The conservative justices on the Supreme Court clearly put their personal opinions ahead of their duties by not striking down Texas’ blatantly unconstitutional abortion vigilante law. This proves yet again that they are partisan hacks in robes, despite their protests to the contrary.
The Texas law that allows private citizens to sue an Uber driver who dares drive a woman to a health clinic has opened Pandora’s box. If Texas can turn their citizens into bounty hunters against innocent women across the nation, then blue states can do the same thing to protect them when it comes to guns.
I’m saying this now. I will be one of the first people to use this new law once Gov. Newsom signs it. I invite you to join me. Who couldn’t use $10,000?
Oops.
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Governor Gavin Newsom today issued the following statement on U.S. Supreme Court Decision on Texas Abortion Law:
“I am outraged by yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Texas’s ban on most abortion services to remain in place, and largely endorsing Texas’s scheme to insulate its law from the fundamental protections of Roe v. Wade. But if states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm’s way.
I have directed my staff to work with the Legislature and the Attorney General on a bill that would create a right of action allowing private citizens to seek injunctive relief, and statutory damages of at least $10,000 per violation plus costs and attorney’s fees, against anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in the State of California. If the most efficient way to keep these devastating weapons off our streets is to add the threat of private lawsuits, we should do just that.”
December 11, 2021
This is just the beginning, by the way. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan tried to warn the conservative hacks on the court, but I guess they need to learn the hard way. Expect to see many more of these types of laws coming from blue states. I expect there will be a law soon allowing private citizens to sue anyone who tries to use the Texas law against a private citizen over abortion. I also expect to see lawsuits galore over new vigilante laws concerning masks, voting rights, the environment … it’s coming.
See how the game is played? Yes, it’s gonna be messy as hell, and that’s exactly what needs to happen right now. The other side has already gone nuclear because they didn’t think we’d do the same. This puts SCOTUS on the spot, as it should. They will spend their time twisting themselves into pretzels over arguments against the avalanche of liberal Texas-law clones coming their way, or they will strike them all down—which they should have done to begin with. It’s a win-win for Democrats.
Oh, and this is just one avenue of attack. You see, conservatives love the Texas abortion ban because it’s impossible to stop, since the ban isn’t done by any agency of the state. It empowers private citizens anywhere to sue abortion providers. But there are things Democrats can do in the meantime. In fact, there’s plenty Joe Biden can do right now to protect women in Texas if he gets his head in the game.
He needs to start thinking like a Republican:
The Democrats can be clever too, however. Consider the doctrine of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects government employees from private lawsuits arising out of the performance of their jobs. Conservatives love to defend qualified immunity when a cop shoots a black person to death or a CIA agent tortures a suspected terrorist. So here’s an idea: If abortion providers were made federal officials—call them “privacy protectors”—who were deemed to be operating under the authority of the government, they would be protected from the private civil actions Texas now authorizes.
To do this, Biden would need to set up, through executive order, some kind of “President’s Commission on Privacy,” either through the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Justice. This commission could then hire the aforementioned “privacy protectors,” who would be empowered to go across the country, counseling women on their constitutional rights and providing other services attendant to those rights.
This is what it looks like to fight back. Our leaders need to fight like our rights are being trampled on, dammit, because they are. For God’s sakes, our very democracy is under threat. The other side has made this into a war, and we need to have leaders who will rise to the occasion. Newsom seems to understand this, and if other leaders aren’t able or willing to fight, we need to replace them with those who will.