U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a scathing rebuke to the conservative wing of the nation’s highest court on Friday, criticizing their decision to not overturn a novel Texas vigilante abortion ban that essentially deputizes every person in the country with the promise of a $10,000 bounty for turning in those who aid, abet, or engage in the practice of abortion.
The Court in a rare Friday in December move handed down a ruling allowing health care providers to continue their lawsuit challenging SB 8, the Texas 6-week abortion ban, but continued to allow the law to stand in force.
Justice Sotomayor made clear the Court should have killed SB 8 before it even went into effect.
“The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago, before S. B. 8 first went into effect,” wrote Sotomayor in her dissent. “It failed to do so then, and it fails again today.”
“I dissent, however, from the Court’s dangerous departure from its precedents, which establish that federal courts can and should issue relief when a State enacts a law that chills the exercise of a constitutional right and aims to evade judicial review,” she continued, accusing the right wing jurists of “effectively invit[ing] other States to refine S. B. 8’s model for nullifying federal rights. The Court thus betrays not only the citizens of Texas, but also our constitutional system of government.”
She also chastised the right wing majority, saying it “simply ignores” “the law’s numerous procedural and substantive anomalies,” noting that “Those vulnerable to suit might include a medical provider, a receptionist, a friend who books an appointment, or a ride-share driver who takes a woman to a clinic.”
UPDATE –
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern:
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