In Honor of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik: Notes and Resources on the Texas Abortion Law Malfeasance
David Shasha
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Whore of Trump Coney Barrett, and Rapist Kavanaugh Promote Federalist Society Lawlessness
You would not know it from following Tikvah, Bari Weiss, and the FOX News Trump echo-chamber, but the most important story this week was the extraordinarily corrupt Texas Anti-Abortion law:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/opinions/texas-abortion-law-contradictions-ghits/index.html
I wanted to make sure that our readers were aware of the position presented by North African legal authority Rabbi Yehuda ibn Ayyash that allows us to see what the enlightened Sephardic view on Abortion looks like:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/MMXsqjbzDBk
The outrageous Texas law basically guts Abortion Rights, in favor of a Snitch culture that will provide cash bounties to those who report on women who try to terminate their pregnancies after six weeks. The idea is to force health clinics to close in fear of endless litigation and possible bankruptcy.
The law even includes those unfortunate women who have been raped or have been the victims of incest – no exceptions!
It is fortunate that men do not get pregnant!
Though men are quite capable of committing rape and incest.
It has been noted that the law’s bounty provisions are eerily similar to those of the Fugitive Slave Act:
Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe has spelled out the corruption and brazen unconstitutionality of the law:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/02/roe-v-wade-texas-abortion-law-us-constitution
The complete article follows this note.
But we now have a Trumpist “Grab Them by The Pussy” SCOTUS that does not care a whit about our Constitutional system.
It is all about The Federalist Society and its scummy judicial tentacles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/us/politics/texas-abortion-conservatives-courts.html
I addressed the problem of Rapist Kavanaugh and Trumpworld Fascism in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/piSYJMpkRTM/m/UGOoc3wYBgAJ
The Rapist is like Trump in that he got away with it and is now basking in his frat-boy glory:
Destroyer of the Sephardic Heritage Rabbi Meir Soloveichik used his space at the Bari Weiss New York Times Op-Ed page to praise Whore of Trump Coney Barrett, as she was in the process of stealing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Court just days before the 2020 election:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-faith.html?searchResultPosition=5
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/fomWxZTWdq0/m/PIk-NtmmAwAJ
Fair play is not in The Federalist Society playbook:
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/news/2019/04/03/468234/conservative-court-packing/
It is the Moscow Mitch rule:
Whore of Trump Coney Barrett is now part of a Lawless SCOTUS that has no fidelity to American legal values, as Slate’s Dalia Lithwick has eloquently written:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/texas-abortion-law-what-to-do.html
The complete article follows this note.
We must always remember Soloveichik’s New Convivencia alliance with the Evangelical Christian Right and its Anti-Abortion and Anti-Birth Control Dracula Jesus crusaders:
https://equityfwd.org/meir-soloveichik
Which has been made clear in his many articles for the Radical Catholic journal First Things:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_fs8wonYLfhONdKPKTgFt_aoi6GPoJ2uhDFcWOfKuTk/edit
And in his ties to fellow Trumpscum religious extremist Senator Mike Lee:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sUvnfXMeduh00CKAuDD30NiRwbD-5Q147YrMHbGs7Q0/edit
In typical Ashkenazi nihilistic PILPUL fashion, Soloveichik has run roughshod on our Sephardic Jewish values, as his SCOTUS allies have run roughshod over the US Constitution.
There are obviously no rules that cannot be broken, and no laws that cannot be breached.
Soloveichik may think that in adopting Lysol corruption he has gamed the system, but we continue to believe that God sees all and that there will be an ultimate reckoning at some point in the future.
Every dog will have his day.
As we enter into the holiest month of the Jewish calendar, let us focus on God’s Justice and on those who would seek to corrupt our Torah as Soloveichik has done.
David Shasha
There Are Two Real Ways to Answer the Texas Abortion Law
By: Dahlia Lithwick
Thinking about a nondecision that never came down via the so-called shadow docket in the middle of the night that allowed the second-largest state in the country to overturn a 50-year-old precedent without the Supreme Court writing a word is a bit like dancing between the raindrops. By doing nothing at all on Wednesday night, the Supreme Court largely evaded top-of-the-fold coverage or glaring headlines even as—for all intents and purposes—abortions after six weeks simply stopped in Texas at midnight (and not coincidentally on the day Texas Republicans passed their effort to further minority rule at the ballot box).
It’s easy to be angry at Journalism for failing to prioritize the story. Or at Democrats who control the House, the Senate and the White House for failing to do anything to protect women’s right to choose in Texas. But the problem with covering a thing that didn’t ever exactly happen is that Journalism is largely terrible at it, and the problem with being mad at Democrats is that quite literally the only thing that can be done about a stolen federal judiciary is to reform it. So far, Democrats are a combination of unable or unwilling when it comes to actually reforming the courts. (But don’t worry—there’s a Commission!) Supreme Court conservatives who know this have thus become terrifyingly adept at judging between the raindrops—at deciding life-and-death matters by way of unreasoned orders in the dead of night, based almost entirely on their feelings. They have fully mastered the game of denial and deflection, dressed up as humility and institutionalism.
If you want to be pissed off at someone today, kindly be pissed off at Texas Republicans, who passed a law that evades judicial review by design, and at the judges and activists who delight in its unbearable cleverness. (These are the people who used to say they were just helping women make better decisions but now say women can make no decisions). Be pissed off at the stealing of the federal courts that took place in plain sight, which pissed off plenty of people, but not, apparently, enough people to stop it. Be pissed off at abortion opponents who insisted in public that their justices would never disturb Roe while smirking in private because they knew it would happen within months. And if you want to see someone do something about it, do the only thing that might make a difference and engage in an effort to rebalance the federal courts to be reflective of what voters prefer and the law demands.
One of the problems we are currently facing as a nation is that after four years of the loudest shouting imaginable, everything seems to be happening in quiet. Donald Trump was a master at doing lawlessness out in the open, brazening out his legal feelings and daring the courts to stop him. But his judges—the ones with lifetime appointments—have become masters of doing lawlessness in the shadows, codifying their legal preferences into law without much regard for the role of precedent, or the need for standing, or concern for imminent harms suffered. And so we end up with nondecisions like the choice to allow Texas’ unconstitutional law to go into effect, decisions that seem to take a vast majority of people by surprise even though they were set in motion decades ago and were always very plainly the goal.
To President Joe Biden, and the Democrats who are madly tweeting that they are fighting to defend abortion rights in Texas, one does want to know what that looks like, beyond tweeting that you are fighting to defend abortion rights in Texas. What exactly is the plan here? The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States is not about to reinstate the rule of law in Texas.
Texas has now made abortion impossible for 85 percent of the women in the state—these are real people—and we all are on tenterhooks waiting to see whether and how the Roberts court allows it and justifies it. That isn’t the way the legal system was designed to work at all. The problem with watching jurisprudence unfold as though it’s reality television is that the court does all its work during the commercials. There was nothing that could have been done to stop this particular case if a bunch of Trump judges saw no emergency. There’s no point in spending the day berating one another for failing to pay attention to the thing we didn’t see because it was designed to occur unseen. The game is bigger than this, has always been bigger, because the game is about power, as it has always been. Which means that the only things to do now are work to protect the vote and fix the courts—the boring tedious work that also happens outside the spotlight and beneath the fold. If the systemic machinery of justice isn’t immediately repaired, what happens in the shadows is going to keep catching us off guard, late at night, while we struggle to decide if Roe was overruled this week, or nullified, or merely paused for a few million people. Until the courts do their work in the open, according to the agreed-upon rules of the road, this slow erosion of the rule of law is always going to occur between the raindrops, and we’re going to feel surprised and powerless every single time.
From Slate, September 1, 2021
Roe v Wade Died with Barely a Whimper. But That’s Not All
By: Laurence Tribe
For years, as the supreme court’s composition kept tilting right, reproductive rights have been squarely on the chopping block. Now they are on the auction block as well.
Observers have speculated how today’s new ultra-right court would commence the slicing: by chipping away slowly at Roe v Wade? Or by taking the political heat and overruling it outright? Few imagined that the court would let a statute everybody concedes is flagrantly unconstitutional under the legal regime of Roe not only go into effect without being judicially reviewed but become the centerpiece of a totally unique state scheme that puts a bounty of at least $10,000 on the head of every woman who is or might be pregnant.
It wasn’t just Roe that died at midnight on 1 September with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. It was the principle that nobody’s constitutional rights should be put on sale for purchase by anyone who can find an informant or helper to turn in whoever might be trying to exercise those rights.
That, after all, is how the new Texas law works. Its perverse structure, which delegates to private individuals anywhere a power the state of Texas is forbidden to exercise itself until Roe is overruled, punishes even the slightest form of assistance to desperate pregnant women. Doctors, family members, insurance companies, even Uber drivers, are all at risk if they help a woman in need. And the risk is magnified by the offer of a big fat financial reward for whoever successfully nabs a person guilty of facilitating an abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, typically six weeks after a woman’s last period, well before most women even know they are pregnant. There is not even an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. No law remotely like this has ever been allowed to go into effect.
The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas. As of a minute before midnight on 31 August, clinics in Texas were already turning patients away out of fear. Even if the law is eventually struck down, many will probably close anyway.
Worse still, if women try to escape the state to access abortion services, their families will be on the hook for offering even the smallest aid. If friends or family of a woman hoping to terminate her pregnancy drive her across state lines, or help her organize money for a plane or bus ticket, they could be liable for “aiding and abetting” a now-banned abortion, even if the procedure itself takes place outside Texas.
Adding insult to injury, if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel, recognized by the supreme court in 1999 as a core privilege of federal citizenship. Welcome to Gilead!
Many wealthy women will presumably still find ways to access care. But their poor, disproportionately minority sisters will be stuck, forced to face down the barrel of unimaginably cruel choices. Desperate women will still seek abortions but will be forced to do so on the black market and in back alleys. Fewer Samaritans will risk heavy fines or imprisonment to help them. Some will die trying.
What can be done? We can give up on this court and try pressuring Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would enshrine a federal statutory right to provide and receive abortion care free of these sorts of state schemes. But such a bill would die at the hands of Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, in a Senate filibuster.
And what if it were somehow to pass? Odds are that a court majority, despite having held that Congress is empowered to enact a nationwide ban on certain late-term abortions because medical procedures are part of interstate commerce, would suddenly “discover” new limits on the reach of the commerce clause as a source of congressional power and strike the act down. When the court so casually lets a law that flouts its precedents take effect, all bets are off.
Or are they? Maybe even justices deeply hostile to abortion rights can be persuaded to balk specifically at the unprecedented financial incentives this grotesque law creates to put a price on the head of every pregnant woman or girl. Shades of sex slavery and prostitution might put this privatization of law enforcement in a light even conservative jurists find unbearable. What if women chilled by this business model, or those seeking to help them to avoid unwanted motherhood, were to sue the Texas authorities who stand ready to disburse $10,000 bounties for each forbidden abortion detected or prevented?
As Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent – there were four dissents in all – the Texas law “is a breathtaking act of defiance – of the constitution, of this court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas”. After a puzzling silence of a day and night, “the court finally [told] the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked.” Even if not a single justice in the 5-4 majority rejects the ability of a state to “evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry”, and even if all five of the justices in that majority stand ready to trash Roe v Wade, maybe at least one of those justices would agree that no state can hand out financial rewards to people – not only citizens in Texas but people from anywhere in the country, perhaps the world – shredding the constitution of the United States?
At least it’s worth a try.
Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University and an accomplished supreme court advocate. Follow him on Twitter @Tribelaw
From The Guardian (UK), September 2, 2021