This whole concept where citizens track each other / report personal information about others ... and then sue them / possibly profit (or just collect money) for events that seem to have nothing to do with them seems insane at every level.
That the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it is absolutely insane. Even operating on the assumption that the conservative majority on the court wanted to overturn Roe without having big headlines saying "Roe Overturned" choosing this absolutely insane law to do it is not going to do them any favors in the long term. The chance of this backfiring is so high that it's hard to imagine anybody looking at it and saying it was a good idea. How can they not be feeling like Roger Taney after Dred Scott right now? This could be the beginning of the end for restrictive abortion laws nationwide, to so decisively win a battle that costs you the war.
Edit: Wow, this is getting downvoted fast. I'm leaving it up so history can be the judge. I'm feeling confident that effectively issuing a Letter of Marque to every single US citizen on their own constituents is will turn out badly. This law is only going to be abused, and severely, unless the sensible minds in the courts wake up and put it on hold.
The Court rejected an emergency stay. It did not uphold the law. That will come after hearings next year.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-6-week-abortion-ban-p... (However, preliminary estimates suggest that the law could prevent roughly 132 procedures per day, or 4,009 per month.)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/03/texas-abortion...
Wait, so if I had even a thin basis for a suspicion, I could file cases against the legislators who voted for the bull?
From what I’ve read there is nothing preventing you from filing frivolous suits against the legislators. They have to defend themselves or face a summary judgement. The law as written is wide open for abuse. This could be amended with a provision that excludes legislators and rich politically connected people.
Granted, that provision is probably unconstitutional by itself, but it just goes to show you that the banning abortion part of the law is the least problematic part of the entire thing.
Exactly, just because it isn't specified or enumerated as a right in the constitution, doesn't mean it's not a right... right?
> The fact the Texas legislature came up with that completely ridiculous scheme is not that surprising.
People on this site tend to downvote if you talk based on perceived state attitudes. The same thing happens if you make blanket statements about California, it's citizens, or electorate.
But the law is crazy, unconstitutional and would start a tit-for-tat form of legislating that would completely delegitimize whatever legitimacy the government has left.
Note, the legislature is weird. It meets every other year, is basically a second job. Not sure Cali's professionalization of politics is better, but something has to give.
IIRC, biennial sessions used to be extremely common.
Why would you think that? It's not true.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state-experience...
> One reason for the change was the resurgence of state legislative power in the middle of the 20th century. Legislatures’ growing role in state government can be measured by the shift from biennial to annual legislative sessions. In 1940 only four state legislatures held annual sessions—and Alabama's legislature met only once every four years. In 2011, only four states still have biennial sessions—Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas. Two changes came recently: Arkansas with its first annual session in 2009, and Oregon with its first in 2011.
In 1940, 34 states had populations of 1 million+ and only one state had a population of less than 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
IANAL, but this is how I understand it. The supreme court does not strike down laws in a preliminary injunction, it just prevents the attorney-general or other applicable officials from enforcing it. This law is written so that the attorney general has no part in enforcing the law, so the supreme court can't do a preliminary injunction. It can only strike down the law once somebody tries to use the law and it bubbles its way up the court system.
But of course if everybody is too afraid to break the law, the law has effect without ever being applied.
The best suggestion I heard on how to get rid of it would be to have Massachusetts ban handguns using the same loophole. Somehow I think that this stacked court will come to its senses when it is the 2nd amendment being threatened rather than the 14th.
In this case totally _unrelated_ parties can sue, which seems entirely different.
They are very good at making laws to do what they want (in this case, leverage precdent to ensure that that wfeffoets to block the law before it went into effect did not succeed, maximizing the chilling effect on abortion provision).
> That the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it is absolutely insane.
The Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of the law (either the abortion restriction or the enforcement mechanism), it only validated the Texas Legislature's attempt to avoid a pre-implementation block against the law. While this enables the chilling effect of the law, it does not validate the substance of the law.
> That the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it is absolutely insane.
If you want an outcome-oriented reasoning explanation, I’d say the majority wanted to set back the availability of abortion without overturning row; indeed, while likely still upholding it once a case reaches it through the slow path it has required.
Instead, this is a way to get around constitutionality since it's not the government who is violating the constitution. Never mind all of other constitutional bits about due process that are being horribly trampled on (such as allowing people to sue without standing...).
It is certainly the end of medical privacy in the US, but it may even be the end of the Supremacy Clause, which gives the federal government the ability to pass laws that override state laws.
It's difficult to overstate how much of a threat this law is to the US Constitution.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/meet-the-legal-st...
Edit to add because I guess it wasn't obvious enough: The strategy would force the Supreme Court to quickly strike down both laws.
Now, I am not of the opinion that something has to be explicitly protected in the constitution for it to be a right. I prefer to assume a limited view of what behavior government has the authority to limit. However, if something is not explicitly protected in the constitution, then it is at least up for debate.
There's procedural implications for this distinction as well: the Supreme Court can overturn its prior precedent (as Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson). But the Supreme Court cannot overturn the text of the Constitution itself. Only an amendment by Congress can do that.
EDIT: Just to clarify, that procedural distinction means that the Supreme Court could uphold the Texas law while overturning a similar law restricting gun ownership without contradiction.
Aside from some archaic language, the second amendment is actually fairly clear. It is clearly talking about guns, and the phrase "shall not be infringed" is fairly strong, clear language.
On the other hand, the 14th amendment say nothing about abortion, and there's no reason to suggest the authors of that amendment had abortion in mind when they wrote it.
That does not mean that such a right does not exist, or that it needs to be explicitly mentioned in the Constitution to receive protection, but any judge who wants to assert that such a right exists is going to have to do a lot more work than one who wants to assert the existence of an individual right to own guns, even "assault weapons" (which is a largely nonsense category anyway).
Individuals shaming other individuals for "expressing opinions" are not "deputized," since there's no official act. We can talk on and on about whether it's it's good or not, but it's nowhere near as dangerous as states end-running civil liberties by appointing private citizens to do their dirty work.
Don’t think it’s comparable. If I have perfect vision, I don’t think I can sue a site for being unusable by blind people. Actual injury must be shown.
Similarly, Prop 65 allows for direct, private civil suits. Although it has seen some reforms in recent years, it took some really egregious settlements before that happened.
TL;DR: You can thank Californians for importing their crappy legal theories into Texas.