Linda Hirschman is a veteran lawyer, and she’s confident that the Texas anti-abortion law, SB8, directly challenged the power of the federal court system—and that may be pro-choice activists’ saving grace.
The law says that the onus is on the public to report people in violation of the law, aka women and abortion providers, instead of the court. After hearing arguments this past Monday, it’s highly likely, Hirschman conjectures to The New Abnormal host Molly Jong-Fast, that the Supreme Court will take offense to that system, and won’t stay it.
But not because they truly care.
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“The worst thing that happened from the Supreme Court standpoint is that the southern state, [Texas], tried to nullify the decision of Roe V. Wade in the state of Texas by stripping the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over this dispute. And that's what has led a lot of commentators to say at least two of the five of the six conservative justices will flip and make a majority to strike down SB8. This is not because they love abortion rights, or because they think that women are citizens. They see that as a threat to their power,” she tells Molly.
That doesn’t mean that Texas is going to give up though, Hirschman explains, especially when you have people like the state’s AG, Ken Paxton, defending the law simply because he thinks it’s his, and other peoples’, business to make sure women don’t have abortions.
It mirrors, almost identically, the system of an 1850 slave law, says Hirschman.
“Like Texas’, [it] set up a complete legal system in order to enable private people to punish the uppity women in 1850,” she explains. “In the Fugitive Slave Act, the federal government relied on the enslavers, the slaveholders from the south, to pay slave catchers—does this sound familiar?—that they sent to the north [to] identify the slaves and drag them to a federal court that looked exactly like the system that SB8 sets up. And then those federal courts would send them back to enslavement. There was no defense against it, just like there's no defense against the abortion law and SB8. It is chillingly similar.”
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