Urgently exploring all options
The Justice Department plans to file a lawsuit against Texas over its restrictive anti-abortion law that critics say is unconstitutional and has brought a halt to women’s reproductive rights in the state, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Monday the department was urgently exploring all options to challenge the Texas law. The department will use powers under the so-called FACE Act to provide support from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is under attack, Garland said.
Note that Bloomberg News said “women’s reproductive rights,” something which is apparently out of reach of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Won’t this just end up going to SCOTUS which will uphold it anyway?
Anna,
Possibly. I don’t take it as an absolute certainty. We’ll have to see what DOJ actually does, but I’ve seen some musing that a suit by the federal government might get around some of the procedural/jurisdictional issues that made private lawsuits tricky.
And those things can matter at the margins. While I think that the “conservatives will never overrule Roe” pundits are naive or disingenuous, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’ll just do whatever they want on any legal question no matter the merits. There are some limits to how far even the five most conservative justices are willing to go, or at least to how far they’re willing to go in one shot as opposed to incrementally moving precedent in their direction.
In any event, it’s probably worth trying. I can think of a few possible outcomes in the near term:
1. Lower courts deny injunctive relief, SCOTUS declines to intervene. This is the worst-case scenario, and yet all that’s really happened is that some DOJ lawyers wasted some time.
2. Lower courts grant injunctive relief, SCOTUS intervenes and vacates the stay. Not a great result, but depending on how long that interval is, it’s possible that it buys time for Texas courts to do something useful. If nothing else, it generates another wave of headlines about SCOTUS’s extreme anti-woman agenda, which maybe helps wake up some of the voters who have been shrugging off these issues.
3. Lower courts grant injunctive relief, SCOTUS declines to intervene. Still may be a temporary victory depending on the outcome on the merits and/or the ruling in the Mississippi case on the Court’s docket for this fall, but still worth doing.