Read about the ramifications of SB-8. Private citizens can sue anyone who assisted or advised her in getting an abortion for $10,000 each. There is no real limit to who can be sued, as long as some tangential relationship can be made between her and getting the medical care she requires. While they can't go after her directly, almost everyone else is fair game. The limits aren't well defined, and courts haven't ruled to clarify. A pilot who pilots the plane she flies on to another state could be sued, if someone can identify a pilot by name and they can be served by Texas courts.
buddhabound
joined 2 years ago
She ran unopposed in the last election after claiming she was going to retire. However, because the local Democratic party can't get its shit together to run a candidate, she just filed her papers and extended her career of taking those free tax dollars and putting them in her pocket.
It's terrible, and he's a terrible person. But, I had concerns that this case getting decided too fast would hurt the other case trying to overturn TX's ban. One of the arguments in the state-wide ban case was that women could go to the court and get permission for abortion as needed. That's a horrible solution that doesn't scale, but if this case was too quick to resolve, the court could use it for cover and not have to rule on the overall ban in TX.
Paxton acting like such an entitled prick about this ruling might actually help both cases survive. This case will get a stronger opinion by the judge, and the other case won't be able to just point to this case as a "see you don't need us" scapegoat way out of actually ruling on the larger ban question state-wide.
Abortion bans don't stop abortions. People with the means will travel out of state. People without the means to travel will obtain abortions by whatever means necessary. Women will die.
There were reasons why Roe was decided the way it was. Some people have forgotten history or never learned it. Women they know and women they love will die. They will remember, they will learn. It will be too late.
There are some interesting snippets in there about what she learned about how the Dem party operates vs the Republicans from when she was part of the Jan 6th committee.
In the Dems' case, the reps themselves do a lot of the work - they're actual lawyers and qualified people who can dig into the substance of an issue and go through the details in a knowledgeable way. The reps, in contrast, rely on staffers for most everything that isn't the most basic understanding. She said that the difference between how the Dem and Rep parties operate are like night and day.
I think the snippet is included as part of Lawrence O'Donnell's interview with Nancy Pelosi last night, but I might be wrong. I watched a lot of Liz Cheney talking on the news last, and heard a lot of snippets from her audiobook yesterday as well, so I'm not 100% sure, but I think the source is either Lawrence or Nicole Wallace's show.
And where are they to go?
New Mexico (which the local jurisdictions are doing their best to criminalize interstate travel, despite the Constitution and Court)
Kansas, which voted to protect women's right to reproductive healthcare.
Colorado. And then it gets further and further away after that. If someone is on the east side of Texas, Kansas and then Illinois are probably the closest safe & legal options.
I think one of them is out with a severe illness, too. Or, at least that's what I remember from the article with Matt Gaetz the other day. So, it might only be a 1 member majority.
Slay, queen.
During the most recent challenge to Texas's anti-abortion laws (in Texas Supreme Court) there was an argument made by the state that women should go to the court and ask for the court to allow the abortion on a one-by-one basis. Basically, the state argued that women should do exactly what this suit is doing. The plaintiffs in the other case said it's not reasonable or practical to do, and so now someone has brought a suit that basically puts this argument right back in front of the court while it's deliberating whether or not that is a reasonable course of action.
Further, the TX anti-abortion law (SB-8, iirc), also gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who assists (even with planning or transportation for an abortion) for $10,000 each. The current suit is also asking the court to protect all of the people involved, from the doctor to the woman's husband, from those types of lawsuits.
Further, many border towns in TX have made it illegal at the local level to use the local jurisdiction's roads/infrastructure to travel out of state for an abortion. This suit also will need the court to prevent those local jurisdictions from taking action against any of the involved parties if it rules she must travel out of state.
Even further, most of these laws in Texas have a 10 year retroactive lookback/statute of limitations for the $10,000 "bounty", so they will need the court to rule on her case to not only protect them today, but for at least the next 10 years. This court protection may need to be potentially forever in case the state decides that there is no statute of limitation, as there would be if abortion was classified as "murder".
And the state argued that women should just go individually to court on an as-needed basis to get all of these details worked out any time she needed necessary reproductive healthcare. This is a ridiculous argument.
Some women can't even afford to go out of state, or there are too many barriers to be protected so they can return home afterward. It's even sillier to expect people to be able to hire lawyers and bring a case before state courts within days of finding out a pregnancy isn't viable. "Just go somewhere else" doesn't work in Texas, and it shouldn't have to.
PS. Women have the right to reproductive healthcare on demand, despite what the bullshit Supreme Court says and I'm not debating with anyone about it. Fuck off. I'll block you and move on and not give a single thought about it.
To be fair, my "woman" is able to disagree with me because I didn't chain her up, hold her captive, and traffic her for my cam site (allegedly).
Or investment groups are still buying houses because they don't have to pay the same rates that individuals would, and then they're turning them into short term rentals. I just saw an article a couple of days ago about how investors bought a huge chunk of the residential market this year. For all we know, this is just more of the rich grabbing our resources to consolidate them into profits later when we've all been squeezed out.
I'm GenX, and I wouldn't answer a poll if you paid me. I will vote, and I will never vote for a Republican for the rest of my life. If there's no Dem candidate on the ballot for a specific office, I leave it blank so they can see how many votes they're not getting when they don't run a candidate.