Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was dismissive of Democratic panic over the recent Supreme Court decision to virtually outlaw abortion in Texas, saying that the law may not stand and that Democrats are using it to distract from politically damaging news.
“People are using it to gin up their base to distract from disastrous policies in Afghanistan, maybe for fundraising appeals,“ he said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “I wish we would focus on issues as opposed to theater. It was about if they had standing, nothing to do with constitutionality. I think we should move on to other issues.”
The Supreme Court decided with a 5-4 majority to let the six-week abortion ban stand, claiming that its hands are tied due to the law’s crafty enforcement scheme. The law deputizes individuals to sue all those who “aid and abet” a post-six week abortion, making it hard to bring a lawsuit preemptively, since it’s unclear who will be enforcing the law.
The dissenting liberals expressed fury with their conservative counterparts.
“The Court’s order is stunning,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor 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.”
Still, Cassidy pointed to the part of the majority opinion where the justices emphasize that they are not yet ruling on the law’s constitutionality.
If it’s as terrible as people say it is, it‘ll be destroyed by the Supreme Court,” he said.
The Texas law won’t be the Supreme Court’s only bite at the apple, if the conservative majority wants to continue to dismantle the precedent established in Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Next term, it will take up a 15-week abortion ban out of Mississippi, which does not use Texas’ unusual enforcement scheme, but encourages the justices to address the precedent directly. Other states have also already promised to produce copycat laws, encouraged by the Texas law’s success so far.
In the meantime, the Texas abortion ban is the law of the land. Per the abortion providers in their pleadings for emergency relief, 85 to 90 percent of abortions done in the state are now illegal.
