The fact the Texas legislature came up with that completely ridiculous scheme is not that surprising. They just aren't that good at making laws and have elected a number of people who show no concern with the general welfare of their constituents.

That the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it is absolutely insane. Even operating on the assumption that the conservative majority on the court wanted to overturn Roe without having big headlines saying "Roe Overturned" choosing this absolutely insane law to do it is not going to do them any favors in the long term. The chance of this backfiring is so high that it's hard to imagine anybody looking at it and saying it was a good idea. How can they not be feeling like Roger Taney after Dred Scott right now? This could be the beginning of the end for restrictive abortion laws nationwide, to so decisively win a battle that costs you the war.

Edit: Wow, this is getting downvoted fast. I'm leaving it up so history can be the judge. I'm feeling confident that effectively issuing a Letter of Marque to every single US citizen on their own constituents is will turn out badly. This law is only going to be abused, and severely, unless the sensible minds in the courts wake up and put it on hold.

> the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it

The Court rejected an emergency stay. It did not uphold the law. That will come after hearings next year.

The damage is already done. This galaxy brain legislation is being picked up by 6 other states[1] and growing. By the time the Supreme Court gets back to it there will be at least a dozen other implementations to consider as well. If they opt for a narrow ruling the whole case could drag out for a decade or more. Meanwhile legal bounty hunters get to make claims with little to no merit on the hopes of getting some $10,000 payouts and with little risk--the abortion providers pay the court costs win or lose.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/03/texas-abortion...

> the abortion providers pay the court costs win or lose

Wait, so if I had even a thin basis for a suspicion, I could file cases against the legislators who voted for the bull?

If you lose you have to pay your own court costs, but the abortion provider pays their own costs regardless. If you win the abortion provider also pays your court costs.

From what I’ve read there is nothing preventing you from filing frivolous suits against the legislators. They have to defend themselves or face a summary judgement. The law as written is wide open for abuse. This could be amended with a provision that excludes legislators and rich politically connected people.

Even better, you could do so in courts that are inconvenient for them (read: other end of the state), without any allegations that it's a proper venue for the case at all, and they couldn't move to place it in a more reasonable jurisdiction.

Granted, that provision is probably unconstitutional by itself, but it just goes to show you that the banning abortion part of the law is the least problematic part of the entire thing.

Between the time the court rejected a stay and the hearings next year, a constitutional right will be denied to countless people.

>a constitutional right

Exactly, just because it isn't specified or enumerated as a right in the constitution, doesn't mean it's not a right... right?

Yeah, causing damage in between. But that is what selecting justices was all about anyway last years.

Who will SCOTUS hand the bill to for the unplanned and unwanted children who are carried to term in the meantime by women who could not get access to healthcare until hearings are held [1]? Who should these women sue for damages due to defective statute and who have been harmed by the state of Texas?

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-6-week-abortion-ban-p... (However, preliminary estimates suggest that the law could prevent roughly 132 procedures per day, or 4,009 per month.)

> The fact the Texas legislature came up with that completely ridiculous scheme is not that surprising. They just aren't that good at making laws

They are very good at making laws to do what they want (in this case, leverage precdent to ensure that that wfeffoets to block the law before it went into effect did not succeed, maximizing the chilling effect on abortion provision).

> That the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it is absolutely insane.

The Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of the law (either the abortion restriction or the enforcement mechanism), it only validated the Texas Legislature's attempt to avoid a pre-implementation block against the law. While this enables the chilling effect of the law, it does not validate the substance of the law.

> That the Supreme Court basically rubber stamped it is absolutely insane.

If you want an outcome-oriented reasoning explanation, I’d say the majority wanted to set back the availability of abortion without overturning row; indeed, while likely still upholding it once a case reaches it through the slow path it has required.

This is not a "completely ridiculous scheme". This is a loophole in the constitution that Texas is employing.

IANAL, but this is how I understand it. The supreme court does not strike down laws in a preliminary injunction, it just prevents the attorney-general or other applicable officials from enforcing it. This law is written so that the attorney general has no part in enforcing the law, so the supreme court can't do a preliminary injunction. It can only strike down the law once somebody tries to use the law and it bubbles its way up the court system.

But of course if everybody is too afraid to break the law, the law has effect without ever being applied.

The best suggestion I heard on how to get rid of it would be to have Massachusetts ban handguns using the same loophole. Somehow I think that this stacked court will come to its senses when it is the 2nd amendment being threatened rather than the 14th.

texas probably got the idea from civil liability laws that were used being used against gun manufacturers prior to the federal immunity law. gun control organisations were using the court system to bankrupt manufacturers as a backdoor to banning guns.

I don't think that's a similar situation, really; those allowed injured parties to sue the manufacturers who made the dangerous device. In the US gun manufacturers are generally special-cased here; they have unusual protections that you wouldn't have if you, say, manufactured a defective water heater.

In this case totally _unrelated_ parties can sue, which seems entirely different.

You're probably getting downvoted for this attitude:

> The fact the Texas legislature came up with that completely ridiculous scheme is not that surprising.

People on this site tend to downvote if you talk based on perceived state attitudes. The same thing happens if you make blanket statements about California, it's citizens, or electorate.

It's not a blanket statement about a state but the legislature which is much smaller group of people.

Unfortunately it's a small jump to thinking, "somebody elected these people" and then projecting those sentiments widely. Anyway, that's what I've learned about talking about Texas and California broadly. I've lived in both states and have both negative and positive things to say about each, but when I criticize them I've figured out I have to be very concise about describing with who and what I find wrong in order to have my opinion heard and respected.

No downvote here but it's that. We're used to people talking about a place that doesn't exist usually so we're touchy about it.

But the law is crazy, unconstitutional and would start a tit-for-tat form of legislating that would completely delegitimize whatever legitimacy the government has left.

Note, the legislature is weird. It meets every other year, is basically a second job. Not sure Cali's professionalization of politics is better, but something has to give.

> Note, the legislature is weird. It meets every other year, is basically a second job.

IIRC, biennial sessions used to be extremely common.

Back when state population was measured in the tens of thousands.

> Back when state population was measured in the tens of thousands.

Why would you think that? It's not true.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/state-experience...

> One reason for the change was the resurgence of state legislative power in the middle of the 20th century. Legislatures’ growing role in state government can be measured by the shift from biennial to annual legislative sessions. In 1940 only four state legislatures held annual sessions—and Alabama's legislature met only once every four years. In 2011, only four states still have biennial sessions—Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas. Two changes came recently: Arkansas with its first annual session in 2009, and Oregon with its first in 2011.

In 1940, 34 states had populations of 1 million+ and only one state had a population of less than 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

I find it curious that the law itself allows for civil suits. Why aren't these just criminal prosecutions?

I think the law is built as sort of a convoluted legal Rube Goldberg machine to sneak around existing case law about abortions, so all of these weird constructions are to avoid doing something that's already been ruled unconstitutional.

It's a legal trick to prevent federal courts from immediately ruling the law unconstitutional.

It is certainly the end of medical privacy in the US, but it may even be the end of the Supremacy Clause, which gives the federal government the ability to pass laws that override state laws.

It's difficult to overstate how much of a threat this law is to the US Constitution.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/meet-the-legal-st...

The best suggestion I heard for fighting this would be to have Massachusetts or some other deep blue state copy and paste this law to get around the 2nd amendment.

Edit to add because I guess it wasn't obvious enough: The strategy would force the Supreme Court to quickly strike down both laws.

I'm not sure how those two are equivalent. The second ammendment is in the literal text of the Constitution, whereas abortion is derived (as far as I can tell) solely from case law.

AIUI, Roe v Wade says that abortion rights flow fairly directly from the 14th amendment.

"Directly" is a strong word. It's an interpretation which assumes there is such a thing as a right to an abortion such that the states would then be violating by passing legislation.

Now, I am not of the opinion that something has to be explicitly protected in the constitution for it to be a right. I prefer to assume a limited view of what behavior government has the authority to limit. However, if something is not explicitly protected in the constitution, then it is at least up for debate.

There's procedural implications for this distinction as well: the Supreme Court can overturn its prior precedent (as Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson). But the Supreme Court cannot overturn the text of the Constitution itself. Only an amendment by Congress can do that.

EDIT: Just to clarify, that procedural distinction means that the Supreme Court could uphold the Texas law while overturning a similar law restricting gun ownership without contradiction.

The second amendment is neither clear nor absolute. For example the constitutionality of an assault weapons ban is still unclear. Your point would stand if Massachusetts banned the right to bear arms. However, if they banned everything but single shot rifles, it comes back to precedent. Like the Texas law, it's obviously unconstitutional based on precedent, but not obviously unconstitutional based on the text of the amendment alone.

All laws require some interpretation in their enforcement, but this is pretty blatant equivocation.

Aside from some archaic language, the second amendment is actually fairly clear. It is clearly talking about guns, and the phrase "shall not be infringed" is fairly strong, clear language.

On the other hand, the 14th amendment say nothing about abortion, and there's no reason to suggest the authors of that amendment had abortion in mind when they wrote it.

That does not mean that such a right does not exist, or that it needs to be explicitly mentioned in the Constitution to receive protection, but any judge who wants to assert that such a right exists is going to have to do a lot more work than one who wants to assert the existence of an individual right to own guns, even "assault weapons" (which is a largely nonsense category anyway).

I thought about that and wonder if that still leaves us with an utterly broken country anyway.

Because states can't prosecute it, they already lost that one before the Supreme Court. So the hack is that the state isn't the one enforcing it.

Because abortion is a constitutional right in the US, and it would immediately be enjoined as a flagrant violation of constitutional rights (at least pending the current court's likely, but not certain, overruling of Roe v Wade and Casey).

Instead, this is a way to get around constitutionality since it's not the government who is violating the constitution. Never mind all of other constitutional bits about due process that are being horribly trampled on (such as allowing people to sue without standing...).

This just shifts enforcement to the courts, which are part of the government.

Would you care to go on record as asserting that limits can not be placed on Constitutional rights?

I think we are seeing citizens deputized to enforce laws and norms in other places in society too. It already happens on social media. It's also happening offline, folks are losing their jobs over just expressing opinions. Citizens without standing enforcing edicts on others. It truly worries me. This isn't exactly what you meant, but its something I think is related which I've been thinking about.

"Deputized" has a precise meaning in this context: the state is substituting private citizens for officials in order to commit official acts.

Individuals shaming other individuals for "expressing opinions" are not "deputized," since there's no official act. We can talk on and on about whether it's it's good or not, but it's nowhere near as dangerous as states end-running civil liberties by appointing private citizens to do their dirty work.

It's becoming more of a trend. There were quite a few such sites after Jan 6th, for example and I believe a subreddit or two devoted to such.

That’s the core value proposition of being a paid informant.

Similar to what East Germany had were IIRC 1 third of their citizens spied and report activities of everyone else.

Yeah. I’m against abortion but that kind of thing is HOA levels of unacceptable.

Look to the ADA for inspiration.

> Look to the ADA for inspiration

Don’t think it’s comparable. If I have perfect vision, I don’t think I can sue a site for being unusable by blind people. Actual injury must be shown.

California has a cottage legal industry whereby lawyers will file Unruh Act accessibility claims against businesses. There’s a very low standard on Unruh claims, to the point that some lawyers will work with the same plaintiff repeatedly looking for things like being inches off on doorways etc.

Similarly, Prop 65 allows for direct, private civil suits. Although it has seen some reforms in recent years, it took some really egregious settlements before that happened.

TL;DR: You can thank Californians for importing their crappy legal theories into Texas.

Which Californians were responsible for the new Texas laws?