Originally published at: Texas Picks The Abortion Fight Everyone Saw Coming
The Texas Senate passed new bounty hunter-style abortion legislation Wednesday night to quash mailed abortion pills, targeting a method that has slipped through the cracks of abortion bans and contributed to the slight rise in the total number of abortions since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), staunchly anti-abortion, is expected…
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Thank you for all your hard work reporting on this, Kate.
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“While I’m not entirely sure how things work in Texas, here in New York, a rejection means the matter is closed.”
In Texas, rejection means you force your will on the unwilling.
It’s their same attitude toward sex.
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America is so big it thinks it is the world. Texas is so big it thinks it is America.
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First of all, isn’t the mail as in the USPS, private and isn’t tampering with the mail a crime?
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Comstock Law
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A minor quibble:
I realize that Kacsmaryk’s federal jurisdiction is called the Northern District of Texas, but to Texans, Amarillo is not north Texas (as understood by anyone in the region). Amarillo is in the Panhandle of Texas - far north and west of DFW and environs.
Amarillo is also in Dr Feelgood Jackson’s district - a region where men are men and sheep are nervous.
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So does anyone else see that this could just become a ploy to sue manufacturers, deliverers, and providers from anyone in the state of Texas? How would just any old person in Texas have standing to sue? Wouldn’t this any old person have to prove that a provider or manufacturer actually mailed abortion pills to a specific person? A person they may not even know?
Please someone make it make sense.
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The Texas bill is flat-out unconstitutional. Only the Federal government, through Congress, can regulate interstate commerce in any way, and legal pills being purchased out-of-state and mailed to Texas is the most blatant definition of interstate commerce imaginable.
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It isn’t supposed to make sense. Being nebulous and ill-defined means it can readily be abused to fit most any situation.
Red states do this a lot. The idea is to instill that old IBM sales technique of “fear, uncertainty and doubt”. If you aren’t really clear what the legal boundaries are, you are more likely to err on the side of caution.
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Not a bad analogy.
Something to bear in mind, though, is that a big contributing factor to the effectiveness of the FUD tactic back then was the near-certainty that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Which means that effective pushback from the blue states (Pritzker, Newsom, et al.) will be an important countermeasure. Texas does not “outrank” California. Our federal system is a compact among equals.
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Only up to the moment SCOTUS rules that some states are more equal than others.
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I’ve been waiting for this one. It’s not simple. For example, can you mail marijuana from a legal state to an illegal state? This case will
Involve interstate commerce. It will also involve physician decision making. Unfortunately, I expect Texas to prevail when it gets to the Supreme Court because the court has too many Catholics, and corrupt ones at that.
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Such a ruling would essentially end the republic.
To be clear, I expect vast landscapes of bad faith and partisanship from the current corrupt majority, but if we’re going to go that far, then we might as well also worry about what happens when a 5-4 majority (ACB and Roberts using a quick round of paper-scissors-rock to decide who will join against) rules that the value of pi is now 3.0.
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I agree with cjbinks. Also, isn’t it interesting that one can sue a provider or manufacturer of a medicine yet cannot sue the provider or manufacturer of a weapon?
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The real threat is the zombie Comstock Act, which actually does regulate interstate commerce, and which is somehow legally ambiguous (not sure how, exactly). The offending section should have been repealed when Democrats had the power to do it.
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I think the weed/cannabis example is different because weed is illegal under federal law. Sending weed/cannabis through the mail is, I believe, a violation of federal law in and of itself. The Mifepristone/Misoprostol combo is FDA approved and legal to prescribe and legal to send through the mail. Texas is asking for a situation where their state laws can be enforced against other states, and where Texas law would effectively supersede federal law.
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This is a stupid law. Good luck proving proper standing. “Cuz I said so.”
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This is why I get angry at people who mindlessly bleat “leave it to the states”. Why should someone’s personal rights change because they live on the wrong side of a river or survey line?
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