Discussion for article #227049
Wow! This is good news for Texas and the future of choice.
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SLAP!!! Take that Rick.
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Good. That shit law will be tied up in the courts…for a while…
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The law is on Wendy’s side! Good for her!
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Oh, thank god. That is a terrible, terrible law.
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And now, having read the entire opinion, boy howdee, what a big bitch slap to the Texas Lege and to Greg Abbott.
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These politicians don’t give a rats ass about abortion. What they care about is raising funds off of a divisive issue. They are a hypocritical bunch of cowards who will sell women’s rights for a campaign contribution. Texans need to rise up and vote them out in mass. They don’t own the polls.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if the Republicans would defend a woman’s Constitutional right to an abortion with the same fervor they have for her Constitutional right to fire an Uzi?
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And Abbott wussed out when it came to debating Wendy.
http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2014/08/abbott-backs-out-of-sept-30-debate.html/
Wendy is having a good day.
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In other news, Abbott’s campaign announced today that it will not participate in the only statewide televised debate with Wendy Davis, even though he had agreed to do so months ago.
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That’s for sure. If they were so against abortion then they should be pro contraception. Their hypocrisy is unbelievable and their stupid base is worse
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Fucking wuss He knows she will wipe the floor with him
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And now it’s off to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the one circuit packed tighter with right wing extremism than that vast, impacted bowel between Bill Kristol’s ears.
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if the 5th circuit reverses this ruling, how long would that take? and if they did reverse it, what would be the next highest court?
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They are the intermediate appellate courts between the federal district courts (the trial courts) and the Supreme Court. Accurately answering your question takes a bit of doing.
The federal circuit courts of appeal have a variable number of judges authorized by law, ranging from 6 in the 1st Circuit (basically New England) to 29 in the Ninth (Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and all states west, including California, Alaska and Hawaii) . The Fifth, encompassing Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has 17.
Appeals are heard by panels of three judges, selected randomly. The panel may include regular appellate judges of the circuit, but can also include semi-retired “senior status” judges, district court judges sitting “by designation” and, on occasion, retired Supreme Court judges. O’Conner, for example, sat on several appellate panels after she retired.
I mention all this because the loser in an appeal heard by a panel has no further right of appeal. Getting your case heard by these three randomly selected judges is the only appeal you have as of right. Rather, the appeal loser’s options are to petition SCOTUS to grant certiorari or petition the circuit for rehearing en banc.
Rehearing en banc means the case gets reheard by all of the active judges of the Circuit (i.e. the ones who are not on senior status). Rehearing en banc is rarely granted, but asking for it stops the clock on your time limit to petition SCOTUS for certiorari until they deny your petition. And if they grant it and, on rehearing, you lose again, you can still petition SCOTUS for cert.
Certiorari means the Supreme Court agrees to rehear the case, usually either because the case presents issues of national importance or because a conflict has arisen between circuits. Four justices have to vote to grant cert., i.e. give you a hearing, but, of course, it takes five to win.
The key word here in both cases is “petition.” That’s Legalese for “ask them to do a thing they have a right to do or not do in their unbridled discretion.” Your odds of getting either kind of petition granted are, frankly, rotten. The overwhelming majority are denied. SCOTUS gets around 7500 cert petitions a year and grants about 230. The odds of getting rehearing en banc varies a bit by Circuit, but, well, they’re really, really bad regardless.
Unless, of course, it’s a really, really high profile case like this one and you happened to draw a panel that constitutes an ideological minority of the court as a whole, in which case, your chances of getting an en banc rehearing, as a practical matter, go up dramatically. That’s what people are talking about, when they talk up the chances of a rehearing en banc of the D.C. Circuit’s Obamacare opinion. It now has more Democratic than Republican appointees, but the panel had two Republicans and one Democrat.
Similarly, In this case, if, by chance, it got heard by two sane judges, the raving nutbaggers who constitute the majority will likely grant rehearing en banc in a skinny heartbeat.
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“…in the name of safety…”
In the name of anything but safety.
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thank you!
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Abbott is 110% the emperor with no clothes. He totally took it for granted that he was the anointed one and that he had paid his dues and gotten himself teed up in the right position as A.G. and he was an asshole and idiot for the right people and that might have been the story, but Wendy is calling his bluff. There’s truly no there there with Abbott. He’s the utterly acquiescent shill of every hard right and monied special interest and when you peel away that stuff he’s nothing, hence the total chickening out on the debate(s), (I think he originally agreed to 2).
Wendy is running against a facade who never for a second thought he would be called on it. Abbott would be toast in a debate. He just admitted that. Wendy CAN defeat this Shrub/Perry wannabe. If Dems just get out and vote in Texas, the return of a Dem governor is an absolute possibility.
Why do these people hate our constitution so much?
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