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THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION is asking the US Supreme Court to block the Texas law banning most abortions, while the fight over the measure’s validity plays out in the courts.
The law has been in effect since September, aside from a district court-ordered pause that lasted just 48 hours, and bans abortions once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks and before some women know they are pregnant.
The Justice Department asked the high court to lift an order imposed by a conservative federal appeals court that has allowed Texas to continue enforcing the nation’s strictest curbs on abortion through a novel law that was written to make it hard to challenge in the federal court system.
The department had announced its intentions last Friday.
It is not clear whether the administration will prevail at a Supreme Court with a conservative majority that has been fortified by three appointees of former president Donald Trump and already has agreed to hear a major challenge to abortion rights in a case from Mississippi.
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It’s definitely a clever law in that it bypasses federal prosucutions by allowing anyone to sue (and make money off) anyone involved in such an abortion (except the one undergoing the procedure). So it’s consequently hard to challenge the law, and that may well be the formal reason for not blocking it. If other states then follow the Texas route, the bizarre situation could arise that Roe vs Wade formally still holds, but only in theory.
@Mick Tobin: It also sets precedent for many other such laws, bypassing constitutional rights with state-sponsored vigilantism.
@Mick Tobin: you say clever, I would say devious and cynical. They created a law they knew to be unconstitutional and tried to dodge the oversight of the SOCTUS.
Think that SOCTUS may take the law down because it circumvents them and that sets a dangerous president
@Colm O’ Shea: it is very clever and it is not unconstitutional. They just went and got around it. If people want to have an abortion they can but it will leave, the people who are assisting them as the ones being targeted by the law. To stop it SCOTUS will have to direct another court to amend Roe v Wade or write a new law to stop people bypassing constitutional laws. A dangerous precedent but a clever one. If I were part of the pro choice legal team, I would be looking at our laws on this
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