Photo:: SawBear - Getty Images
Texas State Capitol
Texas State Capitol
With a new Trumped-up, rightwing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court eager to destroy a half century of legal protection for the constitutional rights of women to make their own health decisions about pregnancy, we knew they wanted to roll back history to an earlier age. But we never expected to suddenly find ourselves back in the mid-1800s with lawless vigilantes roaming the countryside punishing their fellow citizens.
The brazenly unconstitutional anti-abortion law just passed by Texas Republicans bans all abortions after six weeks before many women even know they’re pregnant.
That’s a clear violation of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing access to abortion in the first trimester. The Court modified the timeframe in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey assuring legal abortion until a fetus was “viable” to live outside the womb around 24 weeks. It also banned restrictions creating an “undue burden” on women.
But the most diabolical provision of the unconstitutional law is its enforcement mechanism intentionally written to prevent courts from intervening to uphold the constitution. No state officials are authorized to enforce the law. As a result, there are no state officials for opponents to sue to stop enforcement of an unconstitutional law. Instead, Texas created something far worse.
Bounty Hunters
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor accurately described in her furious dissent, the law “deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.” The law authorizes anyone to sue someone else in civil court for helping a woman receive a newly banned abortion and collect a minimum of $10,000 plus attorney’s fees. Those punished with substantial legal costs could be any friend, family member, religious advisor, counselor, an Uber driver and every employee in an abortion clinic.
Chief Justice John Roberts has never been a friend of abortion rights, but he prefers chipping away at those rights gradually. Roberts fears suddenly ripping away a constitutional right most women have taken for granted all their lives will destroy the court’s reputation as well as his own. That’s why he joined Justices Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer in dissent. He called empowering Texas bounty hunters to financially punish anyone helping a woman receive an abortion “not only unusual, but unprecedented.”
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But Roberts is no longer the swing vote on the court. Trump appointees Brett Kavanagh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett are joining up with the most extreme long-serving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito appointed by the Bushes. The result is a radically more rightwing court majority that looks a lot more like those Trump Republicans who tried to violently destroy democracy on Jan. 6 than that old, conservative Bush party.
American History
The new court majority couldn’t wait to sic those Texas vigilantes on anyone supporting a woman’s constitutional right to end an unwanted pregnancy, something guaranteed to all women for the past 48 years until just the other day. Unfortunately, Roberts was wrong about vigilante law enforcement being historically unprecedented in America.
The Texas bounty hunters most closely resemble the sleazy self-appointed slave catchers who were allegedly enforcing Fugitive Slave Laws in the 1800s by hunting down runaway slaves in free states and returning them to “their rightful owners.” They weren’t always careful about only snatching former slaves off the streets. They could make just as much money kidnapping free blacks who lived in the north all their lives and selling them to southern slave owners.
The right of women to control their own bodies and health care isn’t the only right under assault by Republicans. The Roberts Supreme Court has already gutted federal voting rights protections for racial minorities passed in the civil rights era. Republican state legislators have added nearly 100 new voting restrictions to reduce voting in black and brown communities since their racist president was defeated in November.
Republicans have told us for years how unhappy they were about courts expanding America’s democratic rights to anyone beyond the select group of wealthy, white males originally awarded rights by our Founding Fathers. That never included any Founding Mothers and certainly no one of color.
That’s why Republicans have always paid more attention to the Supreme Court during presidential elections than Democrats have. Because Democrats believe in democracy, they thought the continuing expansion of democracy and equal treatment under the law for all Americans regardless of gender, race, religion or national origin were here to stay. The activists who always warned us Republicans were out to destroy all our democratic rights were considered alarmists. The apocalypse has arrived. We all need to wake up and start voting Republicans destroying democracy out of office in the midterms.
Republican presidents keep appointing Supreme Court justices who call themselves “originalists.” Now we know that’s just a fancy word for our country’s original white male supremacists.
