Opinion: What the Justice Department should do to stop the Texas abortion law

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Opinion: What the Justice Department should do to stop the Texas abortion law

Opinion by Laurence H. Tribe
Today at 2:29 p.m. EDT

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor emeritus and a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School.

The Texas legislature and five Supreme Court justices have joined forces to eviscerate women’s abortion rights — the legislature by creating and the justices by leaving in place a system of private bounties designed to intimidate all who would help women exercise the right to choose. But the federal government has — and should use — its own powers, including criminal prosecution, to prevent the law from being enforced and to reduce its chilling effects.

Of course, the best approach would be for Congress to codify the right to abortion in federal law, although Democrats likely lack the votes to make that happen — and there is a risk that this conservative Supreme Court would find that such a statute exceeded Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause.

But as President Biden calls for a “whole of government” response to the fact that thousands of women in Texas — and no doubt soon elsewhere — are being denied their constitutional rights, there are other solutions that already exist in federal law.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has the power, under federal civil rights laws, to go after any vigilantes who employ the Texas law to seek bounties from abortion providers or others who help women obtain abortions.

The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law. If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?

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Opinion: One tactic to stop abortion bounty hunters from demolishing women’s constitutional rights

Opinion by Jennifer Rubin
Columnist
Today at 10:00 a.m. EDT

When thinking about Texas’s nefarious scheme to deprive women of their constitutional right to seek an abortion, I am reminded of the tactics White segregationists used in the years following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The 1954 ruling prohibited schools from segregating students, so some parents created all White “academies.” Some states threatened to close public schools for everyone. Blocked from keeping Black students in substandard schools, they sought other means to do the unconstitutional activity.

In the case of Texas’s antiabortion law, state lawmakers know that Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land, establishing a woman’s right under the 14th Amendment to control her own reproduction. So they came up with the idea to enlist private citizens to rat out women exercising their constitutional rights. They offered these people a bounty of $10,000. Think of them as hiring every Texas resident (and residents outside the state!) on a contract basis to make abortion services virtually impossible to obtain.

There are many avenues the federal government can do to protect Texas women. For example, Section 1983 of Title 42 in the U.S. Code provides: “Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.” When Texas’s law forces every abortion provider in the state to shut down, surely there is a deprivation of constitutional rights. They have effectively “chilled” women’s constitutional rights.

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The Texas statute breaks new legal ground, and women’s rights defenders must be creative and bold in their counterattack. Any and all viable strategies should be tried.

[Lonestarblue]

1. At the moment, no abortions are being performed in Texas.

So there are no vigilantes collecting their $10,000 rewards for stalking and snooping into women’s lives. For such a case to be brought, a clinic with strong financial backing to afford the costs of litigation needs to step up and perform an abortion after the six-week deadline. That may happen—it’s early days yet. While two of the largest groups, Planned Parenthood and Whole Women’s Health, are no longer making abortion appointments, that could change as their legal counsels determine a way to challenge this heinous law.

[dalton99a]

2. The law is working. The idea is to terrorize anyone thinking about helping the woman