The Liberal Gun Club Forum

'They treat women like property': Texas GOPer ignores abortion law but rips Taliban's 'sick culture'

A Texas Republican lawmaker on Sunday slammed the Taliban's treatment of women even though his state has recently enacted laws stripping women of their rights.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) made the remarks to Fox News host Chris Wallace just days after Texas enacted a law that puts bounties on women who have abortions.

"This is not a new and improved Taliban," McCaul complained. "This is the same Taliban reverting back to the same brutal practices."

"And we know that they marry off young women as young as 12, many times 14 years old," he added. "It's a very sick culture and they treat women like property. I worry about the women left behind as well."

But under Texas's new abortion law, an underage woman would be effectively forced to carry her rapist's baby.

Bette Midler Calls For Sex Strike In Wake Of Radical Texas Abortion Crackdown

Singer Bette Midler is taking a page from history to encourage women to go on a sex strike to protest the draconian Texas anti-abortion law.

“I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress,” Midler tweeted.

The proposed action evokes “Lysistrata,” a play from ancient Athens where the women of Greece denied men sex until they ended a war between nation states. The main character is believed by some scholars to be loosely based on the real-life Athenian activist Lysimache.

Actor Alyssa Milano similarly called for a sex strike in 2019 after a controversial anti-abortion “heartbeat” law was passed in Georgia but later shot down by the courts.

Midler was moved to push for action by the extreme new Texas law, the most restrictive in the nation, that criminalizes abortions after just six weeks, before most people even realize they’re pregnant. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court refused to take immediate action to block the law.

The statute also sets up a bounty system for vigilantes who report people seeking abortions and can collect a $10,000 reward if they successfully sue those who “aid and abet” an abortion.

Not everyone praised Midler’s protest. Some said it “demeaned” women’s rights as merely transactional by presenting them as only “granted” by men in “exchange for services.”

Another said the stunt implies straight women have sex to please men, not themselves.

Many noted that Midler’s message underscores that it takes two to make a pregnancy, yet women are the ones singled out for shame and penalties for an abortion, while men can easily dodge any responsibility or consequences.

The Texas Taliban Wing of the Republican Party

American papers are filled with pundits speculating about the horrors the Taliban may inflict on the people of Afghanistan, particularly its women. Less attention has been paid to the horrors Texas Republicans — the Taliban wing of the Republican Party — are inflicting on the State of Texas. In total control of the state, Republicans have a free hand that they’ve used to enforce extremism.

Dubbing them the Texas Taliban isn’t just name-calling. The parallels are chilling. The Taliban scorn democracy. They see their opponents as heretics and heathens. The Taliban are bigots, rejecting people of other religions. The Taliban enforce a religious zealotry with suppression of women a central tenet. The Taliban invoke religious law to supplant the civil law. The Taliban reject modernity, scorn science, and seek return to a fundamentalist society that never was.

Now consider the Republicans in Texas. They too are afraid of democracy. From Sen. Ted Cruz to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, they sought to overturn the presidential election, while the party leaders echo Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen.

Worried that Republicans are in danger of becoming a minority in the state, Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican state legislature just pushed through election suppression measures to make it harder for workers, minorities, seniors, young people and the disabled to vote, harder for civic groups to assist people in voting, easier for partisans to intimidate voters, and opened the way for the partisan legislature to overturn election results they don’t like.

Republicans prey, as well, on racial and religious prejudices. Their party chairman, Allen West, is a former Florida congressman who described Barack Obama as “Islamist,” charging that he was “purposefully enabling the Islamist cause.” When the Supreme Court tossed Trump’s baseless challenge to the election, West suggested that the South should rise again and secede: “that law-abiding states should bound together and form a union of states that will abide by the constitution.”

Republicans in Texas also target women in their zealotry. The governor just signed a law effectively banning abortion in Texas, outlawing any abortion after six weeks. Most women don’t even know they are pregnant in that period of time.

Worse, the law turns citizens into bounty hunters, offering cash rewards for turning in anyone who assists someone seeking an abortion. This law, if it survives challenge, will lead to deaths — from illicit abortions, from suicide, from pregnancies that take the mother’s life. An effort to stay the enforcement of this vicious law — a clear violation of the Supreme Court’s constitutional precedents — was just denied by the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices acting without issuing an opinion.

The Republicans also turn their backs on science. Texas has suffered record-breaking floods, droughts and winter storms over the last decade. Yet, with the state a leader in fossil fuel production, its politicians have been in denial about climate change. They were unprepared when Hurricane Harvey hit the state in 2017. Then extreme weather caused a major snowstorm that froze an unprotected energy grid. Gov. Abbot laughably blamed the deadly energy failure on solar and wind energy.

Now Abbott and Texas Republicans are trying to ban local authorities and school districts from enforcing mask mandates. Pandering to the Trump-aroused zealots in their own party, they are prepared to put children and teachers at risk, even as Texas hospitals and ICUs are filling up with the surge of new cases from the Delta variant.

The Taliban, of course, patrol the streets of Kabul armed with AK-47s, terrorizing those who might cross them. The Texas Taliban hasn’t gone that far, but they did just force through a law allowing its citizens to carry handguns without a permit.

In an era when we’ve witnessed armed gangs marching on the Michigan legislature and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol, one can only shudder to think what would happen in Texas if Republicans were to lose political control.

Unlike the Taliban, Texas Republicans still have to face the voters. Big oil money can help insulate them. Voter suppression laws can hold down turnout. The Big Lie can rouse their base. In the end, however, Texans will decide whether they will bring an end to this misrule or continue to support a party that is ever more unhinged.

In the last two weeks, the Taliban honored an agreement to help the U.S. military get 123,000 Afghans and Americans out of the country and promised to do more as they seek to work with other nations.

In that same period, the Texas legislature and Abbott sought to restrict voting and take away a woman’s right to self-determination. Who are we to not trust a newly emerging Taliban as it seeks its place in the family of nations while being asked to trust a Republican Government of Texas that attacks democracy and the rights of women?

It’s the old tried-and-true Confederate State of Texas, the last state to inform its slaves they were free, for which we now celebrate Juneteenth.

Justice Department Says It Will Protect Abortion Seekers In Texas

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday that the Justice Department will work to protect the safety of people seeking abortions in Texas as the agency continues to explore how it can challenge the state’s new anti-abortion law.

Garland said in a statement that while the Justice Department urgently explores “all options” to challenge the Texas law, “we will continue to protect those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services pursuant to our criminal and civil enforcement of the FACE Act.” The department will also provide federal law enforcement support when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is “under attack,” according to the attorney general.

The FACE Act, or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, is a federal law enacted in 1994 that bans physically obstructing or using the threat of force to injure, intimidate or interfere with a person seeking reproductive health services. The law also prohibits intentional property damage at abortion clinics and other reproductive health centers.

“We have reached out to U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and FBI field offices in Texas and across the country to discuss our enforcement authorities,” Garland said. “We will not tolerate violence against those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services, physical obstruction or property damage in violation of the FACE Act.”

It’s unclear how helpful the FACE Act will be in Texas, where the extremely restrictive new law bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy ― a time when most people are unaware that they’re pregnant ― and provides $10,000 bounties to private citizens who enforce the law by successfully suing anyone they suspect to be assisting in a person’s attempt to obtain an abortion. The ban went into effect Wednesday after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority declined to block it.

The Texas law will likely lead to abortion clinics closing as women either leave the state to obtain the procedure or attempt less safe methods out of fear ― potentially making the FACE Act not as powerful of a move as the Justice Department hoped. About 55,000 people in Texas had abortions last year, including nearly 1,200 who were out-of-state residents, according to data collected by the Texas Health and Human Services Department.

Garland said last week that the Justice Department is “evaluating all options to protect the constitutional rights of women, including access to abortion.” President Joe Biden directed the Gender Policy Council and the Office of the White House Counsel to launch a “whole-of-government effort to respond to” the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the law to go into effect, including investigating what the Justice and Health and Human Services departments can do to make sure people in Texas can access abortions. But it’s still unclear what the administration can actually do to protect abortion access while the Texas law remains in effect.

Supreme Court's Attack on Abortion Rights Opens Door for Vigilante Lawsuits Against the Unvaccinated

The absurdity and lawlessnessof the Supreme Court's procedural decision in the Texas abortion case could, if turned around on the GOP, have the benefit of getting more people vaccinated.
Is what’s good for the goose is good for the gander?

In letting stand Texas’s draconian new anti-abortion law, The Supreme Court allowed states (at least for the time being) to deputize almost anyone in the world as bounty hunters to go after and punish anyone in Texas taking part in a Constitutionally legal and protected act—namely performing, aiding or abetting an abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy.

In her blistering dissent to the Supreme Court’s inaction Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the Texas law "a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court's precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas."

If the Supreme Court wants to overturn 49 years of precedent in Roe v. Wade, it will have ample opportunity to do so the old-fashioned way (with lower court rulings, briefs, oral arguments and lengthy written opinions) next spring when it hears an appeal to Mississippi's currently unconstitutional abortion law banning abortion after 15 weeks.

The Court's non-decision in allowing the Texas law iis devastating for the rights of women to control their own bodies.

But it's equally devastating to the rule of rule of law in America, itself another blow by Republicans at the fundamentals of democracy.

Allowing the Texas law to go into effect immediately while it slowly winds its way through the courts turns every citizen into a potential Stasi-style informant and bounty hunter against their neighbors who are otherwise performing legal and Constitutionally protected acts.

But the Supreme Court's 5-4 conservative majority may have been too clever by half. If Red states can evade judicial review by letting civilians instead of government be its enforcers of otherwise questionable, illegal and unconstitutional laws, then so can Blue states.

California, say, could pass a law giving anyone the right to sue any Californian who is unvaccinated and be entitled to receive $10,000 or more plus legal fees from each unvaxxed person.

It could virtually Xerox Texas's anti-abortion law and just substitute "failing to be vaccinated against Covid-19 with a vaccination that has received full or emergency use approval from the FDA" for Texas's "performing, aiding, or abetting an abortion after 6 weeks." If the Supreme Court is consistent with its Texas abortion ruling, the initial effectiveness of such law couldn’t be prevented by any court.

Similarly, New York, say, could pass a law giving anyone the right to sue any New Yorker who possesses a gun and collect $10,000 or more plus legal fees.

The Supreme Court's 2008 decision in District of Columbia v Heller holds that an individual has the Constitutional right under the Second Amendment to possess firearms independent of membership in a state militia. Although many have criticized Heller, it's the law of the land and any normal attempt by New York to outright ban firearms would be facially unconstitutional. But if New York followed the Texas model of turning over enforcement to individual bounty hunters and if The Supreme Court is consistent with its decision not to hear the Texas abortion case, then gun-rights advocates would have no legal recourse available to challenge the immediate effectiveness of the law in court.

So here's a message to Democrats: Stop bedwetting over the Supreme Court's horrendous decision to allow the Texas anti-abortion law to go into effect. Rather, use the legal opening provided by the right-wing Supreme Court majority to enact Democrats' goals without judicial review. In states where Democrats control the legislature, governorship and courts, immediately call special sessions and pass laws deputizing individuals to sue the unvaccinated and collect $10,000 or more plus legal fees.

Of course this isn't the way politics should normally be done. Some may argue that Democrats shouldn't stoop to the level of Republicans in evading the law through procedural tricks now allowed by the Supreme Court. But, as it's been often said, don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

Congressional Democrats' response to the Texas decision is to make outraged statements and loudly proclaim that they'll legislate Roe v. Wade into law. Since they know such legislation will never become law because of their refusal to end the filibuster, this is little more than a sop to the base to make it seem as though Democrats are doing something. Better to turn the Republicans' own weapons on the Republicans and use the Supreme Court's decision to accomplish important goals like vaccine mandates and gun control.

This will help expose the absurdity—indeed lawlessness—of the Supreme Court's procedural decision in the Texas abortion case, with the added benefit of getting more people vaccinated.

Democrats, stop just sending outraged tweets and press releases about the evils of the Supreme Court's Texas abortion decision and proposing legislation you know won't pass the Senate. Instead, actually use your political power in the states where you have it to bring meaningful change.

A district judge in Texas has issued a temporary restraining order against Texas Right to Life, blocking the anti-abortion group from suing abortion providers employed by Planned Parenthood under the state's strict new abortion law, according to a copy of the order provided by Planned Parenthood.

The law, which took effect this week, bans abortions after as early as six weeks into pregnancy and allows private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who assists a pregnant person seeking an abortion in violation of the law. It is among the strictest in the nation and bars abortions just after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is often before a woman knows that she is pregnant.

Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Travis County ruled that the medical providers faced "probable, irreparable, and imminent injury" if they were sued by the private group in connection with abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy, as provided for under the law.

Planned Parenthood health facilities in Texas had filed the lawsuit in Travis County District Court on Thursday night, contending, "At every turn, S.B. 8 purports to replace normal civil-litigation rules and clearly established constitutional rules with distorted versions designed to maximize the harassing nature of the lawsuits and to make them impossible to fairly defend against."

Helene Krasnoff, vice president of public policy litigation and law at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, praised the order on Friday, saying in a statement, "We are relieved that the Travis County district court has acted quickly to grant this restraining order against Texas Right to Life and anyone working with them as deputized enforcers of this draconian law."

Texas AG Ken Paxton: Abortion bounties on women is 'what the Founders intended'

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday said that the Founders of the United States "intended" for Texas to pass an anti-abortion law that places bounties on women.

During an appearance on Real America's Voice, Paxton told host Steve Bannon that the Texas "heartbeat bill" is "amazing" because it allows anyone to sue to collect $10,000 bounties from each person who assists a woman in having an abortion.

"We're basically protecting life at six weeks or whenever life starts," Paxton claimed. "This came back to reality and protecting human life. I understand why Washington, the elitists are upset with this because this actually protects babies."

Bannon argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland had "singled out Texas" over the anti-abortion law and another bill that will restrict voting rights.

"They clearly didn't understand what the founders intended," Paxton insisted. "They wanted states to be the experiments for democracy so they can try things in different ways. The federal government, the Joe Biden administration, Merrick Garland don't view it that way. They think they know the answer for all of us."

"Every time we make a move, whether it's on elections or abortions or anything that's good for our people -- the border, we just got sued over the border," he added, "they come in, the federal government comes in, Biden comes in and tries to stop us from taking care of our people."

The war on women returns: How GOP governors may doom Republicans in Congress

Back in 2012, Republicans were on one of their tears against women's rights, thinking that it was the ticket to win the election and oust President Barack Obama from office. They decided to attack contraception, confirming once again that their alleged love for the fetus was really all about restricting reproductive freedom.

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held committee hearings and insulted the women who testified about the medical need for contraception. Rush Limbaugh grossly derided one of them on his national radio show, calling a woman named Sandra Fluke a "slut" who is "having so much sex she [couldn't] afford her own birth control pills ... having so much sex, it's amazing she can still walk." Ever the classy fellow, Limbaugh added, "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." (And that was just for starters.) One of their top donors, Foster Freiss, went on television and claimed that in his day, a woman just used aspirin for birth control — by putting it between her knees. Haha! And perhaps the most famous quote of that entire campaign season came from a GOP Senate candidate from Missouri named Todd Akin who was asked about his stance that rape and incest survivors should be forced to bear the child of their rapist and said this:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

He later walked back the biologically illiterate comment (and then walked back the walk-back two years later) but it was too late. The Republican "War on Women" was a decisive factor in Obama's re-election and the Democrats gained seats in both the Senate and the House that year.

Republicans famously performed an electoral "autopsy" after that election in which, among other things, they acknowledged that their reputation as witless misogynists was hurting the party's image. But the party completely ignored that analysis and went on to elect Donald Trump, a man credibly accused of numerous sexual assaults who was even caught on tape crudely bragging about it.

And as you have no doubt heard, despite their losses in the last two elections, they are at it again.

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Aided by the Trump Court majority of far-right conservative Catholic justices, the state of Texas passed a law banning abortion after 6 weeks with no exception for rape or incest. And the Governor of Texas decided to emulate the great examples of Akin, Limbaugh and Freiss by demonstrating his ignorance of human biology, saying that rape victims will have "at least" 6 weeks to get an abortion (not true, and absurd on its face) and then issuing this fatuous declaration he apparently believed would be reassuring to assault victims:

Let's make something very clear, rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets. So, goal number one in the state of Texas is to eliminate rape, so that no woman no person will be a victim of rape."

What a great solution. I wonder why they didn't think of this before?

This time the party has gotten very creative with this new law in which they are turning private citizens into vigilantes and bounty hunters in order to circumvent federal jurisdiction, And you can expect this clever gambit to become law in many Republican-led states. North Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is considering a similar law and went a step further by issuing an executive order restricting telemedicine abortions and abortion medication. Florida's Ron DeSantis said he's going to take a look at it and the Florida legislature is already moving on it.

The Wall Street Journal profiled the Machiavellian legal thinker who came up with the idea to enforce the abortion ban through the civil courts by enlisting the public to file suit. His name is Jonathan F. Mitchell, a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia who worked for former Texas Governor Rick Perry and was tapped for a position with the Trump administration but his nomination never came up for a vote. He is also, of course, heavily involved with the Federalist Society. According to the WSJ:

In 2018, Mr. Mitchell drafted "The Writ-of-Erasure Fallacy," a Virginia Law Review article that articulated the legal theories that would eventually find their way into the Texas abortion law. The article was a deep dive into the subject of judicial review and raised the idea that when a court rules a statute unconstitutional, the law isn't erased from the books and could be modified to allow for "private enforcement." He described how laws could be constructed to "enable private litigants to enforce a statute even after a federal district court has enjoined the executive from enforcing it," without going in-depth about the applicability to abortion laws.

Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine reports that Mitchell worked with an anti-abortion extremist pastor in east Texas named Mark Lee Dickson who promoted the idea of towns calling themselves "sanctuaries for the unborn" and giving citizens the power to legally harass providers, including pharmacies that sell Plan B contraceptives. Mitchell and Dickson did a trial run of this legal strategy in Lubbock, Texas where a federal judge ruled that he had no power to enjoin private citizens. That success laid the groundwork for the state law that the Supreme Court majority washed its hands of last week.

None of this really all that unprecedented, as Kilgore noted:

The idea is reminiscent of the White Citizens' Council model of fighting desegregation during the Civil Rights era: Once defeated in the courts, white supremacists switched to nonofficial harassment of civil rights workers, threats of terrorism, and essentially (white) community-based civil disobedience.

Unfortunately, this time the Supreme Court is on the wrong side of history and the state governments are using this legal end run to, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his dissent, "avoid responsibility for its laws." It's a very neat trick but one that could end up being too clever by half if Republicans continue to repeat their mistake in believing that everyone in America is as primitively misogynist as they are. One gets the sense that some of them, at least, understand this.

The silence from most national GOP officials has been deafening. Unfortunately, there's not much they can do about it. By empowering fanatics in the states to go their own way, they've completely lost control of the issue.

U.S. Justice Department sues Texas over new abortion law that Attorney General Merrick Garland calls unconstitutional

The Justice Department sued Texas on Thursday over its new abortion restrictions law, Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters, a week after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the law.

Garland announced the lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in Austin, after abortion rights advocates, providers and Democratic lawmakers called for the Biden administration to act. Other legal challenges to the bill have been stymied due to the design of the law, which opponents say was engineered to flout a person’s right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973.

“This kind of scheme to nullify the Constitution of the United States is one that all Americans, whatever their politics or party should fear,” Garland said.

The Texas statute, which went into effect Sept. 1, is considered one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. It prohibits abortions once a “fetal heartbeat” — a term medical and legal experts say is misleading — can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many people know they’re pregnant. Providers say that the law prevents at least 85% of the procedures previously completed in the state.

Garland said Texas' statute is "invalid under the Supremacy Clause and the 14th Amendment, is preempted by federal law and violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity." He called the law a "statutory scheme" that skirts constitutional precedent by "thwarting judicial review for as long as possible."

Previous laws aimed at restricting or stopping abortions have been struck down over the years by the Supreme Court. But this law uses the novel mechanism of relying on private citizens filing lawsuits to enforce the law, not state officials or law enforcement. This makes it especially difficult to strike down in court, because there is not a specific defendant for the court to make an injunction against.

The law empowers any private citizen in the nation to sue someone found to be “aiding and abetting” an abortion, including providers, doctors and even Uber drivers.

The law has seemingly brought most abortions to a halt in the state. Major clinics canceled appointments, fearful of being inundated with lawsuits in which they’d have to pay a penalty of at least $10,000 if they are found to be in violation of the law. Some clinics have even stopped performing abortions allowed under the new restrictions — before fetal heart activity is detected — out of fear of getting hit with lawsuits.

“The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that Texas cannot evade its obligations under the Constitution and deprive individuals of their constitutional rights,” the lawsuit stated. “The federal government therefore brings this suit directly against the State of Texas to obtain a declaration that S.B. 8 is invalid, to enjoin its enforcement, and to protect the rights that Texas has violated.”

Renae Eze, Gov. Greg Abbott's press secretary, condemned the lawsuit shortly after it was announced.

"Unfortunately, President Biden and his Administration are more interested in changing the national narrative from their disastrous Afghanistan evacuation and reckless open border policies instead of protecting the innocent unborn. We are confident that the courts will uphold and protect that right to life,” Eze said in a statement.

John Seago, legislative director for anti-abortion organization Texas Right to Life, said his organization thinks the lawsuit lacks legal standing and should be thrown out.

“We think this is an audacious overstep from the Biden administration,” Seago said. “This is really an amazingly ambitious lawsuit ... This is clearly a violation of Texas' authorities' [ability] to write their own laws and create their own causes of action. Hopefully, the judge that receives this sees the unprecedented nature of what the Biden administration is asking for.”

Abortion providers and advocates applauded the Justice Department joining the legal battle to overturn the statute.

“It’s a gamechanger that the Department of Justice has joined the legal battle to restore constitutionally protected abortion access in Texas,” Nancy Northup, president of Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. "Right now, and every day this law is in effect, patients are being denied access to essential health care, and the hardest hit are people of color, those struggling to make ends meet, undocumented immigrants and others with pre-existing obstacles to access healthcare."

Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of America president, said in a statement the lawsuit was "a needed announcement" and thanked Biden and the federal government for the action.

Prior to Thursday’s announcement, legal experts expressed doubts as to how a federal lawsuit might work or how successful it might be. Because of the way the law is constructed, experts have been dubious on how the legal saga will play out in courts and those same challenges could impede efforts by the Justice Department. Federal lawmakers have also vowed to overturn the new restrictions by codifying Roe v. Wade in federal law, but those efforts likely face their own political challenges.

The federal lawsuit joins other legal efforts aimed at overturning the restrictions. Abortion providers originally challenged the new law in July, arguing it violates the precedent established by Roe v. Wade. But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put a hold on district court proceedings, leading the providers to seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court. Many onlookers waited late into the night Aug. 31, expecting an order from the high court before the law went into effect — but it didn’t come.

A day later, the high court declined to weigh in. In an order, a majority of the court acknowledged that the case raised serious constitutional issues, but said that it wasn’t clear whether the government officials and anti-abortion activists named as defendants on the suit “can or will seek to enforce the Texas law,” so it wasn’t clear whether they could be sued in an attempt to block it. In a 5-4 decision, the Court allowed the law to continue. Court proceedings in the lower courts remain in limbo until the 5th Circuit makes a decision regarding its stay.

The law also prohibits plaintiffs from being ordered to pay defendants’ legal fees if the case is dismissed, leaving little risk for people who want to bring lawsuits and potential high costs for clinics to defend themselves even in cases where they ultimately prevail. No lawsuits have been announced so far.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was not immediately available for comment.

sikacz wrote: Fri Sep 10, 2021 9:10 am Shifting law enforcement to the people is just a step toward vigilante justice. What’s next duels..

HOUSTON — Local pregnant woman Marta Hidalgo has now registered as a corporation to retain full bodily autonomy after one of the country’s most restrictive abortion bills went into effect in the state of Texas, sources confirmed.

“I am now known as Fallopian Rubes, Incorporated,” declared Hidalgo. “This so-called ‘heartbeat bill’ is a slippery slope of epic proportions, so I had to find a legal loophole like a true American. I know it’s been said over and over by countless people, but I’ll be damned if I let the government tell me what to do with my body. To be honest, I don’t even want to get an abortion. It is way too important for me to spawn offspring that will counteract the insane levels of ignorance that prevail in the Lone Star State. Instead of a gender reveal, I will be announcing whether my fetus will be an LLC or a sole proprietorship.”

The Justice Department asked a federal judge late Tuesday to issue an order that would prevent Texas from enforcing a law that prohibits nearly all abortions, ratcheting up a fight between the Biden administration and the state’s Republican leaders.

The Justice Department argued in its emergency motion that the state adopted the law, known as Senate Bill 8, “to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights,” reiterating an argument the department made last week when it sued Texas to prohibit enforcement of the contentious new legislation.

“It is settled constitutional law that ‘a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,’” the department said in the lawsuit. “But Texas has done just that.”

As such, the department asked Judge Robert L. Pitman of the Western District of Texas to issue a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction that would prevent enforcement of the law.

“This relief is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of women in Texas and the sovereign interest of the United States,” the Justice Department said in its brief.

Representatives for Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The Justice Department’s filing is the latest salvo in the Biden administration’s fight to stop Texas from enacting a law that prohibits most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, often before many women are aware they are pregnant. There is no heart at this stage of development, only electrical activity in developing cells. The law makes no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

The motion comes two weeks after the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declined to block the Texas legislation. The majority stressed that it was not ruling on the law’s constitutionality and did not intend to limit “procedurally proper challenges” to it.

At the center of the legal debate over the law is the mechanism that essentially deputizes private citizens, rather than the state’s executive branch, to enforce the new restrictions by suing anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.

In its court filing, the Justice Department called this mechanism “an unprecedented scheme that seeks to deny women and providers the ability to challenge S.B. 8 in federal court.”