More than two weeks have passed since the Supreme Court’s extraordinarily rushed arguments over Texas’ unique abortion law without any word from the justices.
They raised expectations of quick action by putting the case on a rarely used fast track. And yet, to date, the court’s silence means that women cannot get an abortion in Texas, the second-largest state, after about six weeks of pregnancy.
That’s before some women know they’re pregnant and long before high court rulings dating to 1973 that allow states to ban abortion.
There has been no signal on when the court might act and no formal timetable for reaching a decision.
The law has been in effect since Sept. 1 and the court has been unable to muster five votes to stop it, said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University’s law school. “While there is some sense of urgency, some justices had more of a sense of urgency than others,” Ziegler said.
[…]
The Texas law is doing what its authors intended. In its first month of operation, a study published by researchers at the University of Texas found that the number of abortions statewide fell by 50% compared with September 2020. The study was based on data from 19 of the state’s 24 abortion clinics, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
Texas residents who left the state seeking an abortion also have had to travel well beyond neighboring states, where clinics cannot keep up with the increase in patients from Texas, according to a separate study by the Guttmacher Institute.
The Supreme Court is weighing complex issues in two challenges brought by abortion providers in Texas and the Biden administration. Those issues include who, if anyone, can sue over the law in federal court, the typical route for challenges to abortion restrictions, and whom to target with a court order that ostensibly tries to block the law.
Under Supreme Court precedents, it’s not clear whether a federal court can restrain the actions of state court judges who would hear suits filed against abortion providers, court clerks who would be charged with accepting the filings or anyone who might some day want to sue.
People who sue typically have to target others who already have caused them harm, not those who might one day do so and not court officials who are just doing their jobs by docketing and adjudicating the cases.
The justices’ history with the Texas law goes back to early September when, by a 5-4 vote, they declined to stop it from taking effect.
At the time, five conservative justices, including the three appointees of President Donald Trump, voted to let the law take effect. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberals in dissent.
The abortion providers had brought the issue to the court on an emergency basis. After they were rebuffed, the Justice Department stepped in with a suit of its own.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted the Justice Department’s request for an order that put the law on hold. Pitman wrote in a 113-page ruling that the law denied women in Texas their constitutional right to an abortion and he rejected the state’s arguments that federal courts shouldn’t intervene.
But just two days later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overrode Pitman and allowed the law to go back into effect.
The Justice Department made its own emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. Rather than rule on that appeal, the court decided to hear the two suits just 10 days later and without the benefit of an appellate court decision.
You know the story. It’s hard to see this as anything but deliberate foot-dragging at this point. It would have been completely normal at the beginning for SCOTUS to put the law on hold while the litigation played out, but they chose not to do so in the most obsequious way possible. That they still haven’t sure looks like a choice to me. And barring an unexpected holiday week order, this atrocity of a law will remain in place as the Mississippi challenge to Roe v Wade gets its hearing. Stay mad, y’all. The Chron and Daily Kos have more.
20 days and counting………
Pingback: SCOTUS hears Mississippi abortion case today – Off the Kuff