Before the Republican Party became fully deranged by bigoted, nihilistic, reality-challenged lust for lib-owning domination, it knew not to catch the car. But the post-Trump GOP is barking mad and just caught itself a foaming mouthful of rolling Pirelli. If it’s too crazed to let go, it’s going to get run over.
The Texas law is a ghoulishly insidious piece of legislation designed to rebuff legal challenges (and it worked!) by taking state enforcement out of the picture in favor of deputized citizens incentivized by bounties paid by violators. Texans are encouraged to file civil suits against fellow citizens they suspect of performing or facilitating an abortion. “Aiding and abetting” an abortion might include, say, handing someone the phone number of an abortion clinic in an adjacent state. If the court finds in the plaintiff’s favor, they are entitled to extract at least $10,000 from the accused, plus court costs.
There’s a lot one might say about this grotesque scheme. It’s an invitation to surveil, harass and intimidate anyone inclined to actively protect women's reproductive autonomy. It sets citizens against each other. This is some real Stasi shit. Eyes-and-ears-are-everywhere! This is. . . not a recipe for social amity and civic health.
Of course, the titanic hypocrisy of maintaining that it’s a tyrannical imposition on “medical freedom” even for private businesses and institutions to mandate masks or vaccines while simultaneously promoting state-sanctioned bounty-hunting to enforce a regime of coerced pregnancy and childbirth is . . . crazymaking. It is hypocrisy of infinite density — a black hole of bad faith from which nary a glimmer of moral principle or intellectual honesty can escape.
And don’t get me started on the court majority’s unsigned opinion ruling that the law ought to go into effect. The basic idea really is just that there is nothing the Court can do to secure our Constitutional Rights against a dubiously constitutional laws as long as states enforce them with bounty hunters. It’s pure arbitrary insanity! It is, as Sotomayor puts it, “untenable.” She writes, “It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.”
Indeed! Because you know that the conservative majority would not affirm this principle in general. There is zero chance that Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Thomas would offer the same deferential treatment to a formally identical California law designed to frustrate citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights by incentivizing civil lawsuits against anyone who gives away or sells or in any way aids or abets the possession or ownership of a firearm.
If that had been the Constitutional liberty in question, you know that the majority would be all “Whoa, whoa, whoa hoss! Slow your roll! I dunno who you’re supposed to sue if your rights are infringed here, either. But an established right is pretty clearly about to get violated on terms that defy heaps of precedent, so let’s stop and think this thing through, okay?”
Conservatives who approve of the outcome here know full well that the majority would have said exactly what the dissenting minority said if a right they valued had been at stake. Which is to say, conservatives know that their cherished SCOTUS majority is legislating from the bench in a transparently ideological, partisan way — and without even a pretense of principled deliberation.
Chief Justice Roberts knows it. As his sober dissent makes clear, the majority’s refusal to pull back and carefully consider the legality and implications of Texas’ scheme of vigilante deputization makes a mockery of balls-and-strikes neutrality and prudent judicial restraint. I think he’s mortified by the damage his fellow conservatives have just done to the court’s already battered legitimacy by so carelessly outing themselves as hypocritical, opportunistic, partisan hacks.
I can’t find solid data on the matter, but I think there’s little reason to believe that Republican women are considerably less likely to seek an abortion. I personally know several successful Republican (at the time) women who have terminated pregnancies. Republican women have abortions for the same reasons anybody does. Suppose you have two kids finally old enough not to need constant attention, you’re back to work full-time after a decade at home, and you’ve finally launched the small business you’ve been dreaming about. It doesn’t matter much if you lean left or right; you will very likely cherish your freedom to control your body and pursue the projects and plans that supply your life with a sense of purpose and meaning. When that freedom is at risk, many women will act politically to defend it. And not all of those women are Democrats. . . yet. The GOP has been bleeding support from suburban white women for well over a decade. Trump’s inability to reverse this trend may well have cost him a second term and lost Republicans their Senate majority. Texas’ horrifying new law and the Supreme Court’s signal that it’s eager to toss Roe in a dumpster can only make matters worse.
Before the Republican Party became fully deranged by bigoted, nihilistic, reality-challenged lust for lib-owning domination, it knew not to catch the car. But the post-Trump GOP is barking mad and just caught itself a foaming mouthful of rolling Pirelli. If it’s too crazed to let go, it’s going to get run over.
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