Update on the Pro-choice Resistance

It's been an interesting day on the pro-choice front. 

Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe, reminds us of a case that he won in 1982 at the US Supreme Court that established in an 8-1 decision that the state had fallen into unconstitutional territory when it "delegated to private nongovernmental entities a power normally invested in agencies of government". 

As Rachel Maddow summarize in an interview with the professor:

What was at issue here was that the government, the state, can`t let some random entity, a church, a school, some other private entity make that decision. It`s a governmental decision. You cannot delegate it to a private entity to make that determination for its own purposes. That is standing Supreme Court precedent from 1982, again, 8-1 decision.

 Tribe:

The whole case arose because of this arbitrary power that was given to a private entity. It happened to be a church.

But the issue is the same whether it`s a church or not. There are cases in which the Supreme Court said you cannot give governmental power over peoples` lives or liberty to private bodies, that have no public accountability.

And the Supreme Court has said, in 1925, in a unanimous decision, that the attorney general of the United States, even without a statute, has authority to go to court, to represent the United States against any state, which interferes with interstate commerce, or in this case, international commerce, to Mexico, or to New Mexico within the country, or that violates human rights pursuant to a treaty, in order to get injunctive relief.

And I know, the attorney general is looking closely at all of those options.

And furthermore,

He also has options under the Ku Klux Klan Act, to bring criminal proceedings, against bounty hunters who are basically engaged in the kind of vigilante justice that led to the enactments of the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871.

the individuals who are targeted, the clinics who were taken out of business. Could bring lawsuits under the civil equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan Act, which is 42 U.S. code sections 1983 and 1985, to legalistic about this, but those are the sections.

They can bring suits to basically get a multitude, of whatever bounty is are being claimed against them, so that what we need since this Texas law operates by chilling abortion helpers and abortion providers, frightening them out of business when they can do is say. You sue us for $10,000, or $10 million, because there is no limit put on the statue. And we will see you for double that. You want to try?

So now it's the legal equivalent of, "Go ahead. Make my day."

There's still more. Today, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled unanimously to decriminalize abortion in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.