The worst supreme court in history, hosted by the worst chief justice in history, is now officially out of control, especially in light of this court allowing the war on woman's right to choose, AKA S.B.8, to stand in spite of John Roberts wanting to nullify this patently unconstitutional law from hell based on well established legal precedence regarding Roe v. Wade.
When the Supreme Court released its opinions this morning on the two Texas cases around S.B. 8—the vigilante bill that allows anyone to collect $10,000 bounties against suspected abortion providers—there wasn’t a lot of clarity or consistency in the news media on how to frame what had happened. Was it a “win” for abortion rights or another warning of the coming blow to abortion access in this country? The court did allow the plaintiff abortion providers to continue to try to bring suits against a handful of state licensing officials tasked with helping to implement the six-week ban, but it declined to enjoin the law, which has prevented virtually any abortions in the state of Texas after six weeks since Sept. 1 and makes no exceptions in cases of rape and incest.
The trouble that the media is having in settling on a coherent frame for this specific decision is both entirely the problem and entirely beside the point. The real story of the two decisions in U.S. v. Texas and Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson is that Chief Justice John Roberts has now lost control of his court. As was the case in the very first shadow docket order that allowed S.B. 8 to go into effect, despite abundant evidence that it was materially harming pregnant people and clearly violated Roe v. Wade, the vote today was 5-4, again with the court behaving as though there is nothing unusual about the Texas scheme. The chief justice had over three months to change a single mind on the conservative flank of the court. He failed to do so. Writing for those five justices, Neil Gorsuch lays out myriad stumbling blocks and problems with the abortion providers’ theory before granting them very limited relief against four state licensing officials who have some authority to enforce S.B. 8.
Citizens United - 2010, HobbyLobby - 2014 and Greece NY - 2014 were the start points for the decent of the Roberts court ... all that was needed to finish the job were Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.
Perhaps now is as good a time as any to put to rest the soothing notion, floated last spring, of a 3–3–3 court, with a temperate and amiable Brett Kavanaugh as the median justice and a youthful Amy Coney Barrett inclined to pump the brakes on the most radical elements of the Federalist Society’s pet projects. Neither Barrett nor Kavanaugh appears to be swayed by the chief justice’s concerns for institutional legitimacy or even, in fact, institutional supremacy. If red states want to go ahead and choke off federally protected rights, they have been given the comprehensive road map. We will certainly see red states do precisely this.
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