The Supreme Court’s refusal to block the Texas abortion vigilante law SB 8 has predictably spawned a series of imitators in other states. The Texas law is difficult to challenge in court because its extreme abortion ban is enforced not by state officials but by … anyone who wants to. Literally anyone can sue not just doctors and nurses, but anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion. No wonder legislators in other states have looked at this precedent and decided to imitate it.
At least 31 different bills copying the vigilante aspects of the Texas law have been introduced in states across the country, The Washington Post finds. And while such bills proposed by Democrats tend to get attention—including two of the three examples the Post itself opens with—the majority are from Republicans. That includes seven direct copycats of the Texas abortion law and more than a dozen focused on the Republican education culture wars, including mask mandates, gender-neutral bathrooms, library books, and curricula on issues like race.
While race has been a top focus of Republican attacks on education, it’s not the only one. Florida's "don't say gay" bills would allow parents to sue school districts for any classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity. Bills in Tennessee and Oklahoma would let parents sue to have books pulled from library shelves if they think the books are “obscene,” usually translated as containing LGBTQ content.
A bill introduced by the same Oklahoma state legislator who introduced the book-banning bill would allow parents to sue teachers for saying anything that conflicts with a student’s religious beliefs, including talking about evolution or the big bang theory. And teachers who got any financial help paying the fines would be fired.
In most cases, the plan is not to have teachers and school districts actually be sued—it’s to scare them into silence, which is working in the states that have already passed bills against teaching about race in ways that upset racist white parents. But once you pass a swath of extremely broad, vague bills offering the prospect of $10,000 for a temper tantrum, there are going to be people all too happy to have temper tantrums in hopes of the cash, no matter how cautious teachers, librarians, and schools are being.
In a few states, Democrats have also offered vigilante bills copying the Texas mechanism for evading legal scrutiny. In California and Illinois, lawmakers have introduced bills allowing private individuals to sue gun manufacturers, dealers, and others over the harms of gun violence. Also in Illinois, there’s a bill allowing business owners to sue customers over fake vaccination cards. But basically everyone involved realizes that if those laws pass, the Supreme Court is likely to strike them down without a second thought about the hypocrisy involved in doing so after allowing the Texas abortion ban to stand.
So while media organizations like the Post paint the rise of vigilante bills as a both-sides-do-it thing, the reality is that it’s overwhelmingly being used by Republicans as a tool of oppression, and the Trump-packed Supreme Court is guaranteed to treat Republican and Democratic laws very differently.
