This is a different refusal than that reported in Supreme Court Protects Babies With Heartbeats By Allowing Texas’ Six-Week Abortion Ban. That one was early Wednesday, this one happened late Wednesday.
Supreme Court Upholds New Texas Abortion Law, For Now
The opinion of the court:
The dissents:The U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday night refused to block a Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The vote was 5-to-4, with three Trump-appointed justices joining two other conservative justices. Dissenting were conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, and the court's three liberal justices.
The decision left open the option for abortion providers to challenge the Texas law in other ways in the future, leaving open the possibility--even likelihood-- that the case will return to the Supreme Court, though not for months or longer.
The opinion was unsigned. It said the abortion providers didn't properly address "complex and novel antecedent procedural questions" in their case.
"In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants' lawsuit," the decision said. "In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas's law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts."
Roberts:
Mere procedural bickering.Chief Justice Roberts, in dissent, said he would have temporarily blocked the law from going into effect in order to give the lower courts adequate time to hear and decide "whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws" by "essentially delegat[ing] enforcement to...the populace at large."
The case, he acknowledged, does present difficult and novel questions, but none of those questions had been thoroughly considered yet by the lower courts. Nor, Roberts said, had the cases been fully briefed or considered by lower court judges.
Breyer:
This is because the new Texas law allows citizens to enforce the law.Breyer, citing the famous 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, said that normally where a legal right is invaded, the law itself "provides a legal remedy by suit," and this law, he suggested, does the opposite.
Kagan:
Same as Breyer but she adds the fiction that abortion is a constitutional right. Nowhere does the Constitution protect abortion. The court invented the right.Justice Kagan, in her written dissent, said "Texas's law delegates to private individuals the power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion during the first stage of pregnancy. But a woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during that first stage," a right that the Supreme Court has endorsed repeatedly over nearly a half century.
Sotomayor:
Same as Kagan just more emotional."The court's order is stunning, " she wrote. "Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand....Because the court's failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent."
The text of the court's opinion and dissents: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinion...21a24_8759.pdf