That is a lot more complicated. It isn’t intended to undermine the authority of the court so much as it is intended to undo something that a previous incarnation of the court did and that the majority of the current court probably no longer agrees with. The mechanism of judicial review is pretty much always the same though and is always present. Unconstitutional laws are passed all the time and the court generally doesn’t take offense.
Have you looked at how they’ve ruled on First and Second amendment cases in the last 10 years?
And you are correct about the decisions regarding an implied right to privacy, but there is a big difference between overruling a legislative overreach by a right only guaranteed by starre decisis, and one guaranteed by the constitution. This current court doesn’t give much weight to starre cases, regardless of what John Roberts said during his confirmation hearing (although Roberts seems to vote with the three liberal justices more when the six authoritarians go beyond where they should).
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I still think we need a 3-strikes law for Congress. If any law you voted for is later found to be unconstitutionally infringing upon the rights of citizens, that’s a strike. Vote for three such laws and you’re out; you get a scarlet letter proclaiming you to be a public menace, and become ineligible to run for public office ever again.
You may be a psycho like Empty G, but if you prove yourself in court to be a repeat offending mini-tyrant, sic semper tyrannis.
If nothing else, the President should be subject to this. His entire oath of office is to defend the Constitution. “You had one job…”
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You’d want to design the lawsuit legislation so it would sidestep Heller, which is the case that’s now used to define the extent of the Second amendment.
Are you sure you want such a law given how republicans control the supreme court? The possbilties for abuse are immense.
Everything the Court rules on sets precedent (stare decisis), including their interpretations of the First and Second Amendments. Heller, which you mentioned in another comment, sets the current interpretation of the Second Amendment through stare decisis.
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Well… the last frame telegraphs the solution; Violate someones civil rights with a suit, get lose $10,000.
Add in that an officer of the court get’s disbarred for a violation of the professional cannons.
Game over.
One of the immediate reactions to the law was to suggest that a friendly entity (who would not claim the money) file the lawsuit, as the law only allows someone to be sued once per infraction. Specifically, I think the idea was that if someone got threatened with a real lawsuit, they then get a friend to sue them and then not contest that one, so there would be no costs and it would short-circuit the real lawsuit.
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Right, in other words, when it doesn’t matter.
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I dunno that would work. It’s a per case thing. So they’d be doing it every time they performed an abortion.
And that does pretty much nothing for all the other reasons laws like this are harmful, and how over broad this particular one is. Every woman who had a miscarriage isn’t going to be suing herself or all the people around her who might get wrapped in. Uber and cab drivers aren’t going to be suing themselves every time they drive to a Reproductive Health clinic. Planned Parenthood can’t do this every time they do a pap smear, just to be safe.
The law is structured pretty carefully to end round the usual approach for judicial review by the Supreme Court.
Apparently the deal is that to challenge something on basis of constitutionality, you usually sue the government entities enforcing it. But the government doesn’t enforce this, private citizens do. Which really complicates challenging it.
There’s other approaches, but you run into a whole standing issue. Who’s impacted in a way that allows them to sue. And there are other reasons to challenge it, like for example the entire structure of the law being a huge, probably illegal disaster. So it comes down to who can sue in a way that directly attacks the tactic itself.
It’s basically built to give a majority conservative, anti-choice court excuses to punt on deciding cases. Which is exactly what happened. It isn’t even neccisarily meant for any suits people file to be successful, the “punishment” here is the costs of fighting the suits not neccisarily the $10k fine. Even if every single suit gets dismissed, and there’s good reason to believe they would. A clinic could go bankrupt just addressing them all.
A party with cleanly established standing has to sue on basis that the structure of the law itself is illegal. They’ll have to get through lower courts first as well, since one of the SC’s excuses for letting SB8 go into effect was the lack of lower court decisions.
It is directly designed to avoid being challenged directly in court, and on basis of it’s constitutionality. That’s a direct undermining of the court. The tactic here was not to instigate a legal challenge to Roe v Wade, it was to ban abortion in a way that couldn’t be challenged by Roe v Wade.
It’s an end round.
You’d want to basically copy SB8 to use the exact same justification for avoiding challenge in court at all. That’s how this thing is meant to function, and it’s a major thing that needs to get blowed up.
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What would help to begin with is the press understanding the law better. SCOTUS refusing to hear a challenge to SB8 on the shadow docket had to do with the plaintiff not having standing, as was mentioned here. Texas is getting hit on all sides right now, including by the DOJ, so it’s doubtful it will hold after cert is given and it’s argued before all nine justices.
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Yeah like I said, there’s other ways to go about it, other parties that may have standing.
I think that DOJ case is targeted at the structure of the law, and the way it blocks Federal rights/ability to enforce laws and protect rights.
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I think there is also the reality that Texas will be amending this law endlessly to block efforts to evade it – denying standing to various individuals and groups to engage in this kind of maneuver.
I don’t think the point of this campaign is ultimately to have a lot of these individual cases anyways – it’s to endlessly harrass abortion providers and advocates. I think Texas Republicans and the right wingers on the Supreme Court have an understanding that anything they do will get the longest possible delays and narrowest possible reversals, allowing the legislature to always be two steps ahead of anyone trying to continue the legacy of Roe v, Wade.
Meanwhile, expect swift and sweeping judicial activism against any liberal states, with rationalizing and concern driving trollies from the national press.
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I thought it looked more like Jared wossname, the son in law to the guy who was prez between Obama and Biden.
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that was the justification but hardly the reason
“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny,” Sotomayor wrote, “a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
the key word is opted. the majority made that choice because they’d rather not handle the challenge at all
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I’m not sure of this. IANAL. Who enforces the law? When a citizen sues a citizen, what prevents the target from telling the suiter to fuck off? Will law enforcement intervene? Will it go to court? Then the government is back in place as an actor.
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Because they don’t want to encourage such a deliberate attack on the court system’s ability to do its job…yet
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If you ignore a lawsuit, the Court will grant a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff. They will automatically win whatever they demanded in the Complaint and can get Sheriff’s Departments to enforce civil judgments. Ultimately the government enforces civil law. Claiming they are not the actor here is disingenuous.
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The part I don’t get is why there haven’t been tens, even hundreds, of thousands of lawsuits filed in Texas already. My impression was that the law was written such that there’s no chance of the plaintiff being slapped with court costs. Why doesn’t every legislator who voted for this fine law have to spend all day, every day, in court proving they’re not an abortionist?
(Or maybe they are an abortionist. Did they vote for funding roads that have been used to transport people for purposes of obtaining an abortion?)
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Have you met Justices Beer O’Clock or Amy Coney Gilead, yet?
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