1y ago

Fight over Texas anti-abortion transport bans reaches biggest battlegrounds yet

www.reuters.com Fight over Texas anti-abortion transport bans reaches biggest battlegrounds yet

Two Texas jurisdictions will consider measures this week to outlaw the act of transporting another person along their roads for an abortion, part of a strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Commissioners in Lubbock County are slated to vote on the proposal on Monday. A few hours north, the Amarillo City Council on Tuesday will weigh its own such law, which could lead to a future council or city-wide vote.

Lubbock and Amarillo are the biggest jurisdictions of the 10 places in Texas that have considered restrictions on abortion-related transportation since the June 2022 end of Roe, which had granted a nationwide right to abortion. Five cities and counties in the state have passed bans.

33 comments

There was a much smaller town, I believe more in East Texas, that brought such an ordinance up. I was pleasantly shocked that they eventually came to the conclusion that their proposed "papers please" environment was a wee bit too much like what many of their older residents had fought against.
Sadly, I'm not confident that clearer minds will continue to prevail.
Further, as I type this, I'm in an airport in Dallas headed to Nevada where I'm going to gamble, have sex out of wedlock, consume cannabis, and potentially purchase and consume an alcoholic beverage between the hours of two and seven in the morning. Somehow, no Texas legislator has any interest in prohibiting my endeavors. Seems inconsistent.
- Somehow, no Texas legislator has any interest in prohibiting my endeavors. Seems inconsistent.
  Were you born male, and do you still identify as such? That might have something to do with it.
  
  Exactly their gender hierarchy is simple: cis men having full freedom and protection, cis women having protection as provided by a cis man, everyone else’s existence threatens the legitimacy of this system and must be forced into one of the boxes with violence if needed
- I'm betting the gambling prohibition will fall in Texas in the next 10 years. Same in other states that ban it. There is just way too much money going to their immediate neighbors for the politicians to not get greedy.
  
  Doubtful. They still have dry counties for fucks sake

The real problem is this notion that these abortion bans are enforced through private lawsuits, and not by actual law enforcement. The law was crafted this way on purpose, to evade judicial review: you can't sue the State over its enforcement if the state doesn't enforce it. The article even quotes someone pointing out that all this does is get localities involved in private lawsuits.
Conservatives are super afraid of the Government intruding on people's lives but have no problem at all empowering nosy neighbors to do it.
As an experiment, a Liberal city with strict gun laws ought to pass similar laws empowering nosy neighbors to sue people they suspect of harboring illegal firearms, and Transporting them across state lines. It may be the only way to get this Conservative Supreme Court to address this practice.
- Conservatives are super afraid of the Government intruding on people's lives but have no problem at all empowering nosy neighbors to do it.
  More specifically, they have no problem with the government empowering itself to act on behalf of a specific faction of nosy neighbors by rendering judgments and using the power of the state to enforce them in a way that's functionally equivalent to treating those neighbors as witnesses to a crime.
  If the Supreme Court was a judicial body and not an instrument of the Republican party, they would have stuck down the Texas law as an obvious "fuck you" to judicial authority based entirely on playing dumb about what RvW allows. But it turns out they didn't care because they were already planning on overturning RvW anyway, along with concepts like standing and precedent.
  God I hate them so much.

It's not just unconstitutional, it's legally nonsensical. Citizens of a state are not the property of the state, a state only has jurisdiction over what people do inside the state itself.
- And yet the US federal government taxes income earned outside of the US.

i am confused how the feds cant now also dig up the bastardized, dead horse that is the commerce clause and use it against TX here.
or how the fuck does your legal intent in another jurisdiction makes you a prisoner of the current one?
- It very specifically doesn't. The federal government regulates interstate commerce, pretty literally all of their intended power is derived by controlling the economy and holding an army.

I really feel like politicians should be held financially liable for the legal costs of defending obviously unconstitutional laws like this. I mean, it's so unbelievably unconstitutional that no serious judge would allow it to stand in a legal challenge. That makes this a waste of taxpayer money when it inevitably goes to judicial challenge.

I'm sorry, but does this say: Texas can't stop you from having an abortion, so they'll make it illegal for someone to transport you there?
- It is illegal for any city or fucking state from keeping you from driving to another state or city no matter the purpose. Fuck these cities and fuck the federal government for not intervening and putting a stop to this bullshit.
  This is kind of bs you see in North Korea or some communist hell hole like China. But Republicans and their voters are to stupid to see that.
  I hope the voters in both cities remove the city council members from office over this by force if need be. This is plan old fascism and needs to be stomped out now.
  
  💀

I’m a dipshit and even I know this is one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived.
- Well in the state of Texas, once the idea is conceived, you have to carry it to term.
  
  Then you give it a gun and see what happens.
  
  So much for the marketplace of ideas.

So Texas is saying it's illegal to transport people to another state if it's for an abortion, but it's encouraged to transport immigrants to another state if they're undocumented?
What if it's an undocumented immigrant that wants an abortion?

Making it illegal for women to travel is simply called Freedom LIBTARDS!

33 comments