The Supreme Court on Friday said some lawsuits against Texas' anti-abortion law — the strictest in the country — can proceed.
The big picture: The court's decision is not a ruling on the merits of Texas' law — and leaves the law in place — but it paves the way for the courts to decide whether that law is constitutional.
Driving the news: The decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, says abortion clinics in the state can challenge the Texas law's constitutionality in court. But it allows only a small slice of those lawsuits to proceed.
Texas banned abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac activity, which usually happens around the sixth week of pregnancy. But rather than a straightforward government regulation, it enforced that law by allowing private citizens to sue other private citizens who provide or facilitate an abortion.
- That highly unusual enforcement structure is why even many conservative legal experts have long expected the law to ultimately fall — allowing individuals to sue each other over constitutionally protected behavior is a form of vigilantism with enormous implications for a host of rights.
- But that enforcement structure was also designed, in part, to evade oversight from federal courts — if the state itself does not enforce the law, how could the courts tell it not to enforce the law?
- The Supreme Court initially let Texas' law remain in effect, for exactly that reason, but both clinics and the Justice Department argued that states should not be able to essentially eliminate constitutional rights this way.
President Biden said in a statement that he was concerned that...