Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review, has a gimlet eye for political humbug. He brings that talent to the current abortion news.
Every Supreme Court Justice President Trump Appointed Just Voted for the Texas Abortion Ban https://t.co/jC1OAozUd6 pic.twitter.com/nhvGEYWyYe
— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) September 3, 2021
McCarthy Sounds Off
McCarthy: Once, when Shakespeare crafted a tale of comic intrigue, he called it “Much Ado about Nothing.” The title would be just as apt for the Supreme Court’s late night INACTION Wednesday in what is best understood as a non-case about Texas’s fetal heartbeat law.
Because the matter involves the Left’s most sacred cow, abortion, there is the now-familiar hysteria. Yet, nothing has really happened. All the Court did, because it could not properly do otherwise, is let the Texas law go into effect.
Naturally, there came strident dissents from four justices – Chief Justice John Roberts, along with the tribunal’s three progressives, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. We’re talking abortion here, and since there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion, and certainly no RIGHT to terminate the lives of unborn children, the Left has for a half-century substituted stridency for jurisprudence.
It’s Just Noise
But it’s just noise. Contrary to media-Democrat complex demagoguery, the Court has not green-lighted restrictions on abortion that gut Roe v. Wade. Indeed, the five-justice majority was emphatic that it was not rendering a decision on the contested provision’s validity: “[W]e stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substance claim in the applicants’ lawsuit. In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law[.]”
The law prohibits abortion, except in the case of a medical emergency, “if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child … or failed to perform a test to detect a fetal heartbeat.”
To be sure, the statute would make it illegal in Texas for providers to perform elective, pre-viability abortions – the kind permitted under Roe v. Wade (1973) as refined by Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania (1992). Inevitably, the Supreme Court will have to rule on the validity of such a ban. As we shall see, though, probably not in this case.
An interesting twist is that the Texas law is not a criminal provision and it may not be enforced by state officials. Instead, it creates a private, civil right of action: If a doctor performs an abortion in violation of the law’s terms, he or she could be sued for $10,000, although a plaintiff would have to establish legal standing to file a lawsuit.
Supreme Court’s Opinion
The Supreme Court’s brief opinion Wednesday night involved a lawsuit – Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson – in which abortion providers tried to sue state officials, judges, and a pro-life activist. But there is no case against those defendants: The state officials have no power to enforce the law and have sovereign immunity. Settled law bars precluding state courts from entertaining lawsuits. And the pro-life activist filed an affidavit attesting that he had no plans to file any lawsuits for violations of the law.
The abortion providers knew this. They were trying to game the system: They dawdled for over two months after the law was enacted, waiting until it was about to go into effect. Then they sought an injunction against its operation, hoping a federal court would block the law without grappling with such inconveniences as the fact that there is no legal basis to sue people who can’t or haven’t taken an action they are not required to take.
Naturally, the abortion providers found a friendly Obama-appointed judge who tried to accommodate them by absurdly ruling that the state officials did not have sovereign immunity, and who was poised to hold a hearing on the injunction. But the Fifth Circuit put a stop to that. This set the stage for the Supreme Court to act – or, more accurately, not act … because, at the moment, there is nothing to act on.
The opinions expressed by the author are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of ThinkCivics.com.
This article was originally published by the Political Insider. Read the original article.
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