DOJ v ACLU
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern report at Slate:
On Friday, the Department of Justice filed an astonishing appeal with the Supreme Court, urging the justices to intervene in the Jane Doe case that seemed to have ended last week. Doe, an undocumented 17-year-old in a federally funded Texas shelter, was denied abortion access by the Trump administration, which argues that it can force undocumented minors to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. On Oct. 24, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Doe must be allowed to terminate her pregnancy, which she did the next day. Now the DOJ is urging the Supreme Court to vacate that decision—and punish the ACLU attorneys who represented Doe.
Gee. Here I thought we had an adversarial system, in which attorneys are allowed to dispute the government.
Make no mistake: With this filing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department has declared war on attorneys and groups who dare to oppose it in court.
The Justice Department is doing three things here.
First, it wants the Supreme Court to punish the D.C. Circuit for issuing a decision that it believes to be egregiously wrong by wiping the entire ruling off the books. Second, the DOJ wants to eradicate a decision that sets a legal precedent it despises. Doe’s lawsuit was initially brought as part of a class action, and the ACLU will continue to litigate its broader claim against the Trump administration’s absolute bar on abortion access for undocumented minors. As long as the D.C. Circuit’s decision remains on the books, those lawsuits are almost guaranteed to succeed. The Justice Department wants it gone so that it can litigate this issue anew.
Third, and most importantly, Friday’s appeal is a flagrant effort to crucify the individual attorneys who represented Doe, and to terrify likeminded lawyers into acquiescence. The DOJ thus asks the Supreme Court to force Doe’s lawyers to “show cause why disciplinary action should not be taken” against the ACLU—either by the court itself or by state bars—for “material misrepresentations and omissions” designed to thwart an appeal.
What were those? The ACLU attorneys didn’t keep the DOJ informed on when Doe would get her abortion – her legal abortion.
Put differently, the government argues that the ACLU owed government lawyers a notification of when Doe’s legal abortion would occur. The end goal here seems to have been to try to continue to block the abortion until it would be illegal to terminate, even though she had secured an unqualified right to do so. (Doe was 16 weeks pregnant by that point; Texas bans abortion after 20 weeks, and the government had already delayed the abortion by a month.) The DOJ also claims that Doe’s lawyers had the responsibility to keep answering their phone calls to update them on her status: “Efforts to reach respondent’s counsel were met with silence, until approximately 10 a.m. EST, when one of her lawyers told the government that Ms. Doe had undergone an abortion.”
…
This week-late effort to blame the ACLU for its “arguable” responsibility to ensure that the government could continue to harm their client is not just an effort to save face, but also an attempt to warn attorneys that zealous effectuation of their duties to the clients will now be punished.
The Justice Department’s crusade against the ACLU is especially galling in light of the fact that there was sanctionable misconduct here—on the part of the government itself. Scott Lloyd, the official who blocked Doe and other minors from abortion access, likely violated a long-standing federal settlement agreement in his anti-abortion crusade. Under this agreement, undocumented minors like Doe must be allowed access to family planning services, which Lloyd intentionally and repeatedly withheld. He even instituted his anti-abortion views as official government policy in obvious violation of the federal settlement.
Hatred of women can never be appeased.
H/t Screechy Monkey
I may be wrong, but it appears to me that Trump has been lobbied by the Catholic clergy or their cronies. Or maybe at the outside he thought this one up all by himself.
The issue is not just one of women’s right to control their own bodies and fertility, the clerics have long since lost that battle. They are also wrong on the issue of individual life starting at the moment of conception. We do not as individuals begin instantly, but gradually, over the full term of pregnancy and beyond.
If the priests were only half-sincere, they would insist on all menstrual blood being brought to church for requiem Mass, just in case it contained a zygote or foetus, with full right to the life it has just sadly lost.
The existing doctrine is their way of controlling women and at the same time building an increasing Congregation of the Hopeful, and the Catholic population generally.
We are not out of the Middle Ages yet.
Omar, with anybody but Trump at the helm I’d agree with you about Catholic lobbying, but this just smacks of Trump and his administration’s efforts to shut down any legal opposition to his administration’s plans in general and to Trump personally.
Not to mention, Trump may have little to do with it at all at this time. He filled his administration with people willing to praise him to the skies to get power, and now he has an administration filled with theocrats who would sell their souls to any two-bit hustler for the chance to tell women what to do with their bodies. And since Trump doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t directly affect him, he’ll let them do it, and then defend them when they do because any attack against one of his appointments (unless it comes directly from him) is an attack on his wisdom, his veracity, his person, his very image of himself.
Inklast:
Plus, he’ll see praise from the sort of people he likes. They’ll say things like “Trump takes a strong position on abortion” and when he’s looked up what “position” means he’ll be delighted. Cue ever more doubling-down.