Here's a sampling of opinion this morning on the Texas law effectively ending abortion rights in that state:
"The court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.
"Last
night, the court silently acquiesced in a state’s enactment of a law
that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the court
belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of
procedural complexities of the state’s own invention. Because the
court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review
and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking
abortions in Texas, I dissent." -- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent to the SCOTUS acquiescence in letting the Texas law stand.
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"...It’s not just that the majority of the Supreme Court functionally ended abortion rights for most women in Texas last night merely because they could. And it’s not just that they did so because—as is so often the case with impressionistic, frayed shadow docket reasoning—their personal feelings about the constitutional right to abortion are quite robust. It’s almost impossible to not go one further and declare that the court opted to end virtually all abortion rights in Texas, in the full knowledge that they were blessing an unconstitutional and brutal piece of lawless vigilantism, because it’s only about women." -- Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.
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"Today, accountability has suddenly arrived. Texas Republicans have just elevated abortion rights to perhaps the state’s supreme ballot issue in 2022. Perhaps they have calculated correctly. Perhaps a Texas voting majority really wants to see the reproductive lives of Texas women restrained by random passersby. If that’s the case, that’s an important political fact, and one that will reshape the politics of the country in 2024.
"But it’s also possible that Texas Republicans have miscalculated. Instead of narrowly failing again and again, feeding the rage of their supporters against shadowy and far-away cultural enemies, abortion restricters have finally, actually, and radically got their way. They have all but outlawed abortion in the nation’s second-largest state, and voted to subject women to an intrusive and intimate regime of supervision and control not imposed on men. At last, a Republican legislative majority has enacted its declared beliefs in almost their fullest form—and won permission from the courts to impose its will on the women of its state." -- conservative David Frum, The Atlantic.
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"Joshua Wilson, a political science professor at the University of Denver, said Republicans have had a “safe space” for years, because their vow to outlaw abortion was seen as an empty promise by both the left and the right as a result of the support for legal abortion during the previous Supreme Court regime.
"Now, that safe space is gone.
“'Under Trump, the Supreme Court context changed dramatically. So suddenly you’re in this context where the court might roll back abortion rights,'” Wilson said. “'That makes the politics more dangerous for Republicans.'” -- Alex Seitz-Wald and Sahil Kapur, NBC News.
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"This is not the end of the legal road, even in the federal courts. The underlying legal dispute can proceed through the lower courts and back up to the justices. There is litigation in state courts in Texas as well, state courts that are also bound to respect the Constitution.
"In the interim, though, the impact is clear. In Texas, women’s constitutional rights are being violated every day — as those sworn to uphold and enforce the Constitution stand by, approving." -- Ruth Marcus, Washington Post.
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Can't shake the sense that the GOP is about to become the dog that caught the car.
— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) September 2, 2021
Let's all make sure that this war on women, which will now be waged in every Republican- controlled state in the Union, will end in the annihilation of Trumpist, Christo-fascist Republicanism. Rise up and stay risen!
