Maybe people just don’t care because they recognize that destroying the lives of countless women will weed out some percieved competition for themselves. Misogyny is the norm not the exception, even on the “left” after all.
The more I read about this law the more layers of horror there are:
The patient may not be sued, but doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, people who help pay for the procedure, and even an Uber driver taking a patient to an abortion clinic are all potential defendants. Plaintiffs, who do not need to live in Texas, have any connection to the abortion or show any injury from it, are entitled to $10,000 and their legal fees recovered if they win. Prevailing defendants are not entitled to legal fees.
So
- Any person in America (or even outside the US?) can basically take any Texan to court over suspicion that they had something to do with an abortion, and they get $10K a pop if they win.
- Even a person falsely accused of helping a pregnant woman get an abortion can be out thousands of dollars in legal fees with no recourse and no means of disincentivizing overzealous bounty hunters from making more baseless claims against them or others.
I wonder if this is where the Supreme Court will come into play.
There will be a test case and that’s when the lawyers will figure out how to challenge the whole thing.
Or:
“Kill the poor, not the unborn.” (Factsheet 5)
They could have issued an injunction, but choose not to do so. That signals how they’re going to decide, I think.
We’re fucked. If you live in a state with a GOP controlled legislature, you’re fucked if you’re a woman.
I’m not sure how all those provisions are even constitutional no matter the thing they’re trying to relegate.
They’re constitutional because the SCOTUS when asked to see it, said they didn’t think it was a problem.
Not granting the injunction means the SCOTUS thinks however it shook out is fine and legal.
Sinces the SCOTUS’s only major job is to decide what is and isn’t constitutional, this means they’ve decided it’s constitutional.
It’s NOT. They are not upholding the constitution, which prohibits these sorts of invasions of privacy, but are basing their decision to let this stand due to right wing, Christian Dominion ideology that some members of the court subscribe to.
It’s just so clear to me that this would be a recipe for disaster even if it was a policy designed to prevent something everyone agreed was a crime.
Imagine that Texas enacted a law allowing any U.S. citizen to sue any Texan they suspected of sexual assault along with anyone they deemed an accomplice, with a $10K prize if they won and zero consequences for losing. How long would it take before the courts were clogged with frivolous cases? How long before citizens screamed at the injustice of falsely accused men being burdened with the social stigma and financial burden of defending themselves against such accusations?
This SCOTUS has decided to grant more rights to people accused of rape than to people accused of facilitating an abortion.
Well, this is a really, really insane aspect of this. The Texas law is fucked in half. The fact that it restricted abortion is the only reason they are giving it a pass. If you wrote a similar law against something unambiguously bad and illegal (like say robbery) it would be plainly absurd. You can lose a court battle on balance of probabilities rather than beyond a reasonable doubt and have to pay a penalty to someone who wouldn’t even have been affected if you had done it.
The supreme court basically had to balance their desire to make abortion illegal against the individual’s right to a trial and decided the former was more important.
They are so hell-bent on taking away women’s rights that they are willing to fuck over Texas legal system in the process.
If that doesn’t show how committed they are to making Gilead a reality, I don’t know what is…
The right has repeatedly shown it cares more about balls of cells than actual people. Maybe tell them fetuses are increasing their taxes and see what happens.
How is the state of TX funding these $10k bounties? Is there a fund? How much have they budgeted?
At the risk of being taken for defending the indefensible decision of the Court, that’s not really true. And I think it’s important to understand what the Court did here and what it didn’t do.
This was an emergency petition for a stay of enforcement of a law. It wasn’t the merits challenge to that law (which presumably will come later). A stay is an extraordinary remedy, meaning that the deck is stacked against the person asking for it. The person seeking a stay or injunction has to make a strong showing of four elements: likelihood of success on the merits, prejudice (EDIT: or irreparable harm–not sure which standard is in use in this circumstance), lack of prejudice to the other side, and that a stay or injunction will serve the public interest.
The Court decided the question wrongly, but it did so on a very narrow ground: because the court stays enforcement and not the law itself, and because Texas outsourced enforcement to private individuals via civil liability, the conservative justices said they couldn’t stay enforcement because they only had the power to stay enforcement by government actors.
Again, the ruling is absolutely bullshit shenanigans, as Justice Sotomayor’s dissent correctly points out. But what it isn’t is a holding that the Texas law is constitutional or that similar laws would be constitutional. It’s a preliminary ruling that the persons seeking a stay hadn’t met their burden.
When the Court later hears the merits case re the Mississippi abortion law, it will be in a very different procedural posture. Abortion laws are subject to “undue burden” analysis, which puts a thumb on the scale in favor of those challenging the law. So long as the court concludes (1) that there is still a fundamental right to abortion and (2) the Mississippi law unduly burdens that right, it must reject the Mississippi law. There is, of course, no guarantee that it will say yes on either of those questions, and the Texas debacle is a depressing preview of which way the conservative justices are leaning. But that is a fight that is yet to come and it is not yet lost.
this sorts of ties into one of Umberto Eco’s insights in his overquoted Ur-fascism.
Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism , a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter.
That’s how religion works too.
Since gods are incapable of expressing will, clergy pretend to be their interpreters.
I have to imagine that they are counting on the idea that only people on their team will launch these lawsuits and only people on the other team will be targeted by them. They are probably right. I’d love to think that a US billionaire could bankroll a bunch of lawsuits against Texas lawmakers who may be planning on helping someone have an abortion in the future, but they’d probably just get thrown out (even if the judges oppose the law, since those judges are probably scrupulous).
The reality is hard times ahead and a lot of people risking serious personal consequences to help women have abortions.
