 70 days before it blew up in their face. former fbi chief of staff is with us. joining me now is monica alba and a washington post reporter. thank you for joining us. monica, let s start with you. in listing the wins today, is president biden laying out a case for his re-election before announcing his bid for re-elect
thanks, rachel. all right, that is going to do it for us for now. i will see you again on monday. it will be back here for the rachel maddow show monday night. now it s time for the last word with lawrence o donnell. good evening, rachel. good evening, lawrence. it was, i believe, 53 long days ago when i was running through the hallways here with this leaked opinion that i couldn t believe that i was holding. you had one, and just the shock of having a leaked supreme court opinion, and then, getting it today was also shocking because the stuff that we and others pointed out in it, that could easily have been cut, was still in there. the quoting, you know, these guys from the 16 hundreds in england, who thought witches should be tried and executed. the witch trial moral authorities are still in this opinion. they are still being quoted as guidance for samuel alito. yeah, justice alito, and the majority, they were not taking pains to make sure that this would be broadly
and i think that s, i think, part of the reason that you ve had so much discussion today about what s next, because if they re willing to do this on this, which they knew would be the most divisive possible thing in the country, obviously, they would do it on things for what they think they had even more leeway to operate. that, we don t care element to this is, i think, gonna be a profoundly important part of the way this changes the country. and when you think of the presidents who made this happen, beginning with ronald reagan, but more importantly now, george h. w. bush, because he has clarence thomas on the supreme court, and the reagan justice there right now. but from george w. bush, to ronald reagan and donald trump, it is just a statistic statistical likelihood without even getting into their life histories. it s a statistical likelihood that it least one of them has personally, in some sense, participated in an abortion, possibly by paying for it. as is very commo
You know, the republican extremist congress was very quick to bring up two anti-abortion bills their first week in session. we havewe no doubt, we are goin to see a federal abortion ban bill coming up in the coming months. and we now know we fell just short of whatw we needed in th senate to codify roe. and we need the house and the senate to codify roe. but what is really important for folks to understand, in this longer term fight, was that roe wasas always the floor, it was never the ceiling. and what we mean be that was roe provided the fundamental right to access abortion, it was the fundamental legal right but the accessnd to abortion has always been challenging for us. so our battle, yes, it is far from over. but it is to imagine a world that is much bigger than roe, where we are eliminate restrictions like the hyde e ameantment that restricted federal funds for abortion and we model state by state legislation like in california where they are lireshaping acce
Applies to poor women, women with less financial resources, women who cannot afford to travel to another state, to obtain abortions. services, and perhaps in the future, as the dissent points out, possibly have to travel to toronto, because the republicans are hoping for a nationwide ban on abortion. that is something that mike pence came out in support of today. listen, when republicans tell you what they re going to do, listen. they told us they were going to overturn the affordable care act. and it s exactly what they tried to do in the house of representatives. we won in 2018, and we stop them in their trucks, protecting our health care. they are telling us now that they re going to have an issue but nationwide ban on abortion, and it s up to us in 2022, to stop them in their tracks, and again, protect our health care. as you go forward, which will be the congressional response to this decision? look, the house has already done its work here, to codify roe. we re gonna do oth