Supreme Court and abortion

[nett]

I did no such thing. I merely pointed out that the enforcement mechanism in this law could just as easily be used by far-left activists to bypass GOP state legislatures and governors and implement their own agenda. If you don't see that as problematic then fine.

Considering the far left can and does do stuff exactly like that, I don’t see what’s wrong with the right wing occasionally doing it for a good cause.

My point is that if you legitimize the principal of citizen vigilantes taking anyone they want to into court despite having no connection, then you are opening up a can of worms that will reverberate much more severely on conservatives, agriculture, and small business than the other direction.

Which side of the political spectrum is more "busy body" and wants to regulate others more? You don't like things like gay activists suing wedding cake shops? That only happens now if a particular customer can claim that they were wronged and they are suing for personal damages. Under this new principal, anyone from anywhere in the US could sue the cake shop even if they were never a customer simply because they believed that the shop was acting "discriminatory". Instead of one lawsuit they might face 100 from people who never even set foot into their store. And if they don't defend against every single one of them they get $10,000 automatic judgments plus attorney costs filed against them. The lawsuits don't even have to be in good faith. They can be pure harassment. But if you don't defend against every one you are bankrupt.

Under this new law, liberal activists and hackers are already doing deep-dives into the background of anyone in the GOP legislature and conservative evangelical groups who have teenage daughters with the intent of filing harassment lawsuits against them if they ever do anything like go to Colorado for a ski vacation, or to Disneyland or New York on vacation. Claiming that they went there to have an abortion. Just to clog up the courts and make them hire lawyers to defend themselves and defame them in the news since it would all be public. How do you prove a negative? How do you prove that trip to Colorado didn't involve a stop off at an abortion clinic? How do you prevent someone from mail-ordering an abortion pill in your name from a pharmacy in California, having it sent to your house, and then suing you for an illegal abortion on the basis of the paper trail that they themselves created? If you are a state senator in Texas with a 16 year old daughter, how do you prevent someone from walking into an abortion clinic in New Mexico, giving them your daughter's name and address, creating a paper trail that she was there for an abortion, and then suing you for that abortion?

That is the can of worms that this new law opens up. I don't think they have any idea what they have started.

Your examples are ridiculous. What if someone frames you for some other crime? You can be sued for a wide variety of reasons in the US.

My advice to Christians (and everyone really) would be to pursue peace with all men. If someone does falsely accuse you, God is ultimately our judge.

[temporal1]

So the Supreme Court yesterday decided to not intervene in the heartbeat bill Texas had instituted. What this means is that abortion is now illegal in the state of Texas from the time a heartbeat can be detected (at about 6 weeks). One step in the right direction!

Now the state legislatures need to move quickly to ease the regulations and expense on adoption as I expect there will be a lot of babies born that would have previously not been. Praise God for the Supreme Court!

I'm not sure I'd expect this so fast.
Abortion was already fairly restricted in Texas, and it's not like it's difficult to drive across the border.
And, unfortunately, I expect legal challenges and blatant disobedience to the law.

Not to mention, simple avoidance of conception, with the MANY MANY choices available, is completely within the realm of possibility.
It’s absolutely irresponsible to claim pregnancy is unavoidable!

Here’s something that MIGHT happen: less fornication, more marriage. Imagine that.

I DO NOT ACCEPT THE GO TO CLAIM THAT WITHOUT ABORTION THE WORLD IS DOOMED TO INCREASED NUMBERS OF UNWANTED INFANTS. The hand-wringing that results from this is not helpful.

We are convinced we are intelligent human beings. Lets start acting like it. Refusing to engage in killing human life seems like a very good place to begin.

[Ken]

Your examples are ridiculous. What if someone frames you for some other crime? You can be sued for a wide variety of reasons in the US.

My advice to Christians (and everyone really) would be to pursue peace with all men. If someone does falsely accuse you, God is ultimately our judge.

My examples sound ridiculous today. But they are exactly what the new Texas law authorizes. Under the new law, anyone can sue anyone else in Texas for having taken part in aiding and abetting any abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy. If they win, or if the lawsuit is uncontested, they can earn $10,000 in damages plus attorney fees. That is a completely new form of vigilante law enforcement. There is absolutely no counterpart in existing law for someone to sue someone else for damages that they did not themselves suffer.

My examples are simply examples of what could happen if this same sort of vigilante law enforcement is expanded to other areas of the law. If it is upheld for enforcement of abortion prohibitions, then the same principal could be used to enforce any other type of law. Right now someone could frame you for any other crime, but unless the police investigate and a district attorney somewhere decides to take up the case it goes nowhere. Under the new TX law someone could frame you and then take you to court and collect $10,000 from you without involving the police or district attorneys. That is the part that is new. The profit motive. You don't think that isn't going to be abused?

The point being, if the State of Texas wants to ban abortions after 6 weeks then the state should enforce the law, not delegate that authority to any citizen who wishes to do so. The state AGs office should be the entity collecting evidence and bringing violators to trial like with any other crime.

[temporal1]

Oh my people! Enough of the Drama Queenery!

From what i’m seeing in headlines, from POTUS all through mainstream media, i have to borrow Wayne’s words. ^^

It is absolutely INSANE to pretend for-profit corporate abortion is a necessity of life on earth.

GOOD NIGHT, PEOPLE. DON’T FALL FOR IT. TELL ALL THESE PEOPLE TO TAKE A HIKE.
Do not let them talk with your children, teens, young people.

[nett]

OK, If you're gonna use Reductio ad absurdum argument in this case, you need to stop accusing me and others of doing the same with our concerns about hysterical COVID authoritarianism, especially when places like Australia and Chile have already devolved into police states

Your examples are ridiculous. What if someone frames you for some other crime? You can be sued for a wide variety of reasons in the US.

My advice to Christians (and everyone really) would be to pursue peace with all men. If someone does falsely accuse you, God is ultimately our judge.

My examples sound ridiculous today. But they are exactly what the new Texas law authorizes. Under the new law, anyone can sue anyone else in Texas for having taken part in aiding and abetting any abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy. If they win, or if the lawsuit is uncontested, they can earn $10,000 in damages plus attorney fees. That is a completely new form of vigilante law enforcement. There is absolutely no counterpart in existing law for someone to sue someone else for damages that they did not themselves suffer.

How is taking someone to court and needing to prove your case vigilante law enforcement? Sounds like due process to me

My examples are simply examples of what could happen if this same sort of vigilante law enforcement is expanded to other areas of the law. If it is upheld for enforcement of abortion prohibitions, then the same principal could be used to enforce any other type of law. Right now someone could frame you for any other crime, but unless the police investigate and a district attorney somewhere decides to take up the case it goes nowhere. Under the new TX law someone could frame you and then take you to court and collect $10,000 from you without involving the police or district attorneys. That is the part that is new. The profit motive. You don't think that isn't going to be abused?

1. I don't see this being applied to other crimes, which makes sense.
2. I think most here agree that murdering babies is serious business that deserves serious consequences

The point being, if the State of Texas wants to ban abortions after 6 weeks then the state should enforce the law, not delegate that authority to any citizen who wishes to do so. The state AGs office should be the entity collecting evidence and bringing violators to trial like with any other crime.

There is no one to defend the unborn, because they have no voice. Why do you have such a problem with protecting the unborn?

[Josh]

If you don’t like Texas’s law, then you should support Roe v. Wade being overturned.

Texas’s law is not even an abortion ban. It’s a ban on later term abortions - after a human being exists with its own heartbeat.

[Dan Z]

I'm glad that it is harder to kill babies in Texas now. Judging from the overall direction of societal norms, I don't suspect this law will last in the long run - and I don't see power politics as the solution to the societal direction - but I'm heartened that as a result of this ruling, some little ones will see the light of day when they otherwise might not have.

[HondurasKeiser]

I liked this quote from Charlie Cooke at National Review this morning:

What do you think of the abortion law in Texas?” a friend asked me this morning.

I’ll tell you: I think that the question makes no sense. Properly understood, the abortion law in Texas is not really an abortion law, but a key designed to interact with one of the world’s most preposterous Rube Goldberg machines. What Texas has done is a response to what the Supreme Court has done, which is a response to what previous Supreme Courts did, which was a response to what even earlier Supreme Courts did. And all of it, right from the start, has been nonsense...It’s Roe. Because, legally, Roe has always been utter nonsense — and because, deep down, we all know it.

[HondurasKeiser]

In response to Ken's cassandra-like prophecy of citizen vigilantes coming for your beef and pork:

...Successful pre-enforcement challenges don’t result in laws being literally erased from the statute books. Rather, they work through a legal fiction established in the case of Ex Parte Young that allows federal courts to bar state officials from enforcing the challenged laws...This tactic upends the normal course of litigation by asking courts to consider what parties might or might not do and to weigh harms that might or might not be experienced, instead of judging concrete facts based on actual events. But in case after case, results-oriented judges have jettisoned legal norms on this point using what Justice Scalia famously dubbed the abortion “ad hoc nullification machine.”...

...You might be thinking that the Texas law differs because it allows private people to sue even when their own rights aren’t directly harmed or at stake. Fair point. However, third parties already sue for the benefit of (indeed on behalf of) the government with some frequency. The False Claims Act, for example, allows Joe and Jane Citizen to sue contractors who have defrauded the federal government. They need not be employed by the government or the contractor, or have anything to do with the contract, yet can receive up to 30 percent of the monies recovered if they prove fraud without any federal-government participation whatsoever.

Texas’s genius was applying these existing legal concepts and frameworks to neutralize the abortion industry’s most potent weapon, the pre-enforcement challenge. Abortion clinics are now in an impossible bind because on the one hand, there is no one to sue because no state official is allowed to enforce the law, while on the other hand, there are too many people to sue because they can’t identify who among the millions of Texas pro-lifers will step forward to enforce the law.

Texas’s giving up its extraordinary prosecutorial power while empowering private citizens is like a stunning queen sacrifice in chess that enables the weaker pawn pieces to spring a trap on an unsuspecting king. As a result of this brilliancy, for the first time since 1973, abortion clinics in Texas are now halting abortions en masse because they are unwilling to stand before a judge to justify every time they stop a child’s beating heart. - "Texas’s Absolutely Genius Victory for Life"

[temporal1]

I liked this quote from Charlie Cooke at National Review this morning:

What do you think of the abortion law in Texas?” a friend asked me this morning.

I’ll tell you: I think that the question makes no sense.
Properly understood, the abortion law in Texas is not really an abortion law, but a key designed to interact with one of the world’s most preposterous Rube Goldberg machines. What Texas has done is a response to what the Supreme Court has done, which is a response to what previous Supreme Courts did, which was a response to what even earlier Supreme Courts did. And all of it, right from the start, has been nonsense...It’s Roe.

Because, legally, Roe has always been utter nonsense — and because, deep down, we all know it.

It appears, it’s THE HILL PROPONENTS CHOOSE TO DIE ON, greater than Afghanistan, COVID, refugees, needs of changes in gov ed, increases in violent crime, increases in homelessness, you name it.

The cameras+mics swerved to Texas faster than .. (choose your idiom).
The DNC dog whistle called to action.

i hope i’m wrong.
my impression is, the claimed “necessity” of efficiently killing innocent, defenseless unborn humans is to be the new replacement
for “Never Trump.” From POTUS down. Throughout media, gov schools, healthcare, et al. Even many churches.

The end justifies the means. Even a gruesome end such as this. Here we go again.