Two Texas jurisdictions will consider measures this week to outlaw the act of transporting another person along their roads for an abortion, part of a strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Commissioners in Lubbock County are slated to vote on the proposal on Monday. A few hours north, the Amarillo City Council on Tuesday will weigh its own such law, which could lead to a future council or city-wide vote.
Lubbock and Amarillo are the biggest jurisdictions of the 10 places in Texas that have considered restrictions on abortion-related transportation since the June 2022 end of Roe, which had granted a nationwide right to abortion. Five cities and counties in the state have passed bans.
There was a much smaller town, I believe more in East Texas, that brought such an ordinance up. I was pleasantly shocked that they eventually came to the conclusion that their proposed “papers please” environment was a wee bit too much like what many of their older residents had fought against.
Sadly, I’m not confident that clearer minds will continue to prevail.
Further, as I type this, I’m in an airport in Dallas headed to Nevada where I’m going to gamble, have sex out of wedlock, consume cannabis, and potentially purchase and consume an alcoholic beverage between the hours of two and seven in the morning. Somehow, no Texas legislator has any interest in prohibiting my endeavors. Seems inconsistent.
Somehow, no Texas legislator has any interest in prohibiting my endeavors. Seems inconsistent.
Were you born male, and do you still identify as such? That might have something to do with it.
I’m betting the gambling prohibition will fall in Texas in the next 10 years. Same in other states that ban it. There is just way too much money going to their immediate neighbors for the politicians to not get greedy.
The real problem is this notion that these abortion bans are enforced through private lawsuits, and not by actual law enforcement. The law was crafted this way on purpose, to evade judicial review: you can’t sue the State over its enforcement if the state doesn’t enforce it. The article even quotes someone pointing out that all this does is get localities involved in private lawsuits.
Conservatives are super afraid of the Government intruding on people’s lives but have no problem at all empowering nosy neighbors to do it.
As an experiment, a Liberal city with strict gun laws ought to pass similar laws empowering nosy neighbors to sue people they suspect of harboring illegal firearms, and Transporting them across state lines. It may be the only way to get this Conservative Supreme Court to address this practice.
Conservatives are super afraid of the Government intruding on people’s lives but have no problem at all empowering nosy neighbors to do it.
More specifically, they have no problem with the government empowering itself to act on behalf of a specific faction of nosy neighbors by rendering judgments and using the power of the state to enforce them in a way that’s functionally equivalent to treating those neighbors as witnesses to a crime.
If the Supreme Court was a judicial body and not an instrument of the Republican party, they would have stuck down the Texas law as an obvious “fuck you” to judicial authority based entirely on playing dumb about what RvW allows. But it turns out they didn’t care because they were already planning on overturning RvW anyway, along with concepts like standing and precedent.
God I hate them so much.
It’s not just unconstitutional, it’s legally nonsensical. Citizens of a state are not the property of the state, a state only has jurisdiction over what people do inside the state itself.
i am confused how the feds cant now also dig up the bastardized, dead horse that is the commerce clause and use it against TX here.
or how the fuck does your legal intent in another jurisdiction makes you a prisoner of the current one?
I really feel like politicians should be held financially liable for the legal costs of defending obviously unconstitutional laws like this. I mean, it’s so unbelievably unconstitutional that no serious judge would allow it to stand in a legal challenge. That makes this a waste of taxpayer money when it inevitably goes to judicial challenge.
