|
| Wendy Davis, ready to run, via KTSA TV. |
Maybe the most personally infuriating thing to me about the current flurry of state anti-abortion legislation is its open contempt for the rule of law: I mean these mean-minded, pinched and intolerant people, so ready to judge others for the slightest deviations from their own idea of propriety, passing laws that are flagrantly illegal according to settled law (as the members of a Supreme Court majority from Roberts through Kavanaugh and Barrett have maintained in their confirmation hearings).
The "trigger laws" in something like 20 states from the previous wave were designed to take effect only after such a time as Roe and Casey are overturned, should that happen (I'm not convinced it will, at least this year, though they'll undoubtedly continue working to cripple abortion rights around the edges). The current wave, in Mississippi and Florida and Oklahoma and wherever else, is as if the law doesn't even exist; it's pretty much as if they passed a law legalizing slavery, or denying women the right to vote. Saying, as they do, that it might be constitutional soon, after the Court rules on the Mississippi law, doesn't cut the mustard: it's unconstitutional now, and they know it.
And the Texas law, the infamous SB8, is the worst of all, with its sly legalism in the provisions designed to prevent the Court from considering it—since the state is not enforcing the law, simply inviting bounty hunters to enforce it privately by suing anybody who assists in providing patients with abortion services in the state, for $10,000 in punitive damages, nobody has standing to sue the state, as decided just last week.
