Originally published at: The Texas Anti-Abortion Law: What Could Happen Next? | Boing Boing
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I really don’t understand why California or DC hasn’t done this already.
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My guess is they want to see if the USSC upholds the law. If it does, then the flood gates are open. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Enacting such a law now could allow the reactionaries on the court to try to carve out an exemption for the 2nd amendment as part of their ruling.
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Because it’s a terrible idea as illustrated in the comic. There are more than enough federal and state statutes on the books to enforce gun control policy in states that aren’t actively trying to murder innocent people. Although there should be far more as well as direct financial liability and criminal penalty for failure to enforce.The fact is the there is systemic failure at all levels to enforce the few sane gun policies we do have because we’re being held hostage by an unhinged 2% of the population.
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Gun ownership? I can see that, but how about anyone who passes laws that infringe on the right to vote?
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Because California and D.C. aren’t nearly as anti-gun as Republicans make them out to be, nor as enthusiastic about dismantling the Constitution as Texas is.
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As described in the comic that would obviously fail constitutional muster.
But if California or New York allowed citizens to sue anyone who possesses an unlicensed firearm or who uses or carries a firearm in an unsafe manner (tying it to the phrase “well regulated” in the Second Amendment), that would still probably get smacked down by the Supremes but it would at least have a chance.
And since a citizen doesn’t have the right to demand to see another’s gun license, well, anyone carrying a firearm could be sued (and have to spend the time and money to defend themselves in court) because the plaintiff can’t know if they have a license.
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I’m not convinced that DC wouldn’t be happy to pass a law that says “A citizen may sue anyone for up to $10,000 for feeling threatened by the mere presence of a gun in a public place except if the gun is being transported from the place where it was purchased to a private residence or property.” That is, the law could be constructed to enforce the spirit of the laws that were already passed in DC before the Supreme Court struck them down.
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Never seen you here before, just popping in to say hello to a fellow Fox!
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As I see it, the point of DC or California passing such a law would largely be to illustrate the stupidity of the Court’s current position on the Texas law. I don’t expect that the Court would allow such a law to stand but they couldn’t throw out the law and keep Texas’s without actually overturning Roe.
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The other examples given are clearly covered by either the First or Second amendment, and wouldn’t stand for an instant, despite the makeup of the current court.
Quick question: What’s to stop physicians from suing themselves under the Texas law? Assuming that only one person can sue (yeah, I know there are multiple lawsuits for the one public example so far, but let’s assume for a moment that gets fixed), why not sue yourself before anyone else can? Then lose by default and pay yourself $10,000?
Or does the money go to the state?
I could research this myself, but there are some rabbit holes that are just to deep or messy for me to deal with this week.
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Doctors could sue each other so it evens out:
“I just saw that my partner in this abortion clinic performed an abortion”.
What about banning anti-vaccination propaganda with a $10,000 fine?
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Non-USian/non-lawyer asks. What (apart from, you know) stops the USSC from calling shenanigans, throwing the whole law out, and disbarring the person who thought up this bullshit?
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Is that Ben Shapiro?
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The right to an abortion as expressed in Roe v Wade is based largely on the right to privacy, which, while not explicitly stated in the Constitution, is implied from several other rights explicitly granted in the Constitution and its Amendments. The point being that the right to have an abortion is as grounded in the Constitution as is the right to own a firearm. Until SCOTUS overturns Roe v Wade, the right to have an abortion is protected by the Constitution. So there would be no substantive difference between a law doing an end run around the Constitution to ban gun ownership and a law doing an end run around the Constitution to ban abortion.
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USian non-lawyer. The Supreme Court isn’t usually involved in disciplining lawyers but they can and should throw out the Texas law. The problem is that it hasn’t actually reached the court yet through the trial process. An attempt at a temporary injunction against the law failed because as the cartoon points out, under the Court’s interpretation of the law the actual litigants would have to at least include someone being sued under the law to show harm and at the time of the request for injunction, that hadn’t happened.
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A doctor could technically sue themselves, if a judge will stand for it. I suspect the Center for Reproductive Rights and other orgs are probably holding a similar tactic in their back pocket, in case direct challenges don’t work. A group whose sole purpose is to sue abortion providers and win, so no one else can sue and request the court order additional remedies and punishments (which is possible with this awful law). But to do so atm would undermine the effort to obtain injunctions against the enforcement of the law and getting it declared unconstitutional.
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There must be some mechanism to nullify something so clearly intended to undermine the authority of the court. Surely.
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