Texas Heartbeat Abortion Law

[Romana]

,also, 🪛

 

[Sredni Eel]

Abbott needs to stop thinking Minority Report is some sort of instruction video.

 

[Free]

then says he is going to eliminate rape by arresting all future rapists.

So...he's going to arrest all men? I mean, you can never be certain...

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

So...he's going to arrest all men? I mean, you can never be certain...

Gotta keep those contractual obligations to for profit prisons.

 

[Free]

Gotta keep those contractual obligations to for profit prisons.

I really need a cha-ching reaction right now.

 

[Romana]

At least moneybags. Or eyes with dollar signs in them.

 

[Free]

I'd take a greedy looking version of the euro symbol.

 

[Romana]

I'd take a greedy looking version of the euro symbol.

Like this?

Euro smiley emoticon. Yellow laughing 3d emoji with black eur symbols in place of eyes and red opened mouth Stock Vector Image & Art - Alamy

Download this stock vector: Euro smiley emoticon. Yellow laughing 3d emoji with black eur symbols in place of eyes and red opened mouth. - MCAJFT from Alamy's library of millions of high resolution stock photos, illustrations and vectors.

www.alamy.com

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Good news for all Texans: the supreme court of Mexico decriminalized abortion, ruling that penalizing it is unconstitutional.

Mexico's top court decriminalizes abortion in 'watershed moment'

Mexico's Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, a major victory for advocates of women's health and human rights, just as parts of the United States enact tougher laws against the practice.

www.reuters.com

 

[danielravennest]

Good news for all Texans: the supreme court of Mexico decriminalized abortion, ruling that penalizing it is unconstitutional.

Mexico's top court decriminalizes abortion in 'watershed moment'

Mexico's Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Tuesday that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, a major victory for advocates of women's health and human rights, just as parts of the United States enact tougher laws against the practice.

www.reuters.com

So if Taco Bell opened abortion clinics on the other side of the Rio Grande, Texas women could make a "run for the border"?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

One question that rather puzzles me, and I don't know if anyone's seen it properly discussed elsewhere -- Roe vs Wade notwithstanding, surely the whole bizarre apparatus of enforcement by incentivised officious busybodies must be open to question on constitutional grounds, must it not?

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Indeed it is. Usually a suit requires that the party be injured to sue. That requires a specific harm done by the defendant. This law also allows multiple people to file suit independently and forbids the court from awarding fees if they lose, so there is no risk to file a suit. All of these should have been enough to grant a stay.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Indeed it is. Usually a suit requires that the party be injured to sue. That requires a specific harm done by the defendant. This law also allows multiple people to file suit independently and forbids the court from awarding fees if they lose, so there is no risk to file a suit. All of these should have been enough to grant a stay.

So Texas has just passed a law that the Supreme Court will doubtless find unconstitutional on multiple grounds that have nothing to do with Roe vs Wade?

 

[Romana]

So Texas has just passed a law that the Supreme Court will doubtless find unconstitutional on multiple grounds that have nothing to do with Roe vs Wade?

This court? They should find it unconstitutional,but I'm not counting on it.

However :

 

[Grey Mars]

So Texas has just passed a law that the Supreme Court will doubtless find unconstitutional on multiple grounds that have nothing to do with Roe vs Wade?

My general understanding of the game moves being played is that the court was supposed to find it unconstitutional the first time and block it from ever happening. This is a common tactic of the right, to make bloody red meat laws they never actually intend to have go through. They get to seem hard line to their frothing rage base without the hassle of ACTUALLY doing any of the things they say they want.

Only this time something went wildly wrong. The right wingers who have been doing this for decades forgot that they'd pushed through total amateurs to make up the supreme court super majority. They forgot to tell their own people that they wanted to lose. So the noobs on the court stuck it on a shadow docket and handed the right the victory they always claimed they wanted.

The interesting question is if they'll have the play book sorted out by the time it gets contested back to the supreme court. On the one hand, there's decades of outrage machine that usually operates with all parties moving in perfect lockstep. On the other hand, there's the fresh morons who have by now realized that the lifetime appointments that were handed to them mean that they don't have to publicly lick the boots of power when told. ...and on the other other hand are all the outright lunatics whispering in whatever ear they can catch.

It's going to be a flaming train wreck from start to finish. What remains to be seen is what cargo the flaming train wreck is carrying, and who it runs over on the way.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

The real reason the right doesn't want to actually ban abortions [well, the smart ones] is that abortion issues are legit the only reason some people vote for them, so if it goes, they lose even more voters.

This from my pro-life mom who is also a democrat [she's anti war, death penalty, pro social program, so I'll give her that title, even if I disagree on her anti-choice stance]. So, the GQP seems like it's trying to kill itself more ways than one.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

My general understanding of the game moves being played is that the court was supposed to find it unconstitutional the first time and block it from ever happening. This is a common tactic of the right, to make bloody red meat laws they never actually intend to have go through. They get to seem hard line to their frothing rage base without the hassle of ACTUALLY doing any of the things they say they want.

Only this time something went wildly wrong. The right wingers who have been doing this for decades forgot that they'd pushed through total amateurs to make up the supreme court super majority. They forgot to tell their own people that they wanted to lose. So the noobs on the court stuck it on a shadow docket and handed the right the victory they always claimed they wanted.

The interesting question is if they'll have the play book sorted out by the time it gets contested back to the supreme court. On the one hand, there's decades of outrage machine that usually operates with all parties moving in perfect lockstep. On the other hand, there's the fresh morons who have by now realized that the lifetime appointments that were handed to them mean that they don't have to publicly lick the boots of power when told. ...and on the other other hand are all the outright lunatics whispering in whatever ear they can catch.

It's going to be a flaming train wreck from start to finish. What remains to be seen is what cargo the flaming train wreck is carrying, and who it runs over on the way.

I have to say, I'm thoroughly confused by the US legal system, which seems massively confusing even before taking into account there's both the state and the federal system to worry about.

Generally, over here things start in the lower courts and work their way up. While proceedings can be fast-tracked, as they were several times during the run-up to Brexit, they have to start off in the lower courts and make their way up the appeals system from there.

So I don't find it particularly surprising that the US Supreme Court wouldn't hear this case direct because, were there a similar situation here, everything would be put pretty much on hold while the matter was argued before various different courts, with cases on differing points probably being joined at the appellate stage, and only then would they reach our Supreme Court (and possibly the ECHR, too).

That, as far as I can see, is what's happening in Texas -- a local judge has already issued a temporary restraining order, preventing people suing Planned Parenthood, under this law, and that will presumably be made permanent after oral arguments in a week or so, and then it'll go through the state and federal appeals system, along with any other parallel cases and any actions brought by the Justice Department.

So the law has, if I correctly understand the situation (and I'm not sure I do), been temporarily suspended, just as it would have been had the Supreme Court granted the application, only by a different procedure.

The other thing I don't understand, and I hope we don't get to see demonstrated in practice, is how "changing Roe vs Wade" might work.

Roe vs Wade, as I understand it, interprets the Fourteenth Amendment in a way that creates a constitutionally-protected general right to privacy under certain circumstances, and further interprets this right to privacy to mean that a woman has the right to make her own decisions about her own body without the state interfering save under certain, very limited, circumstances.

What, in practice, would changing or overturning Roe vs Wade mean? In effect, the court would be saying, "Our predecessors were mistaken back in 1973 when they decided the Fourteenth Amendment means such-and-such. It doesn't. This is what it actually means, and here are the reasons why."

Well, OK, they could say that, but what would follow? For the last 50 years the Fourteenth Amendment hasn't meant what we thought it did, and here is what it actually does mean?

That creates legal and constitutional chaos, since no one will know what appellate court decisions based on Roe vs Wade mean any more, many of which will be in areas not apparently related to women's reproductive rights, and really isn't the sort of lunacy I would associate with any kind of legal conservative. I just don't see how it could happen.

ETA: It occurs to me that everyone, and particularly legal conservatives, should, in fact, be very reluctant to advance the proposition that rights that people had thought they enjoyed because of the decision of one supreme court can then be unilaterally removed by another court, simply because the newer judges disagree with their predecessors.

Quite apart from the fact that rights already recognised in law should only be removable by proper legislative process, there are a lot of First and Second Amendment decisions dating back over the last thirty or forty years that conservatives really would not want reopening.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

o

I have to say, I'm thoroughly confused by the US legal system, which seems massively confusing even before taking into account there's both the state and the federal system to worry about.
...
The other thing I don't understand, and I hope we don't get to see demonstrated in practice, is how "changing Roe vs Wade" might work.
...

ETA: It occurs to me that everyone, and particularly legal conservatives, should, in fact, be very reluctant to advance the proposition that rights that people had thought they enjoyed because of the decision of one supreme court can then be unilaterally removed by another court, simply because the newer judges disagree with their predecessors.

Quite apart from the fact that rights already recognised in law should only be removable by proper legislative process, there are a lot of First and Second Amendment decisions dating back over the last thirty or forty years that conservatives really would not want reopening.

The Supreme Court has been extremely reluctant to reverse decisions. Of the two decisions that are most famously wrong, one was reversed by Constitutional amendment (Dredd Scott, which stripped African Americans of all legal rights including citizenship) and the other (Plessy v Ferguson which established the "separate but equal" doctrine that was the backbone of legal segregation in the US) was reversed by a series of later Court decisions.

Plessy was reversed in a series of decisions. For decades groups including the NAACP had brought suit whenever there was no equivalent public resource for people of color. They started winning cases in the Southwest where Hispanic students were blocked from attending public schools in rural communities and no alternative was provided. Next they went after specialized graduate schools in the South including medical and law schools.

After chipping away at and making slow progress, the NAACP came up with data that demonstrated that separate schools were inherently unequal. Brown v Board of Education consolidated several cases, and established the legal basis for desegregation of schools. Implementation is still ongoing.

tl:dr: The Supreme Court has been extremely reluctant to reverse major decisions.

But, starting in the Regan Administration, the Republicans began working to stack the Federal bench in their favor and put in place people willing to reverse Roe (and most likely a few other key decisions like Ogerfell which allowed full marriage rights for same sex couples (and a fair number of Southern "conservatives" would like to reverse Loving, which allowed mixed race couples to marry)).

Normally in the face of a change of this magnitude, the Court would stay the law and allow lower courts to develop a trial history while the status quo remained in place. In many cases, they wait to act until there is a conflict between two circuits, since a circuit court decision is only binding in the circuit where it was made.

If they reverse Roe, the first result will be reverting to a patchwork of state laws determining access to abortion as well as a number of forms of birth control. Southern states will immediately pass draconian restriction, something they have been doing frequently already hoping to generate a case to overturn Roe. The Midwest will be a battleground, possibly motivating enough people to become active to reverse the "conservative" lean in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Only the Northeast and the West Coast will continue to allow current levels of access to healthcare.

The longer term will be anyone's guess. As you note, Roe is tied to many legal protections of privacy. Some of those will still stand under Fourth Amendment grounds. But they are using a cleaver to edit decades of jurisprudence while they focus on one narrow objective without considering the broader implications.

eta: "Conservatives" are also interested in undoing State Inclusion, which is the mechanism that underpins most Federal rights cases. Prior to the 20th Century, it was generally held that the Federal Bill of Rights only limited actions of the Federal Government, and states could only be limited by their own Constitutions. In a series of decisions the Supreme Court came to hold that the language of the 14th Amendment that guaranteed rights and due process to all citizens prohibited states from violating the Bill of Rights. This is an important step in the reasoning of Roe, as well as many other cases. Dismantling State Inclusion would make state governments far more powerful and would lead to a patchwork of rights depending on where you live.

 

[Cristiano]

Justice Department sues Texas over six-week abortion ban

www.cnn.com

READ: Justice Department lawsuit against Texas over its abortion restrictions | CNN Politics

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit Thursday to challenge the restrictive Texas abortion law.

www.cnn.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]