Thus beginning to chip away at the landmark women’s Right’s decision on abortion of Roe vs Wade….
The vote was 5-4….
The minority voting judges where heated in their dissent…….
The court’s five most consistent conservatives — Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., plus President Donald Trump’s nominees to the court, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — said they would let the law stand while the legal battle over it continues.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s three liberals to say he would have kept the law from being implemented while the legality of the law was weighed in court. He described the Texas statute’s enforcement plan as “not only unusual, but unprecedented” and said it deserved more exacting judicial scrutiny…..
…
Abortion providers say the ban — which relies on private citizens to sue people who help women get forbidden abortions — effectively eliminates the guarantee in Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that women have a right to end their pregnancies before viability, and that states may not impose undue burdens on that decision.
It was specifically designed to turn away pre-enforcement challenges in federal courts. With the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene, the most likely challenge will come after the law is used by a private citizen. Then the person sued could contest the constitutionality of the law, with the backing of abortion providers and abortion rights groups….
…
About 85 to 90 percent of women who obtain abortions in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy, meaning the law would prohibit nearly all abortions in the state.
“Patients will have to travel out of state — in the middle of a pandemic — to receive constitutionally guaranteed health care. And many will not have the means to do so,” CRR’s Northrup said in a statement. “It’s cruel, unconscionable, and unlawful.”…
…
Individuals who are sued under the ban could be required to pay the person who brought the lawsuit at least $10,000 for each abortion the defendant was involved in. Critics say the law places a “bounty” on the heads of those who assist with abortions….
More…
The 5 of the High Court ARE taking a beatdown ….
Supreme Court Abets Lawlessness in Texas
Jonathan Bernstein: “Those of us who believe that Roe v. Wade was correct when it gave women a constitutional right to abortion in 1973 are obviously unhappy with the Supreme Court’s ‘shadow docket’ decision to de facto overturn it — or, as Dahlia Lithwick put it in Slate Wednesday evening, Roe was ‘overruled this week, or nullified, or merely paused for a few million people.’”
“But well beyond that: Procedure matters, and the ad hoc, unjustified procedure in this case — procedure that produced a sharp and compelling dissent from Chief Justice John Roberts, who may eventually join a majority to destroy or overturn Roe — may have done as much to undermine the rule of law as anything we’ve seen in these last years of threats to constitutional government.”
“It simply can’t be the case that state governments can eliminate established constitutional rights by structuring laws so that they must go into effect, thus robbing people of those rights, without the courts having any option of stopping them. That’s what Texas and a handful of judges have done in this case, and it’s wrong and it’s lawless even if Roe was incorrectly decided.”
This could pass in the House but is doubtful in the Senate….
Jennifer Bendery
@jbendery
JUST IN: Nancy Pelosi announces the House will take up legislation to codify Roe v. Wade — enshrining abortion rights into federal law — as soon as the House returns from recess.
The actual decision ,which I admittedly have not read , was a denial on procedural grounds.
Accordingly ,what will need to happen is someone will need to be charged .Then the procedural wheels will start rolling.
Thank you
All the same Texas abortion services have stoped it is being reported for those over the state limit right now…..
One would assume no place wants to have the monetary liability…..
I doubt the Feds can get around this and House could vote to codify Roe but forget the the Senate unless they put the action in the reconciliation action
Arkanas is drafting the same legislation i hear…..
Having said that,I presume that vote would be similiar to this one on a vote to actually overturn Roe, Roberts being the only unknown.
Conclusion?Roe will likely be overturned in the near future.
Pro Choice forces would be better advised to prepare for that eventuality rather than spend time in a futile quest to appeal to the conservatives on the court to Change their minds.
I would add that all this is the result of so called “moderates” who in 2016 wanted to “ drain the swamp” by voting for Donald Trump because they didn’t “like” Hillary Clinton.
You get the government you deserve!
Nat’l Review’s Editors:
Just before midnight, the Supreme Court, over the incoherent objections of four dissenting justices, denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the clarity, courage, and commitment to the rule of law that the five justices demonstrated in the midst of intense fury from the Left — and in the face of an exasperating cop-out by Chief Justice Roberts — are heartening indeed…
The Supreme Court majority saw clearly through the huge holes in the emergency application. There was no reason to address the substantive question whether the Act is consistent with Roe and Casey because the abortion providers had failed to meet their burden on the “complex and antecedent procedural questions” that their request presented. The Court has the power to “enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves,” and the abortion providers hadn’t shown that any of the defendants should be enjoined from doing anything.
The ruling should have been unanimous, as the patent weakness of the four dissents shows. Chief Justice Roberts, a sometime champion of jurisdictional limits on the federal judiciary, agrees that “existing doctrines [might] preclude judicial intervention,” but he somehow imagines that the Court can intervene temporarily in order to enable the lower courts to figure out whether they can intervene permanently. Like the other dissenters, he doesn’t hold the abortion providers to the burden of proving their entitlement to relief. Nor do any of the dissenters, amidst their sound and fury, undertake to explain what relief they would order against which defendants in a way that would somehow prevent the millions of nonparty individuals from enforcing the Act in hundreds of Texas courts. Breyer, for example, posits that “it should prove possible to apply procedures adequate to that task here,” but his idle speculation about possible alternatives never confronts the reality that those alternatives aren’t available with respect to the only eight defendants in the case….
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/supreme-court-gets-it-right-on-texas-abortion-law/
Yea Right?
So individuals can sue even if they are NOT part of the specific action?
Doesn’t the court routinely drop cases for THAT reason?
Did i get this right?
No
James, my computer or the web or this website keeps erasing my comments before posting, so I’ll be brief.
The Court’s majority believes, at least for now, that the requirement of “standing” imposed on Federal lawsuits by the “cases and controversies” phrase in the U.S. Constitution need not apply to civil lawsuits under a state constitution. So they see no Federal requirement that a private plaintiff must show that he or she has a direct interest in the matter, or might suffer direct harm from the provider, abettor or seeker of a post-six-week abortion.
However this is sure to be revisited once someone is sued by a private plaintiff.
Jack [or any other lawyer who might be reading this] might be better able to explain standing and how or whether it might apply here.
You explained it fairly well.
Thank You on court’s ‘rush’ to judgment……
Roberts seems to have lost his handle
They seem to have stirred up a legsl hornets nest?
A ‘fix’ Jack?
There is scant mention of Roe v Wade in their dance on this
Miss case could be a ‘fix ‘ or the Right learners Joy of the historic cases going in the garbage…..
Again
Congress won’t address this like immigration
They can’t too much or set right too much either
Center Right is what i have said here for a LONG TIME…..
What in the Hell are you talking about?
What “fix?”
You are increasingly just making things up and then “responding “to imaginary posts.
All I did above is tell DSD that he had offered a goid explanation of the topic.
Damn if I didn’t see you mention a ‘fix’….
If it wasn’t u….
Then my mistake…..
More beatdowns on the Supreme’s….
Most of the time, the Supreme Court appears to the public like a cautiously deliberative body. Before issuing major rulings, the justices pore over extensive written briefs, grill lawyers in oral arguments and then take months to draft opinions explaining their reasoning, which they release at precisely calibrated moments.
Then there is the “shadow docket.”
With increasing frequency, the court is taking up weighty matters in a rushed way, considering emergency petitions that often yield late-night decisions issued with minimal or no written opinions. Such orders have reshaped the legal landscape in recent years on high-profile matters like changes to immigration enforcement, disputes over election rules, and public-health orders barring religious gatherings and evictions during the pandemic….
More…
I had been directly answering James’ question near the start of this thread near the middle of this comments section:
Going along me inquiry it appears that some on rhe right are raising the SAME question and ain’t happy with their people on the court…….
Hmmmm?
Could the fab 5 have fucked up?
Full official texts of the four dissents (12 pp. total in PDF)
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a24_8759.pdf
Kentucky’s Attorney General to Defend Abortion Law
New York Times: “The Supreme Court heard arguments in an abortion case on Tuesday, but the issue for the justices was a procedural one: Could Kentucky’s attorney general, a Republican, defend a state abortion law when the governor, a Democrat, refused to pursue further appeals after a federal appeals court struck down the law?”
“As the argument progressed through a thicket of technical issues, a majority of the justices seemed inclined to say yes.”