SCOTUS Breaks Silence, Dashes Hopes As Conservatives Let Texas Abortion Ban Stand | Talking Points Memo

It’ll be a walk in the park. This is not a close question.

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Lindsey has never acted like he thought he was safe. Gnawing fear and insecurity drive everything including his choice of breakfast cereal.

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It’s always been that way. You never hear the pro-life crowd supporting welfare for single mothers, universal healthcare, childcare, or anything else that would make bringing a child into the world easier.

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We’ll see. I’ll try not to gloat too much.

So are we beholden to Amazon lawyers to take this on or will the company chicken out and quit shipping Plan B to TX?

Depends on the next set of laws, think they haven’t closed the mail order stuff yet, but that’s in the works.

Pharmacies have to be licensed in the state to distribute by mail there, so if they make it illegal, Amazon could see sanctions like having their license to distribute any meds in Texas pulled.

Hmmm. Bezos is a libertarian. Would Amazon sue or do they have standing to sue?

I’m only partway through the thread, so I guess everyone knows that Rafael Cruz has opened his mouth, yapping about “liberty”.

The butthead wouldn’t know irony if it bit him.

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I don’t have a superior plan. Given where we are, the course you’ve outlined seems the best we can likely do. But that still doesn’t make where we are a good place to be.

My only point was that even the steps you put forth involves significant risk to the client. It would be a mistake to make light of that.

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The first comment that needs to be made is calling those who voted to allow the Texas statute to be enforced “conservative”. The fact is by any definition of conservatism, Roe v Wade is one of the most conservative decisions ever, keeping Government hands out of a individual woman’s womb and any decision to the contrary may be many things but "conservative " its not.

The important questions are, is this really about abortion or about controlling women by controlling their sexuality which will be answered by what’s next. What should be next for Texas and women should be more birth control to protect against the worst of this law and for suburban White women, that is one likely result. If I am right and this causes an increase in women demand for birth control, will Republicans make that their next target?

I am actually very happy the Supreme Court did this because Republicans, especially Republican women, have to pay a price for their hypocrisy. That is Trump and his Supreme Court have put an end to the Republican playbook of the last 40+ years of publicly opposing abortion well following policies at the national level that not only keep abortions legal but cause women to choose abortions over carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. That is the way to reduce abortions is to be pro-choice, as in choice of healthcare, choice of education, choice of daycare, perhaps above all choice of birth control. I will get back to birth control later but I digress.

To begin with, the most pro-abortion president in American history, first governor in American history to sign a bill legalizing abortion and when president followed policies that caused the number of abortions to explode and appointed Supreme Court justices who for kept abortion legal, was Ronald Reagan. Reagan only gave lip service to the anti-abortion crowd as a way of getting them to vote on other than economic issues and also give racist voters an excuse to say it was all about abortion.

George W Bush following the Reagan playbook appointed Roberts because like Reagan appointee Kennedy, Roberts is a Republican first and only and will do whatever is necessary to help Republicans take and hold power regardless of his oath of office or the Constitution. Bush always said he did well in the Confederate states because “the people share my values”. The fact that 90+% of Blacks voted against Bush means that either Blacks and Whites have different values or Bush was speaking in code. The one thing the overwhelming support of White Evangelicals proves is that “values” in front of the word voter is and has always been code for race, the code for now is gone.

Also gone is the Republican playbook on the national level of opposing abortion in public while governing to keep abortion legal and frequent. That is what the Supreme Court has done is force Republicans to pay a price for their public opposition to abortion by allowing States to have anti-abortion policies.

But most importantly, the question is what do these laws and Supreme Court decisions mean to American women. I believe the answer is to make them more dependent on men and turn the clock back to before birth control allowed women to have a life outside the home and be independent of men.

That is before birth control, women either had to never risk sex or be married and confined to life raising as many children as chance allowed. This made women mostly dependent on men.

Finally and perhaps most importantly is the immediate affect outlawing abortion will have on women today. For that you only need to look at what it was like before 1973. Everyday on the news you would hear of “backroom butchers”. Everyone knew someone, or someone’s sister, who was harmed and yes even killed by illegal abortions. I remember my mother a nurse, who always encouraged us once we were of age over the age of 12 to visit friends and family in the hospital, except for one time. One of my older sisters was going to visit a friend in an “abortion ward”. I remember the fear my mother had about what my sister would experience, and I remember my sisters rage and fear on her return from the hospital.

That is all of us who have any memories of before Roe v Wade know exactly where we this is leading us to as a society, a place we neither want to remember let alone return.

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A woman in Texas needs an abortion, calls her sister living in another state. Sister uses her Amazon account to order the pills (or from any other supplier like Planned Parenthood). Then she mails the pills to her sister in Texas. Still illegal in Texas if this law stands, but no way to prevent this as long as abortion is legal in other states.

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Do we really need to go through all the other easy questions which won or almost won before a conservative judiciary in the last decade? This will be a titanic battle, and I don’t think any part of it will look easy in retrospect.

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Abbott losing ground.

Poll finds highest-ever disapproval rating for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Poll-finds-highest-ever-disapproval-rating-for-16431446.php

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Looking back on what it took to pass Civil Rights and gender equality, it was a titanic battle and none of it looks easy in retrospect nor was it ever fully accomplished and for the last several decades we have to some extent been backsliding and loosing which explains to some extent where we are today. That we have to repeat this fight, will no doubt be another titanic struggle. In fact as is obvious, it has been a titanic struggle, with very much mixed success, to keep those former gains. Now that we have lost many of them, the struggle to regain them will be at least as hard as it was to gain them the first time.

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Definitely. The fact that it is hard doesn’t make it not worth doing. But we should be clear eyed about what is going to be asked.

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After the first vigilante arrest/kidnapping/double murder, perhaps a good long jail sentence will break the spell.

  1. It’s not a conservative judiciary down at the state courthouse in any county (except Tarrant) with an abortion provider. They’re all elected Dems down there, and they would all love to be the one to kill this thing dead.

  2. It’s not a conservative judiciary up at the court of appeals in any county (except Tarrant) with an abortion provider. The justices are somewhere between all and overwhelmingly elected Dems who would love to write the opinion spitting all of SCOTX’s case or controversy case law right back in the high court’s face as the justification for affirming the lower court and killing this uncommonly stupid law.

  3. It’s an uncommonly stupid law that is unlikely to pass muster with SCOTX because it would give Dems the ability to do all kinds of stuff that the GOP would absolutely hate. Chief Justice Hecht hateshateshates abortion, but he’s smart enough to recognize this monster for what it is and not let it out of the box.

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One can only hope.

Also, all that work trying to scare white suburban women back into the GQP white Christian nationalist fold with the “Critical Race Theory” demagoguery and such…did they just undo all the ground that gained them (yes, it did gain them ground, don’t you doubt…but THIS…I have to wonder whether it’s erased it and then some).

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Well duh…it’s hard to pick the right schoolchildren to shoot when half their face is masked…

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Yeah, I know it isn’t conservative all the way down, but we all know this gets decided by SCOTX.

The location of the clinics isn’t where suit must be brought. Citizens can bring it in their home county, and the law prohibits changes in venue (query whether courts would honor that, which seems ludicrously stupid, but whatever). So other lower and appeals courts that are much more conservative are in the mix. In fact, I’d expect them to be the ONLY ones in the mix.

I’ll certainly bow to your assessment of the Texas judiciary at SCOTX. But… Well, that’s a lot of eggs to put in one, very conservative, basket.

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