Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas.
Thanks for helping take us back to pre-Civil War status in Texas. You aided and abetted the SCOTUS decision on Mississippi’s latest effort to rob half our population of their Constitutional rights.
Even though I blame my state legislature primarily, you have sanctioned their efforts. Either actively or passively. There is enough blame for this assault against your constituents to go around.
SCOTUS basically punted on the Mississippi case, which asked whether opponents of Texas’s S.B. 8, the Heartbeat Bill, could bring a federal case to block the law, which gets around normal challenges by putting private individuals, rather than the state itself, in charge of enforcing it. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court said they could sue, but it limited that ability so severely that the law itself will remain largely intact.
Of course ultimately the case is about far more than abortion. It is about the federal protection of civil rights in the face of discriminatory state laws. That federal protection has been the key factor in advancing equal rights in America since the 1950s.
IN TEXAS, THE LEGISLATURE HAS TAKEN AWAY FROM ITS CITIZENS A RIGHT GUARANTEED BY THE CONSTITUTION, AND THE SUPREME COURT HAS DECLINED TO ASSERT FEDERAL POWER TO STOP IT.
Quoting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Texas has launched “a brazen challenge to our federal structure,” she said, one that “echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto' or ‘nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”
Under this old system, what civil rights will be off-limits?
So the bottom line is that Texas won. The state devised a scheme to evade judicial review, and five justices just blessed that scheme. Thus negating their own power and throwing half the country to the wolves.
And you and your entire party are responsible. Your part is writing a history of civil rights-obliterating discrimination is secure.
We can only hope you feel more shame than jubilation.
