YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE

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. The case 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. The state law, which went into effect on September 1, prohibits abortion after six weeks of a pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. And yet, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court affirmed that women have the constitutional right to abortion without undue restrictions, primarily in the first trimester of a pregnancy. 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. In a partial dissent from the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings,” and quoted an 1809 decision that said, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” Roberts warned his colleagues that “the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system…is at stake.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunter. 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? The court’s “choice to shrink from Texas’ challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions,” Sotomayor wrote. “I doubt the Court, let alone the country, is prepared for them.” 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 are responsible.