From Abortion to Voting, Texas Is Set on Making It Illegal to Help People
The Texas Legislature’s war on women’s health reached its dystopic Catch-22 phase last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court greenlighted the state’s abortion-abettor bounty-hunter law S.B. 8, despite that law’s “flagrant” and “patent” unconstitutionality (per Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, respectively). S.B. 8 was explicitly designed to thwart judicial review, and the Supreme Court saw that and apparently was fine with it. Somewhat lost in the subsequent fog of national and international outrage was Texas’ other big legislative victory: the passage of S.B. 1, the bill targeting minority voting rights and enabling future episodes of partisan election theft. That voter suppression bill was big news very recently: You may recall Democrats scrambling to flee Texas to try to rob state Republicans of the requisite quorum to pass S.B. 1, but when their parliamentary fireworks inevitably fizzled out, Texans not only found themselves living in the New Gilead, but with diminished power to vote their way out of it to boot.
It’s hardly a coincidence that these two legislative assaults came together. S.B. 1 was being passed as S.B. 8 was going into effect. Texas Republicans are acutely aware that as their numbers contract demographically, they can’t continue to rule over racial and ethnic minorities, or pass unpopular laws like S.B. 8, unless those minorities are systematically discouraged from voting. S.B. 1 helps laws like S.B. 8—laws that are wildly out of sync with public opinion and polling—to exist.
S.B. 1 and S.B. 8 not only are symbiotic, but they also share some frightening symbolic similarities. Both confer some of the state’s enforcement and police powers upon random citizens seeking to target minorities. S.B. 8 does so by offering $10,000 (at a minimum) bounties to anyone willing to prosecute those who help women obtain an abortion, and S.B. 1 does so by practically ensuring the harassment and intimidation of voters and ballot counters in order to combat nonexistent voter fraud. If you thought the 2020 election was acrimonious, Texas and the states that will soon fall in line behind it have bad news for you in the many Novembers to come.
The Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice in both assaults. A majority let the abortion rule stand by pretending S.B. 8’s novel jurisdictional questions could and should render Roe v. Wade moot for the time being. In that case, the majority of the court was in essence saying, “Sure, I’ll grant you that the house is ablaze, but that fire extinguisher didn’t come with instructions. Let’s table this for later.” (On Thursday, the Justice Department filed suit against Texas to enjoin the law.) As others have pointed out, it’s impossible to imagine Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett cavalierly permitting random citizens to enforce unconstitutional gun laws against their neighbors.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/from-abortion-to-voting-texas-is-set-on-making-it-illegal-to-help-people/ar-AAOnR5e