WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.
The justices did not detail their reasoning for keeping in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations if they would break Texas law. There were no publicly noted dissents.
The decision comes weeks before a presidential election where abortion has been a key issue after the high court’s 2022 decision overturning the nationwide right to abortion.
The justices rebuffed a Biden administration push to throw out the lower court order. The administration argues that under federal law hospitals must perform abortions if needed in cases where a pregnant patient’s health or life is at serious risk, even in states where it’s banned.
What do you suppose they could do?
They need both chambers of Congress to pass a law or constitutional amendment, and they only have one. Biden could expand the Supreme Court, but he’s too much of an old school statesman to rock the status quo, and there’s no guarantee they’d vote as a unit.
Furthermore, Democratic states have been enshrining abortion access into law and/or their constitutions, and they’ve been getting abortion onto voting ballots in red states, so it’s not really fair or accurate to say they haven’t done anything meaningful.
Edit: typo
They had the presidency and Congress under Obama and Biden.
They didn’t act.
So your stance is that the Democrats under Obama should have used political capital to push for legal abortion when abortion was already legal? Or am I missing something?
I don’t think the excuses for Obama are helpful. Not now, and not then. Even when he was president, it was very clear that the issue needed to be settled by Congress, and he had the power to do it.
And right here I no longer believe you’re debating this in good faith.
When Obama was president, abortion had been legal for like forty years. And, although I wish it had done more, the ACA was and is a very important piece of legislation. But, it was obvious they should’ve instead focused on fixing something that, at that time, wasn’t broken? Yeah, no.
Okay, Obama didn’t have the benefit of future knowledge that Roe v Wade would be struck down. It was a precedent that had stood the test of time across decades.
Why the Dems didn’t do it for the very short time they had both chambers under Biden, I don’t know. Perhaps they had a naive belief that Conservatives wouldn’t be the trolls they are.
But even if we assume they won’t do anything about it again, which I seriously doubt based on how popular abortion access has become—even if we assume that, abortion isn’t the only thing on the ballot, and people are voting en masse for the Democrats, because LGBTQ rights, environmental protections, and even American democracy itself is at stake.
To cast aspersions and wring hands over abortion when we’re 30 days away from the election…I just don’t get how that helps anyone. The die has been cast. Holding onto some vain hope that neither Democrats nor Republicans will win (or worse, that everything will burn down in some bloody revolution) is madness.