Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues The Legal Forum New Texas law

If there is no cost to file suit, and no penalty for frivolous lawsuits, then I'm pretty sure the Texas lawsuit filing system is going to be overwhelmed immediately by billions of bot-generated abortion lawsuit filings against every woman of child-bearing age in Texas. Why not? It costs the suit filers nothing, and sooner or later they will actually get a hit.

Of course, Texas may have a difficult time wading through a million filings per day.

Bots are already in place, filing FALSE info into the system. I’ve read posts on Facebook today giving instructions on, of course, exactly how NOT to do such a thing. Also, as a quick note, the suits are not filed against the pregnant woman, but against anyone who helps her, including medical people. One question under examination right now is whether Uber drivers can be sued.

If you can sue Uber drivers, you can sue all public transit systems, airlines, car dealerships, car rental agencies, etc. I think the law says people don't even have to help a woman who gets an abortion after 6 weeks, just thinking about it is enough! How about shoe stores? Some woman may walk across the border. Yes, this is ridiculous, but that's how the law is written.

Lost another post, sorry. But yes, and that’s a major reason this is not only an abortion law, not only a women’s issue. I’m glad you “get it.”

Why Satanists may be the last, best hope to save abortion rights in Texas
via Salon

Merrick Garland has announced that the Justice Department will protect women seeking legal abortions in Texas, under Roe v Wade. He can thwart the Texas law completely with two different acts:

First of all, every time a state has threatened to close all their abortion clinics via new laws, the courts have forbidden that. So there is plenty of legal precedent for injunctions forbidding such state actions, which happens to be the Achilles Heel of the new Texas law.

Second, he can direct US government employees to supply Texas women with transportation to obtain their pre-24 week abortions. The US government can not be sued for such acts, so nobody can prevail in their vigilant lawsuits. The Hyde amendment says the federal government can't pay for abortions, but there are a myriad of exceptions, state programs, etc. that do pay for them. It mostly affects HHS funding, so Justice Department civil rights funding for that transportation would not be a problem. Actually paying for them would be covered by the clinics themselves through private charities dedicated to reproductive choice. President Biden left the Hyde Amendment language out of the 2022 budget to fulfill a campaign promise.

If court decisions decide the clinics themselves can be sued, federal transportation can just send the women out of state for their procedure. Or clinics can organize their finances and ownership so they don't have any assets. I don't think any of them are raking in the big money! They tend to operate on a hand-to-mouth charitable mode, so it wouldn't be hard. Then vigilantes can sue them and win nothing. Lawyers will refuse to help them pro bono.

Another thing the Biden Administration can do is to make sure the "RU-486 by mail" program is working everywhere. I know that was operating at the height of the pandemic, but it's has been halted by the Supreme Court conservatives while it works it way through the courts. Biden can end all obstacles by directing the FDA to stop regulating RU-486 as a controlled drug. They can still oversee it as an over-the-counter non-prescription drug, but then it just blows up most anti-abortion efforts.

Don’t have much time tonight but I do see problems with your post. First, as far as I know, the new law does not threaten to close any clinics.

Secondly, while the federal government might be able to provide transportation, I’d be awfully surprised if that happened; even if it did, that’s only a partial solution. Doesn’t address the issue of helping with childcare, helping with finances, granting a sick day, etc.

It is a critical weakness, and has been prohibited by the Supreme Court since at least 1905. How a Massachusetts case could end the Texas abortion law (Lawrence Tribe, Boston Globe). Lawrence Tribe actually argued the case in 1982.
"Decades ago, recalling the court’s early 20th-century invalidation of just such schemes in cases involving land use and zoning, we successfully invoked the civil parallel of the Ku Klux Klan Act to prevent the neighbor of Harvard Square restaurant Grendel’s Den from wielding a state-conferred veto power over the issuance of any liquor license within a 500-foot radius. That statute was enacted by Congress specifically to provide a federal judicial remedy for violations of constitutional rights when state judicial remedies were blocked, as they clearly are by the structure of the Texas abortion law.

In an 8-1 opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger, no liberal himself, the Supreme Court in 1982 held that such veto power could easily be invoked for religious, ideological, or other illicit reasons that could well be undetectable, making the scheme unconstitutional on its face."

The reverse problem may attach itself to the frivolous filers. Under 42 USC § 1983, "Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officer’s judicial capacity, injunctive relief shall not be granted unless a declaratory decree was violated or declaratory relief was unavailable." They file a suit, I'd file the countersuit and ask for 10 times the damages.

According to the Washington post, the website has been pulled down at least twice due to hosting problems. In one case, the provider had restrictions on collecting information on third parties.