This was not unexpected (The Washington Post):
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted a request filed Friday afternoon by the Texas attorney general to temporarily suspend a judge’s order blocking the law, which has halted most abortions in the state.
Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) had asked the appeals court to reverse the injunction by U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman, who sided with the Biden administration Wednesday night and characterized the abortion ban as an “unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”
Paxton said the appeals court action was “great news,” tweeting, “I will fight federal overreach at every turn.”
S.B. 8 effectively bans abortions in Texas after fetal cardiac activity is detected at approximately six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.
“This is a major loss for Texas patients and abortion providers, who have navigated the law’s devastating effects on abortion access for over a month now,” Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson said in a statement. “The Fifth Circuit has again disregarded half a century of precedent upholding the constitutional right to abortion.”
Bans on abortion after six weeks have been blocked in several other states by federal judges because they are at odds with the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which guarantees the right to abortion before viability, usually around 22 to 24 weeks.
The Texas law is different because it is not enforced by state officials. Instead, it relies on private citizens, who can sue anyone who helps someone in Texas get an abortion. The Supreme Court cited that enforcement mechanism when it declined to block the law from taking effect.
But a court “’cannot lawfully enjoin the world at large,’” Paxton’s filing argued, “let alone hold Texas responsible for the filings of private citizens that Texas is powerless to prevent” or enjoin the state’s court’s from exercising their jurisdiction.”
The state’s attempt to evade Roe v. Wade‘s protections and judicial review by having private citizens enforce the abortion ban was exactly what Pitman found both “flagrantly unconstitutional” as well as offensive.
Since long before Trumism, this is how Republican lawmakers approach laws they don’t like:
1) Find the line. 2) Step over it. 3) Dare anyone to push them back. No pushback? New line to overstep. The way water slowly erodes mountains, the GOP is eroding democracy. And damned pleased with themselves for getting away with it.
With that in mind, keep Frank Wilhoit’s 2018 dictum close at hand:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
You’ve heard that before, but he wasn’t done. Surrounded for centuries as that proposition has been by “an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy,” that flummery now has fallen away, Wilhoit argued. “All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.”
The Trump era ain’t over yet.