(WASHINGTON) — The House voted Friday afternoon to pass a bipartisan gun safety package.

The bill, crafted in the wake of devastating mass shootings and on the one-month anniversary of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Texas that left 19 young children dead, is the first major piece of gun reform to clear Congress in decades.

The final vote was 234-193, with 14 Republicans joining all Democrats in supporting the bill. Applause could be heard in the chamber when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the vote.

The legislation now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk.

The president has praised the bill, despite having called on lawmakers to pass stronger restrictions like a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“This bipartisan legislation will help protect Americans,” Biden said in a statement after the Senate passed the legislation on Thursday. “Kids in schools and communities will be safer because of it.”

Fifteen Republicans in the Senate, including Republican leader Mitch McConnell, voted in favor of the bill.

The measure makes enhancements to background checks for potential gun buyers under the age of 21, requiring an “investigative period” to review juvenile and mental health records.

It also closes the so-called “boyfriend loophole.” Under current law, those convicted of domestic violence are prohibited from purchasing a gun if they are married to their partners or live with their partners. But under this bill, individuals in “serious” “dating relationships” will also be unable to buy guns for at least five years if they are convicted of abuse.

Millions of dollars would also be allocated to incentive states to pass “red flag” laws to remove guns from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, as well as other intervention programs or mental health services.

The House previously passed numerous gun reform packages; however, the Senate never took up the legislation due to Republican opposition.

The most recent package passed in the House earlier this month went much further than the Senate package. The legislation raised the minimum age to purchase firearms and banned ghost guns and large-capacity ammunition magazines, among other gun safety protections.

“This is a compromise. Surely not everything I want, and it’s not everything Republicans won. But it’s the first opportunity we’ve had in decades to do something worthwhile to prevent gun violence,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.

But other Democrats said the package didn’t go far enough.

“While I know that some are celebrating progress today, I am certainly not,” Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., emotionally said during Friday’s Rules Committee meeting. “This bill before us today is the bare minimum and we should be embarrassed. The bare minimum to protect children that are being murdered while learning their ABCs.”

Pelosi and other Democrats gathered on the steps of the United States Capitol before the vote to celebrate the legislation.

“I say to my colleagues: while it isn’t everything we would have liked to see in legislation, it takes us down the road, the path to more safety, saving lives,” Pelosi said. “Let us not judge the legislation for what it does not do, but respect it for what it does.”

“Our colleagues are gathered here with pictures of those who have been lost in all of this, accompanied by family members of those who have been lost,” Pelosi added. “It is our constant resolve that we will not stop until the job is done.”

The passage of the gun safety bill comes just one day after a major Supreme Court decision expanding gun rights.

The court’s conservative majority struck down a 100-year-old New York law that restricted the concealed carry of handguns in public to only those with a “proper cause.” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the opinion that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.

ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — In thousands of rulings over its storied history, the U.S. Supreme Court has broken with stare decisis, the doctrine of respecting prior decisions, just 145 times in cases requiring interpretation of the Constitution.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that extended constitutional protection for abortion, marks one of the few times it has clawed back a right enjoyed by millions of Americans for decades.

“The court has never ever overturned a prior case extending a constitutional right,” said Cardozo Law professor Kate Shaw, an ABC News legal analyst. At the same time, other scholars say, it would be restoring the right of people to govern themselves through elected policymakers.

The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — allowing states to ban abortion — has put renewed focus on when and how the high court decides to reverse itself, and what some scholars say is a distinct shift in approach over the last 50 years.

“In most matters, it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right,” wrote Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932, famously summarizing the court’s approach to precedent at the time.

Justice Samuel Alito made clear the current majority has a different view: “When it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution,” Alito wrote in Dobbs, “we place a high value on having the matter ‘settled right.'”

The perceived “rightness” of a settled case has taken on new salience with the current Supreme Court, where five conservative justices — three appointed in the last five years — have signaled growing openness to revisit old “wrongs.”

“There is evidence that a weaker version of stare decisis — the presumption that the Supreme Court generally should not overrule its prior decisions — is in vogue on the court,” wrote University of Akron Law School professor Michael Gentithes in a 2020 law review analysis.

Gentithes says the high-water mark for the power of stare decisis was in the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when a conservative majority of justices reaffirmed the core holding of Roe even though a plurality considered it flawed.

“Then, as now, there were a bunch of new justices on the court who seemed quite skeptical of the soundness of Roe,” said Shaw. “And many people were very surprised to see the final outcome from a three justice majority of Republican appointees.”

Since then, as the court’s membership has changed, “poor reasoning” in a prior decision has become “ever-present justification” to attempt to overturn it, Gentithes’ analysis found.

Notably, it was Justice Alito who enshrined the court’s current approach to precedent in his 2018 opinion Janus v. AFSCME.

Laying out five factors he says justices should weigh in reversing a precedent, Alito put the quality of its reasoning as the paramount consideration — a standard that several of his justice peers have publicly embraced.

“I think a lot of people lack courage. They know what is right, and they’re scared to death of doing it. And then they come up with all these excuses for not doing it,” Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined Alito’s opinion in Janus, said last month about overturning cases he believes to be fundamentally wrong.

Two years later, Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion in Ramos v. Louisiana, put his spin on the approach, saying the precedent must be “grievously or egregiously” wrong to warrant overturning. But even then, he noted, justices should keep an eye on the reliance interests in a prior decision and a need to “maintain stability in the law.”

Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett all voted to overturn Roe and Casey.

“When one of our constitutional decisions goes astray, the country is usually stuck with the bad decision unless we correct our own mistake,” Alito explained.

Error correction has always been a factor in the Supreme Court’s rationale for overturning precedent, especially in matters of constitutional interpretation, which cannot easily be addressed by Congress.

While lawmakers could have attempted to amend the constitution to obliterate the Supreme Court’s racist “separate but equal” doctrine legitimized in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, it was the justices’ unanimous 1954 ruling to overturn Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education that set it right.

“I think the Plessy example is very persuasive, not that Roe should be overturned but that we don’t want a stare decisis doctrine written in stone — or even setting cement,” said Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department lawyer and ABC News legal analyst.

Justice Brandeis, a revered liberal icon of the court, acknowledged as much in his 1932 writing on stare decisis, noting that “lessons of experience and the force of better reasoning” may necessitate corrections.

But critics say contemporary emphasis on a prior decision’s reasoning — and its rightness or wrongness — may be undermining stare decisis and the credibility of the court.

“A court that changes its mind every time there is a new justice or different set of facts undermines the very concept of the rule of law and creates uncertainty for citizens, businesses and elected officials trying to go about their lives while following the laws of the land,” said Isgur.

Many legal scholars say overturning Roe also threatens precedents involving rights other than abortion not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, such as marriage.

“If the court is willing to overrule Roe v. Wade, after we just had confirmation hearings of justices come in and say it’s precedent upon precedent, it’s a ‘super precedent,’ it’s foundational,” said Rachel Barkow, vice-dean of New York University Law School, “what the public sees is that no precedent is safe, that stare decisis is meaningless to them and that anything is up for grabs.”

Alito attempts to head off the criticism in his decision, writing “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

“Everybody thinks that stare decisis is the idea that precedent counts for something, but it’s not absolute,” said University of Notre Dame law professor Sherif Girgis, a former clerk to Justice Alito. “It gets respect because it’s a precedent, but there’s always the possibility that it can be overturned if a bunch of other criteria are satisfied.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden on Friday harshly criticized the Supreme Court’s decision upending abortion rights and called on Congress to enshrine access in federal law.

“It’s a sad day for the court and the country,” Biden said as he delivered remarks from the Cross Hall of the White House.

“Today the Supreme Court of the United States expressly took away a constitutional right from the American people that it had already recognized,” he said. ‘They didn’t limit it, they simply took it away. That’s never been done to a right so important to so many Americans but they did it.”

The court’s conservative majority voted Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade as it upheld a Mississippi law that bans nearly all abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Justice Samuel Alito, who also authored the bombshell draft opinion leaked to the public earlier this year indicating this outcome, wrote in the opinion that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.”

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. The Court overrules those decisions and returns that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices slammed the majority’s opinion, writing that the decision essentially “says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of.”

Biden said he believed Roe was correctly decided, calling Friday’s ruling a “tragic error” by the high court.

Biden called on Congress to take action to enshrine abortion rights at the federal level.

“No executive action from the president can do that,” Biden said.

“This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” he added.

“This decision must not be the final word,” he said. “With your vote, you can act. You can have the final word.”

He called out President Donald Trump’s influence by name.

“It was three justices, named by one president, Donald Trump, who are the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country,” he said.

“Make no mistake: this decision is a culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law,” he said. “It is a realization of an extreme ideology, and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view.”

Abortion rights activists previously told ABC News they believed Biden could employ the Food and Drug Administration and Medicaid to fill gaps in care.

Biden took such action on Friday, stating he was instructing the Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees the FDA — to take steps to protect access to medication abortion in the wake of Roe being overturned.

Biden also expressed concern Friday that the ruling would impact other Supreme Court decisions relating to the notion of privacy — such as contraception and same-sex marriage rights.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion on Friday, stated such unenumerated rights should be reconsidered.

Thomas specifically called for the reconsideration of Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right of married couples to use contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, which protects the right to same-sex romantic relationships; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which establishes the right to same-sex marriage.

“Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” he wrote.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was met with immediate protest from individuals on both sides of the abortion debate. Biden called on Americans to keep all protests peaceful.

ABC News’ Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — When activists learned the Supreme Court was considering overturning abortion rights, they feared other rights, such as same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships and contraceptives, might be next.

On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade validated those concerns by stating that other precedents from the high court should be reconsidered.

Thomas called for the reconsideration of Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right of married couples to use contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, which protects the right to same-sex romantic relationships; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which establishes the right to same-sex marriage.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents,” he wrote.

“After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated,” Thomas wrote.

Activist groups across the country are sounding the alarm about a potential fight for previously protected LGBTQ and reproductive rights.

“The anti-abortion playbook and the anti-LGBTQ playbook are one and the same,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD, in a statement. “Our bodies, healthcare and our future belong to us, not to a meddling politician or extremist Supreme Court justices, and we will fight back.”

The lack of reference to “abortion” in the Constitution and the fact that “no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” was used in the opinion that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Still, Justice Samuel Alito stated in the opinion that other unenumerated rights that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution are not immediately in doubt.

“To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” the document states. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Thomas’ note to “correct the error” established in other precedents, however, has put LGBTQ groups like GLAAD, the National LGBTQ Task Force and reproductive rights organizations like Planned Parenthood, on edge.

“We must push back now – on all state and federal lawmakers and courts – to fight for abortion access and reproductive choice, the right for transgender people to access life-saving healthcare, the right to bodily autonomy, and the right to sexual freedom,” said Kierra Johnson, the executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, in a statement.

She continued, “These are our most basic liberties — to live a life of dignity, private from government interference. The Court has no place interfering with our constitutional right to make decisions about our own bodies.”

ABC News’ Devin Dwyer contributed to this report.

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