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clairemann

Yes, Texas Could Go Blue This Year | Time - 0 views

time.com/...texas-blue-biden-trump

US politics election trump gop Texas

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is more uncertain than any in modern history—and nowhere is that uncertainty on better display than in Texas, a state that could very well go Democratic for the first time since 1976.
  • “If I were to guess, I would say 10-15% who vote in a Republican primary aren’t true Republicans,” Ryan says, adding that the percentage might be a notch higher for Democratic primaries, particularly in more partisan areas where the primary is functionally the general election.
  • (to quote Frank Drake, the founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that’s “a wonderful way to organize our ignorance).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The polls in Texas are all over the place, ranging from a 7-point margin for U.S. President Donald Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016, to a four-point Biden victory.
  • Turnout in Texas this year will greatly surpass any previous cycle. In 2016, just shy of 9 million Texans cast a vote for president, amounting to 51.4% of the voting-eligible population, according to the United States Election Project.
  • Many more voters are expected to turn out on Nov. 3. A recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 75% of respondents consider it safe to vote in person on Election Day, though there’s a rift along party lines: 57% of Democrats said they felt safe compared to 91% of Republicans, suggesting Trump voters are more likely than Biden voters to vote in person.
  • “significantly different electorate than in 2016,” says Joshua Blank, research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Nationwide, the conventional wisdom that higher turnout benefits Democrats does not hold up when one considers President Trump’s core base
  • As of Wednesday, early voters with a history of voting in a Republican primary outpaced those who voted in Democratic primaries by 6 points, though the largest percentage voted in neither.
  • More to the point, those on the ballot for state races, Blank says, form an organic field operation across the state, armed with their own volunteers and knowledge of their districts that a statewide or national campaign could never generate from scratch.
  • “They’re only afraid of extremely high turnout.” Meanwhile, he says that Democrats have long held that Texas “is not a Republican state. It is a non-voting state.”
  • This is a particularly common misconception regarding eligible Hispanic voters, plenty of whom, polling by Blank’s organization and others suggests, are generally supportive of the Republican Party.
  • There is a strong possibility that Democrats will retake the Texas House of Representatives this year, which Republicans have controlled—along with the Texas Senate and governorship—since 2003.
  • the Texas Democratic Party has widened the front in terms of slating better candidates. For more than a decade, Blank says, the Party was “catch as catch can” in terms of finding viable candidates for district races, a process that restarted every cycle, with many seats going uncontested
  • “If you’re a candidate who loses narrowly but runs again, it gives you a lot more parity with the Republican incumbent,” Blank says.
  • Arguably the more relevant question is: how many Texans who otherwise would not have voted are excited about local candidates, and are thus more likely to vote and perhaps boost Biden?
  • both shifted Texas from leaning or tilting Republican to a genuine toss up, while the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato places it in “Leans Republican,” just one category to the right.
  • Whether that’s enough to make a difference is, of course, ultimately unknowable before the election. When I asked Sabato why he was keeping Texas in the “Leans Republican” category, he said that “I’ve been hearing every four years that Texas is going Democratic, and it never happens.”
  • Austin Q. Sarker-Young on 31 Oct 20
     
    Dear Claire, While I appreciate the optimism, I think the Democratic Party has cried victory too early this year, and claiming that Texas could go blue simply reinforces this. The Democratic Party seems to have gone a little too far on the offensive, much in the same way as they did in 2016, and this could have disastrous results for the cause of Joe Biden. As for your evidence, I do not trust Larry Sabato, since his prediction given right before election night in 2016 was WILDLY wrong (Clinton 322 - Trump 216). In that prediction, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/our-final-2016-picks/), he predicted that Wisconsin was a "Likely D" and said "Lean D" for the myriad swing states that we all know went for Trump that year. When it comes to Sabato's 2020 predictions, linked here (https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2020-president/), a great many of the states he marks as toss-up or lean Democrat went Republican in 2016. We also all remember the "Blue Wave" disappointment of 2018 that took the House but failed to take the Senate. Considering all this, I have reason to be quite skeptical of what pollsters say. And my opinion? I cannot have one yet. As of today, and probably even at the end of election day on November 3, the final winner of the election is unknowable.
saberal

Republican resistance: dissenting Texas leads the anti-Biden charge | Texas | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ican-resistance-biden-politics

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • First it was tighter restrictions on voting. Then stringent limits on abortion. Then a relaxation of gun laws. And that was just May.
  • Now the shoe is on the other foot. Texas – which sued Barack Obama’s administration 48 times during his two terms – became the first state to file a suit against Biden’s White House in January, just two days after he took office, successfully blocking a freeze on deportations.
  • It was also Texas that led a lawsuit in January seeking to overturn the presidential election results in four battleground states that Donald Trump lost. The effort was thrown out by the supreme court but helped establish Texas as a voice of dissent in the Biden era.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Jacobs added: “You look at the growing numbers of American ‘immigrants’ coming from California to Texas, the growing number of educated voters who tend to vote Democrat and the potential Latino vote, particularly in the main urban areas, and how long Texas remains a stronghold for the Republican party is something that’s been debated for some time.
  • Warford points to the example of February’s winter storm that killed 111 people and caused one of the biggest power blackouts in American history, when more than 4 million customers lost heat. “Texans are dying in their home and we just had an entire legislative session where they didn’t meaningfully address that. It wasn’t a priority.”
  • Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for California politicians including former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said: “Governor Jerry Brown got very vocal with Trump, especially on climate change stuff, but Newsom took it to a whole other level when he came into office, I think at one point calling himself the leader of the resistance.
Javier E

After Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...emains-wary-of-regulation.html

regulation Texas culture business

shared by Javier E on 10 May 13 - No Cached
  • Five days after an explosion at a fertilizer plant leveled a wide swath of this town, Gov. Rick Perry tried to woo Illinois business officials by trumpeting his state’s low taxes and limited regulations. Asked about the disaster, Mr. Perry responded that more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the nation’s worst industrial accidents in decades.
  • Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said.
  • Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. Compared with Illinois, which has the nation’s second-largest number of high-risk sites, more than 950, but tighter fire and safety rules, Texas had more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs.
  • “The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,”
  • That is particularly true in the countryside. “In rural Texas,” said Stephen T. Hendrick, the engineer for McLennan County, where the explosion occurred, “no one votes for regulations.”
  • This antiregulatory zeal is an outgrowth of a broader Texas ideology: that government should get out of people’s lives, a deeply held belief throughout the state that touches many aspects of life here, including its gun culture, its Republican-dominated Legislature and its cowboy past and present.
  • But federal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)
  • This week, Mr. Perry’s press office announced that Texas had been ranked for the ninth year in a row as the country’s most pro-business state, according to a survey by the magazine Chief Executive. Texas accounted for nearly a third of all private sector jobs created over the last decade, according to federal labor data. And under Mr. Perry, it has given businesses more tax breaks and incentives than any other state, roughly $19 billion a year.
  • “Businesses can come down here and do pretty much what they want to,” Mr. Burka said. “That is the Texas way.”
ethanshilling

Texas Voting Bill Nears Passage as Republicans Advance It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...texas-voting-bill.html

texas voting GOP

shared by ethanshilling on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature was racing against the clock on Sunday night to pass a sweeping overhaul of the state’s election laws that would rubber-stamp some of the most rigid voting restrictions in the country, but Democrats were pledging an all-out fight to try to stall the bill and prevent it from passing by a midnight deadline.
  • Earlier on Sunday, after a legislative power play by Republicans that led to an all-night session and hours of impassioned debate and objections from Democrats, the Senate passed the bill.
  • Mr. Abbott, who could call a special session as early as June, has previously stated that an election overhaul was one of his top priorities for this legislative session, and he was widely expected to sign whatever bill Republicans passed.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The bill includes new restrictions on absentee voting; grants broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; escalates punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials; and bans both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting
  • The bill in Texas, a major state with a booming population, represents the apex of the national Republican push to install tall new barriers to voting after President Donald J. Trump’s loss last year to Joseph R. Biden Jr., with expansive restrictions already becoming law in Iowa, Georgia and Florida in 2021.
  • President Biden and key Democrats in Congress are confronting rising calls from their party to do whatever is needed — including abolishing the Senate filibuster, which moderate senators have resisted — to push through a major voting rights and elections overhaul that would counteract the wave of Republican laws.
  • The bill in Texas, if it passes, is unlikely to be the final G.O.P. voting legislation this year. Multiple states, including Arizona, Ohio and Michigan, have legislatures that are still in session and that may move forward on new voting laws.
  • In a provision added late in the process, the Texas bill would make it easier to overturn the results of an election in the state in some circumstances. Texas law previously required proof that illicit votes had resulted in a wrongful victory
  • By seeking to ban drive-through voting, 24-hour voting and the use of tents or temporary structures as polling locations, the Legislature is targeting cities and suburban areas where Democrats did well in November; roughly 140,000 residents of Harris County used one of those methods in the 2020 election.
  • The bill also creates new regulations for the maintenance of voter rolls, which could lead to bigger and more frequent purges of voters from the lists.
  • “They are intent on creating voting restrictions that reverse the trends that you’ve seen in Texas,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said in an interview this month.
  • “What they’re trying to do is create a system that discourages people from actually going out to vote,” he said.
clairemann

SB 8, Texas's anti-abortion law, is back at the Supreme Court. Here's what's different ... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...doj-texas-sb8-abortion-jackson

us politics SCOTUS abortion

shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • On October 14, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit formally blocked a trial court’s decision halting SB 8, a Texas law banning most abortions in that state.
  • But there are some important legal distinctions between the current challenge to SB 8, known as United States v. Texas, and the Court’s previous order in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson allowing SB 8 to take effect. Specifically, the Justice Department argues in its request for relief that the United States is allowed to sue Texas directly, even if private parties may not.
  • The new challenge from the DOJ argues that, at least in an unusual case such as this one, the United States should be allowed to sue the state of Texas — and that it should be able to do so specifically because no one else can. As Judge Robert Pitman, who briefly blocked SB 8 before his decision was stayed by the Fifth Circuit, summarized the DOJ’s argument, the United States should be allowed to step in when “(1) a state law violates the constitution, (2) that state action has a widespread effect, and (3) the state law is designed to preclude review by the very people whose rights are violated.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But SB 8, written to sidestep that kind of legal challenge, explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. The idea is that, if no state official can enforce the law, abortion rights plaintiffs have no one to sue.
  • This scheme, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissenting opinion in Whole Woman’s Health, “is not only unusual, but unprecedented.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the law is “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”
  • The Texas law was specifically drafted to evade judicial review.
  • The second and more difficult question is why the federal government should be the plaintiff of last resort. DOJ rests the lion’s share of its argument on In re Debs (1895), a Gilded Age decision giving federal courts extraordinary authority to halt union activities that disrupt interstate commerce (Debs arose out of a massive railroad strike that threw shipping in the Midwest into disarray).
  • Ordinarily, if a state law permitted private parties to sue abortion providers in state court, those providers could wait to be sued, and then argue that the law permitting them to be sued is unconstitutional during that state court proceeding. But SB 8 is designed to frustrate this normal process as well. For one thing, it contains a simply extraordinary provision stating that SB 8 defendants may not assert their “belief that the requirements of this subchapter are unconstitutional or were unconstitutional” as a defense in state court.
  • Although this Court is unlikely to protect abortion rights, there are still potent reasons why even anti-abortion justices should oppose SB 8. For one thing, if Texas can offer bounties to anti-abortion plaintiffs — and evade judicial review in the process — other, bluer states could pass copycat laws. Do the justices really want New York to pass a law permitting “any person” to collect a bounty from gun owners?
  • I don’t have any illusions that this Supreme Court will hold that doctors who perform abortions cannot be punished. But I’d hope that we could all agree that doctors who are falsely accused of violating a state law should not be punished. If due process means anything, it should mean that Dr. Smith should get her day in court before she is forced into bankruptcy.
katyshannon

Half Of Texas Abortion Clinics Close After Restrictions Enacted : Shots - Health News :... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ose-after-restrictions-enacted

npr half texas abortion clinics restrictions health policy crisis

shared by katyshannon on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • In a little over a year, the number of clinics that provide abortions in Texas fell to 20 from 41, and watchdogs say that as few as six may be left by September.
  • Many clinics closed because of a requirement that doctors at those clinics obtain hospital admitting privileges within a certain radius of the clinic, and many doctors couldn't comply.
  • Supporters of the law said it would protect women by making abortion safer. At the time of the law's passage, The Texas Tribune quoted Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell saying, "There's nothing in this legislation that will close a clinic. ... That's up to the clinic. If they want to put profit over a person, that's up to them."
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Bitter fighting over the law last summer propelled state senator Wendy Davis into the national spotlight, and she is now running for Texas governor on the Democratic ticket.
  • The last restriction under the law goes into effect Sept. 1. All clinics that provide abortions at that point must have upgraded their facilities to ambulatory surgery centers. Busby says many can't afford it and more will close.
  • "This would basically force all the clinics to become mini-hospitals," Busby said. "They have to have hallway widths a certain length, and a janitor's closet, male and female locker rooms, which is completely unnecessary — and a bunch of other regulations that are really not appropriate or do anything to increase the safety of one of the safest procedures in the country."
  • The requirement took effect last November. This week marks the first anniversary of the state law that started it all.
  • Busby said abortion is already one of the safest office-based medical procedures, with a complication rate of less than .05 percent.
  • Busby predicted that after September only six or eight places will be left in Texas to get an abortion, unless a lawsuit stops the new requirement from going into effect.
  • Whole Woman's Health is part of that lawsuit. The group previously had six reproductive health clinics in Texas but had to close two of them over the past year, Busby said.
  • It may have to close an additional three clinics that don't meet the new surgical center specifications, in Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio. It would be left with just one, in San Antonio, that meets the new requirements.
  • Busby noted there are now no clinics that provide abortions in all of East Texas or in the Rio Grande Valley. She said the one clinic left in El Paso could close soon.
  • In Houston, the newly built headquarters of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast does fulfill the ambulatory surgical center requirements, so it will remain open. But the status of smaller clinics remains unclear.
lmunch

Opinion: Texas governor's appalling decision on masks - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Texas politics pandemic culture

shared by lmunch on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Abbott's announcement may have been cheered by some in the business community, but make no mistake: those of us who want to see a thriving economic climate are far from universally on his side. Instead, we recognize that to save lives and build a strong long-term future we have to put science first. And the science does not back up his decision.
  • The number of Covid-19 cases increased in Texas in the two weeks leading up to Abbott's announcement, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Meanwhile, less than 8% of the state's population has been fully vaccinated, according to the university's running tally. To make matters worse, a new study shows that Houston -- Texas' most populous city -- is the first US city to detect all the major Covid-19 strains among patients.
  • In a larger sense, there's a major irony in Abbott simultaneously celebrating Texas' independence and bucking science: science made Texas great.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Scientists, meanwhile, have helped Texas become a leader in renewable energy. Texas leads the nation in wind-generated power, and produced more energy from wind and solar combined than from coal, according to 2020 data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
  • What Texans, and people everywhere, need from our leaders now is a good example. Put science first. Put life-saving measures first. Take the long view, rather than worrying about short-term political repercussions among a base of supporters. That's how we'll get through this together.
clairemann

Texas Supreme Court Denies Republican Effort To Toss Nearly 127,000 Ballots | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ots_n_5f9f06acc5b60eefc853dace

US voting election trump pandemic

shared by clairemann on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Texas Supreme Court on Sunday denied a Republican-led petition to toss nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru voting places in the Houston area.
  • The state’s all-Republican high court rejected the request from a state representative and two GOP candidates without explaining its decision.
  • Conservative Texas activists have railed against expanded voting access in Harris County, where a record 1.4 million early votes have already been cast. The county is the nation’s third largest and a crucial battleground in Texas, where President Donald Trump and Republicans are bracing for the closest election in decades on Tuesday.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hanen’s decision to hear arguments on the brink of Election Day drew attention from voting rights activists. The Texas Supreme Court also rejected a nearly identical challenge last month.
  • Conservative GOP activists have filed a battery of court challenges over moves to expand voting options during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Democrats also need to flip only nine seats to reclaim a majority in the Texas House for the first time in 20 years, and have aggressively targeted several races in Harris County.
  • Texas is one of just five states that did not allow for widespread mail-in voting this year during the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 18,000 people statewide.
  • Woodfill’s lawsuit also noted that all but one of the drive-thru centers were set up “in Democrat areas of the county.” More than 40% of Harris County residents are Latino, and about one in five residents are Black.
  • Counting the drive-thru votes, Woodfill argued, would “call into question the integrity and legality of a federal election.”
  • The Texas Supreme Court, which is controlled entirely by Republicans, rejected an identical lawsuit last month.
  • Jared Woodfill, a former chairman of the Harris County GOP, argued that Texas election law makes no explicit allowances for drive-thru voting and that only voters who need assistance are eligible to cast a ballot curbside.
  • More than 9.7 million people have cast early ballots in Texas, where turnout typically ranks among the lowest in the country. Some elections experts predict that total turnout in Texas could surpass 12 million, and Harris County officials have taken more steps than most to expand voting access.
katherineharron

Explaining the Supreme Court lawsuit from Texas and Trump challenging Biden's win - CNN... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Although all 50 states have certified their election results and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block election results in the commonwealth, the justices are now grappling with a new controversial bid from Texas, supported by President Donald Trump and 17 other Republican-led states.
  • They are asking the Supreme Court for an emergency order to invalidate the ballots of millions of voters in four battleground states -- Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
  • They're asking for the court to block the electors from Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, pushing Biden back under the magic 270-vote total to win.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday. The President on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene -- basically a request to join the lawsuit
  • On Tuesday, it rejected the plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate the state's presidential tallies. It issued one sentence and noted zero dissents. (Justices don't always have to make their votes public.)
  • since Republican delegations outnumber Democratic delegations, Trump would win.
  • "In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor.
  • The court has thus far shown no desire to intervene in the presidential election.
  • Trump has suggested publicly that he hopes his nominees -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- will side with him on any election dispute.
  • "Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860," Trump's motion to intervene states. "There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law."
  • The court could act after those filings arrive or wait until Texas files a brief replying to the arguments made by the battleground states. The justices acted quickly in rejecting the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Tuesday, but they could bide their time as they have in other election-related cases.
  • If the court refuses to take up the lawsuit, it's another nail in the coffin for Trump's hopes to reverse his election loss.
  • If it acts in the other direction, it will be another dramatic and unprecedented turn in the 2020 election, guaranteeing the President will continue to challenge Biden's victory.
  • "There's nothing unique about Texas' claims here, most of which have already been brought in other suits against the same four states," said Vladeck, noting that if Trump and other states are joining in, it could weaken the suggestion the Texas case is unique.
  • The GOP "used to be a party for states' rights," Ginsberg said. "I can't imagine something that is less faithful to the principle of states' rights than a Texas attorney general trying to tell other states how to run their elections."
  • Sen. John Cornyn, the senior Texas Republican, told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?
  • "Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification," Paxton wrote, officials in the battleground states "usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their state's election statutes." He said they had done so through "executive fiat." He pointed specifically to mail-in ballots, which he said were placed "in drop boxes" with "little or no chain of custody," which weakened signature verification and witness requirements, which he called "the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote."
  • First the court would have to allow Paxton to file the suit. Then the court would have to block certification of the Electoral College vote, determine that the four states had allowed massive amounts of "illegal" votes, have the states revisit their vote counts and then resubmit the numbers.
  • The President's campaign has been represented by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis. In the current motion, however, Trump is being represented by John Eastman.
  • Trump has also asked GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- the former solicitor general of the state -- to represent him at the Supreme Court in the unlikely event it hears oral arguments.
katyshannon

Texas Eliminates Funding to Planned Parenthood | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...texas-planned-parenthood

texas cutting funding planned parenthood time US history policy crisis

shared by katyshannon on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Texas is eliminating taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood in the state, based on concerns over the organization’s fetal tissue donations, the governor announced on Monday.
  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office issued a statement, saying Texas is ending Medicaid’s participation with Planned Parenthood, which means the women’s reproductive health nonprofit will no longer receive Medicaid funding in the state.
  • “Following the release of gruesome videos filmed at Planned Parenthood facilities, including Gulf Coast in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott announced his LIFE Initiative to provide greater protections for children in the womb and prevent the sale of baby body parts,” Abbott’s statement reads. The cancellation “calls for funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers out of taxpayer money to be eliminated completely, both at the State and local levels,” according to the announcement.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Abbott said that canceling Medicaid participation for Planned Parenthood in Texas moves the state closer to “providing greater access to safe healthcare for women while protecting our most vulnerable – the unborn.”
  • Planned Parenthood has long said that its fetal tissue donations are legal, since the organization did not accept payment for the donations beyond the reimbursement of costs. On Oct. 13, Planned Parenthood announced that it will no longer accept reimbursements for expenses related to donated fetal tissue. “Planned Parenthood’s policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements,” Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards wrote in a letter to the National Institutes of Health. “Now we’re going even further in order to take away any basis for attacking Planned Parenthood to advance an anti-abortion political agenda.”
  • katyshannon on 20 Oct 15
     
    Texas cuts funding to Planned Parenthood
carolinehayter

Texas GOP's New Voting Restrictions On Verge Of Approval : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...trictions-on-verge-of-approval

politics us gop policy trump

shared by carolinehayter on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • passed along party lines around 6 a.m. after eight hours of questioning by Democrats, who have virtually no path to stop it from becoming law.
  • Republicans in the Texas Senate muscled one of the most restrictive new voting laws in the U.S. to the cusp of the governor's desk early Sunday, approving fewer ways to cast a ballot and more criminal penalties after rushing the bill to the floor in the middle of the night.
  • Under revisions during closed-door negotiations, Republicans added language that could make it easier for a judge to overturn an election and pushed back the start of Sunday voting, when many Black churchgoers head to the polls. The 67-page measure would also eliminate drive-through voting and 24-hour polling centers, both of which Harris County, the state's largest Democratic stronghold, introduced last year.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Texas is the last big battleground in the GOP's nationwide efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Georgia and Florida have also passed new voting restrictions, and President Biden on Saturday unfavorably compared Texas' bill to election changes in those states as "an assault on democracy."
  • The bill would newly empower partisan poll watchers by allowing them more access inside polling places and threatening criminal penalties against elections officials who restrict their movement. Republicans originally proposed giving poll watchers the right to take photos, but that language was removed from the final bill that lawmakers were set to vote on this weekend.
  • Another new provision could also make it easier to overturn an election in Texas, allowing for a judge to void an outcome if the number of fraudulent votes cast could change the result, regardless of whether it was proved that fraud affected the outcome.
  • GOP legislators are also moving to prohibit Sunday voting before 1 p.m., which critics called an attack on what is commonly known as "souls to the polls" — a get-out-the-vote campaign used by Black church congregations nationwide.
  • Major corporations, including Texas-based American Airlines and Dell, have warned that the measures could harm democracy and the economic climate. But Republicans shrugged off their objections, and in some cases, ripped business leaders for speaking out.
  • Texas already has some of the country's tightest voting restrictions and is regularly cited by nonpartisan groups as a state where it is especially hard to vote. It was one of the few states that did not make it easier to vote by mail during the pandemic.
  • "Even as the national media minimizes the importance of election integrity, the Texas Legislature has not bent to headlines or corporate virtue signaling," they said in a joint statement.
  • Since Trump's defeat, at least 14 states have enacted more restrictive voting laws, according to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice. It has also counted nearly 400 bills filed this year nationwide that would restrict voting.
  • Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chaired Trump's presidential campaign in Texas, offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could produce evidence of voter fraud. Nonpartisan investigations of previous elections have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. State officials from both parties, including in Texas, as well as international observers have also said the 2020 election went well.
leilamulveny

Texas Is a Tossup. So Why Won't Trump or Biden Campaign There? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...texas-battleground-state.html

texas biden trump campaign new york times politics

shared by leilamulveny on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • “There’s no doubt that it’s a real race,” said the senator, echoing a similar case Mr. O’Rourke made to Mr. Biden earlier this month in their own phone conversation.
  • Texas Republicans and Democrats alike believe the long-awaited moment has arrived: The state is a true presidential battleground, and either candidate could prevail next week.
  • ential battleground, and either candidate could prevail next week.
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  • e could prevail next week
  • A Biden win would doom Mr. Trump’s chances for re-election. More significantly, it would herald the arrival of a formidable multiracial Democratic coalition in the country’s largest red state. That would hand the Democrats an electoral upper hand nationwide and all but block Republicans from the White House until they improve their fortunes with college-educated white voters, younger people and minorities.
  • Yet even as leading figures in both parties urge their respective presidential nominees to take Texas seriously, the campaigns are still reluctant to spend precious remaining time and money there.
  • Though the state isn’t essential to a Biden victory, Democrats have been more aggressive here. Mr. Biden is dispatching his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to Texas on Friday, and Democrats have also planned a multicity bus tour across the state.
  • Texas Republicans and Democrats alike believe the long-awaited m
  • The pandemic has slowed the Texas economy, the top selling point for its politicians
  • With two days left of early voting, turnout in Texas has nearly exceeded the total number of votes cast in the state in the 2016 election. Voters under 30 have showed up in historic numbers, with over 904,000 of them already casting ballots (only 1.1 million such young Texans voted in all of 2016).
  • “It is a competitive state, meaning a Democrat can now win statewide,” acknowledged Steve Munisteri, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, noting that about 10 million people had moved to the state in the last 20 years. “We’ve had the equivalent of two medium-sized states move in.”
  • In border communities like Brownsville and McAllen, the question for Mr. Biden is not whether voters will support a Democrat — they do so reliably — but whether voters in this working-class region hit hard by the coronavirus will turn out at the same levels as the more affluent parts of the state.
  • Visits to a pair of precincts last week in the Rio Grande Valley revealed a noticeable number of first- or second-time voters, including many students. Many of them were Hispanic and they cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden — or, as they put it, against Mr. Trump.
  • If Mr. Biden can significantly expand beyond the 54 percent of the vote Hillary Clinton garnered there in 2016, the gain in raw votes in such a highly populated community could draw him close to Mr. Trump statewide.
  • “I think most of the young generation is for Biden,” explained Brian Nguyen, a 20-year-old college student, after he voted.
  • “Texas is changing,” said Mr. Cruz. “We’re not home to just oil and gas wildcatters.”
clairemann

Briefs Draw Battle Lines as Texas Abortion Law Nears Supreme Court - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reme-court-texas-abortion.html

us politics SCOTUS abortion

shared by clairemann on 29 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The justices, who will hear arguments on Monday in two cases challenging the state’s near-total ban, required the parties to file their briefs with extraordinary speed.
  • The court will hear arguments on Monday in two different challenges, one brought by abortion providers in the state and the other by the Justice Department. The court’s scheduling order required the two sides to file their opening briefs simultaneously, with responses due on Friday.
  • Both challengers said the law, which bars most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, is at odds with Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning abortions before fetal viability, or around 23 weeks. They added that the law, known as Senate Bill 8, was cynically drafted to avoid review by federal courts.
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  • “S.B. 8 was designed to nullify this court’s precedents and to shield that nullification from judicial review,” wrote Brian H. Fletcher, the acting solicitor general, in the federal government’s brief. “So far, it has worked: The threat of a flood of S.B. 8 suits has effectively eliminated abortion in Texas at a point before many women even realize they are pregnant, denying a constitutional right the court has recognized for half a century.”
  • The patient may not be sued, but doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, and people who help pay for the procedure or drive patients to it are all potential defendants. Plaintiffs do not need to live in Texas, have any connection to the abortion or show any injury from it, and they are entitled to at least $10,000 and their legal fees if they win. Defendants who win their cases are not entitled to legal fees.
  • “Where, as here, a state enacts a blatantly unconstitutional statute, assigns enforcement authority to everyone in the world and weaponizes the state judiciary to obstruct those courts’ ability to protect constitutional rights,” the brief said, “the federal courts must be available to provide relief.”
  • The law effectively deputizes ordinary citizens — including those from outside Texas — allowing them to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.
  • Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, filed a single brief in both cases, arguing that neither the federal government nor the providers were entitled to sue. The right way to challenge the law, Mr. Paxton said, was for abortion providers to violate it, be sued in state court, and present constitutional or other arguments as defenses.
  • “If Texas is right, no decision of this court is safe,” he wrote in his brief. “States need not comply with, or even challenge, precedents with which they disagree. They may simply outlaw the exercise of whatever constitutional rights they disfavor; disclaim enforcement by state officials; and delegate the state’s enforcement authority to members of the general public by empowering and incentivizing them to bring a multitude of harassing actions threatening ruinous liability — or, at a minimum, prohibitive litigation costs.”
Javier E

Opinion | Everyone's Moving to Texas. Here's Why. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...move-to-texas.html

texas california living standard comparison

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Texas’ climate risks. Houston will not do well on a warming planet — it is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry and is threatened by hurricanes and a surge in sea levels. But other big cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth, face more moderate risks, especially compared to many cities in California. Yes, Texas is very hot and likely to get hotter; but if a lot of other American cities also begin to get very hot, Texas cities might not feel as overheated by comparison. In addition to the risk of heat stress, Texas also faces the possibility of water shortages, but that will be true across much of the West, including California’s population centers.
  • What Texans will not have to worry about as much are wildfires, the scourge of so much of California, and the attendant air pollution, though experts predict increases in wildfires in Texas. It’s true that Texas’ less extreme fire risk is related to something precious about California that Texas lacks — abundant trees and mountains in major metro areas, or really any of California’s striking natural beauty. But nobody said living through climate change would be pretty.
  • You might argue that it’s too speculative to take into account something as broad and complex as climate change when deciding where to live. And more important, there’s no real escape from a long-term planetary disaster — even if you move to some place with lovely weather, your life is bound to be altered in significant ways as habitability shifts elsewhere on the globe.
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  • living through California’s tinderbox years has convinced me to keep an eye on climate dangers; while forecasts on climate risk are inexact, making some effort to anticipate its danger when deciding where to live feels more responsible than ignoring it. And when people in California are paying a million dollars above asking price for homes in areas of high and increasing wildfire risk, isn’t that something like ignoring it?
  • There is a concept in behavioral economics known as a “Minsky moment,” which describes when a bull market suddenly wises up to its own unsustainability, causing a collapse in prices.
  • Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at the Tulane University School of Architecture who studies how climate change affects housing markets, told me that a Minsky moment could be coming for high-priced homes in at-risk coastal cities. As home lenders, insurance companies and other players in the real estate business begin to better understand their exposure to climate risks, they may raise premiums or force disclosure requirements that could lower home values.
  • At the moment, buying a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, looks like a safe investment. But lately I have begun to obsess about the uncertainty built into the changing weather. What if three fire seasons from now proves to be one fire season too many — and, in a blink, the housing market into which we’ve invested so much of our future implodes? “In a way, climate change could begin to look like a foreclosure crisis,” Keenan told me.
criscimagnael

Texas Supreme Court Shuts Down Final Challenge to Abortion Law - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...texas-abortion-law.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The Texas Supreme Court on Friday effectively shut down a federal challenge to the state’s novel and controversial ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, closing off what abortion rights advocates said was their last, narrow path to blocking the new law.
  • The Texas law, which several states are attempting to copy, puts enforcement in the hands of civilians. It offers the prospect of $10,000 rewards for successful lawsuits against anyone — from an Uber driver to a doctor — who “aids or abets” a woman who gets an abortion once fetal cardiac activity can be detected.
  • It is the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, and flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning the procedure before a fetus is viable outside the womb, which is currently about 23 weeks of pregnancy.
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  • On Friday, the justices of the Texas Supreme Court, all Republicans, said that those officials did not, in fact, have any power to enforce the law, “either directly or indirectly,” and so could not be sued.
  • “This measure, which has saved thousands of unborn babies, remains fully in effect, and the pro-abortion plaintiffs’ lawsuit against the state is essentially finished,” he wrote on Twitter.
  • The law allows no exceptions for abortion even in the case of women who have been raped or are victims of incest. It has thrown Texas abortion providers into crisis, and similar legislation is pending around the country.
  • “If conservative states want to do things that may not look constitutional even to this Supreme Court, they can use a bounty system to achieve that,” Professor Ziegler said. “The message sent by the Texas litigation was that if you have concerns that you might lose a constitutional challenge, that shouldn’t hold you back. Because you can use this road map to keep the case out of federal court entirely.”
  • “We’ve known that this lawsuit all along was just invalid and should have been dismissed, and now the fact that we’re on that trajectory now is encouraging,” Ms. Schwartz said, adding that the movement “is not going to let our foot off the gas yet.”
  • Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, the clinic that sued to stop S.B. 8, said “the courts have failed us.”
  • “This ban does not change the need for abortion in Texas, it just blocks people from accessing the care they need,” she said. “The situation is becoming increasingly dire,”
  • Many women have traveled to Oklahoma for the procedure, but this week the State Senate passed its own six-week ban modeled on the Texas law. The Idaho Senate passed a similar law last week. Lawmakers in other states have proposed similar bans, but have held off in hopes that the Supreme Court decision, expected in June, will allow them to ban abortion entirely.
anonymous

Texas Republicans Look To Curb Local Efforts To Expand Voting Access : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...fforts-to-expand-voting-access

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Harris County is home to Houston, and is one of the most populous and diverse areas of the country. Longoria says figuring out how to make polling locations less crowded was a main focus in the leadup to the 2020 elections, but she had always wanted to make voting easier as well.
  • One of her solutions was to increase the hours that voting centers were open. Some polling locations were open 24 hours at one point. Longoria says being open late at night gave shift workers — including first responders — more opportunities to vote. She says it also "spread out the number of people voting at any time" at a location.
  • Longoria also looked to local businesses, which were shifting to curbside options for their customers. She came up with drive-thru voting.
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  • Longoria and her team also tried to make mail voting easier by sending out ballot applications to all eligible voters, in case people didn't know they had that option.
  • During a recent news conference, Gov. Greg Abbott argued that local election officials — including those in Harris County — were doing things not explicitly allowed by law. He also accused them of effectively opening the door to voter fraud.
  • In response to those local efforts, Republicans who control the state legislature filed a series of restrictive voting bills. Researchers last year said "Texas is the state with the most restrictive voting processes," but it's likely its laws will become stricter.
  • One measure that's been proposed would make distributing ballot applications to voters who didn't ask for one a felony. Others would outlaw drive thru-voting, and not allow polling locations to be open for more than 12 hours — specifically beyond 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Another would require that election administrators put the same amount of voting machines in every one of their polling sites, no matter what.
  • Davis says the proposed changes to how local officials run elections are "incredibly short-sighted" and could lead to a misuse of public resources. And he also takes issue with proposals that would allow people to record video and sound in polling locations and ballot counting sites. He says that creates election security concerns.
  • But mostly Davis says he feels like lawmakers are accusing election administrators of doing bad things, which he says just isn't true.
  • Committees in the Texas House and Senate began hearing two of the most notable Republican voting bills this week — including House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 7. Texas Democrats have raised concerns that certain bills would make running elections harder because of the fear of prosecution looming over many possible mistakes.
  • Harris County's Longoria says the reaction from state leaders has been disappointing because she was successful in getting more people to vote while also limiting the potential spread of the coronavirus. Turnout in Harris County hit about a 30-year high in 2020.
  • Longoria, as well as voting rights advocates in Texas, are also worried these voting bills could make it harder for marginalized communities to vote. Longoria says it's difficult to disregard the role of race in this effort as lawmakers zero in on things like drive-thru voting.
saberal

'It's easy to dismiss Black women's lives': Texas drags feet on maternal mortality cris... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ty-crisis-black-women-medicaid

US politics crisis

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • When medical staff prepped Shawn Thierry for an emergency C-section, she knew something was very wrong. After an epidural, excruciating pain ran through her legs. Soon, she could barely breathe.
  • The US has the highest maternal death rate among similarly developed countries and is the only industrialized nation where such deaths are rising. But according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Texas the maternal mortality rate is above the US average, at 18.5 deaths per 100,000 live births.
  • They did not advance in 2019, or in the current legislative session which ends this weekend. Focused on restricting abortion rights, the male- and Republican-dominated state legislature has dragged its feet on maternal mortality.
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  • “It was really striking,” said Dr Amy Raines-Milenkov, a University of North Texas Health Science Center professor and member of the review committee. “We found that most of these deaths could have been prevented but the system is just not set up to prevent them. And we found a large racial disparity, which is a reflection of how we in society value women, especially African American women.”
  • the ultra-conservative Texas Senate – which ushered through extremist anti-abortion bills in March – did not pass the bill until the final minutes of its session. Even then, the legislation was not what was proposed. Without explanation, Republican Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham reduced the year of coverage to six months.
  • “Black women are dying at an alarming rate for reasons that could be prevented and our state leaders cut down the main proposal that a state-appointed committee recommended to help them – why would that even happen?” said Jones. “I think it’s because it’s so easy to dismiss Black women’s lives.”
  • In an ideological quest to punish abortion affiliates, Republicans have decimated the Texas reproductive health safety net by blocking low-income Medicaid patients from receiving life-saving preventative care at Planned Parenthood, a move resulting in reduced access to contraception and increased rates of Medicaid births, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
rerobinson03

Opinion | How Latinos Could Redefine the G.O.P. in Texas - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...latinos-texas-republicans.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • This year, hundreds of thousands of Latinos in Texas will vote for the first time, and more Texans have cast votes early than the total number who voted in 2016, giving Democrats hope that the dream is within grasp — even if they don’t win this year.
  • Republican leaders in Texas have long understood the importance of recruiting Hispanic voters and have tailored their messages to appeal to them.
  • Later, Gov. George W. Bush and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas deployed their Mexican-American family members to appeal to Hispanics. Mr. Bush’s nephew George P. Bush, the current commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, said at a campaign rally that his uncle could be counted on to “change the Republican Party so that it starts to represent our views, and our faces, and our diversity.” Mr. Abbott took a similar approach. His Mexican-American wife, Cecilia, and her mother, Maria de la Luz Segura de Phalen, were featured prominently in campaign commercials.
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  • Rudy Alamillo, a political scientist, has argued that such “identity-based appeals” by non-Hispanic candidates can be quite effective.
  • The diverse slate of candidates running for office in Texas this year signals what the future of the Republican Party could look like.
  • The Hispanic candidates among them have been drawn to the Republican Party because it is more aligned with their views on religious freedom, patriotism, free enterprise, Second Amendment rights and support for law enforcement.
  • ut Mr. Trump also has loyal Hispanic supporters running for state and national office. Mike Guevara, who is also running for the Texas Statehouse, representing the Austin area, recently rode at the head of a “Trump Train” — a caravan of vehicles flying Trump flags — and said he can’t imagine “why a Hispanic wouldn’t vote for Trump.” He boiled his support for the president down to three issues — “God, guns and gas” — and said his campaign blends local and national politics because his potential constituents are afraid that Joe Biden will take away their guns.
  • These candidates hold diverse beliefs and diverge on the question of whether to embrace or distance themselves from President Trump.
  • Even if Democrats win in Texas this year, there are no permanent victories in a democracy. Both parties, and new ones that could emerge, will claim to represent Hispanics and other nonwhite Americans. It may come to pass that a majority-minority future will lead to more Democratic victories, but Republicans surely won’t let that happen without a fight.
delgadool

Opinion | Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...texas-climate-change.html

politics history crisis

shared by delgadool on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.
  • What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.”
  • Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event.
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  • Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted.
  • Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.
  • The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t
  • Similarly, once climate change can no longer be ignored, Republicans may tighten their embrace of fossil fuels rather than admitting decades of policy error.
  • “When people are presented with a crisis like in Texas, they often grasp for stability,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told me. “This is something the right is good at — they offer the security of tradition, of the familiar.”
  • Texas kept its grid disconnected from the regional grids so it didn’t have to follow federal regulations. In a world of aggressive climate action, it’s easy to imagine more states, and countries, receding from compacts and multilateral institutions because they don’t like the new rules, or the loss of sovereignty. Indeed, America just experienced this dance as President Donald Trump withdrew us from the climate accords, before President Biden signed us back up. A global crisis that demands cooperation and even sacrifice will be fertile soil for nationalists and demagogues.
clairemann

Biden administration asks justices to block enforcement of Texas abortion law - SCOTUSblog - 0 views

www.scotusblog.com/...orcement-of-texas-abortion-law

us politics SCOTUS abortion

shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to do what the justices declined to do last month when asked by a group of Texas abortion providers: block the enforcement of a Texas law that imposes a near-total ban on abortions performed after the sixth week of pregnancy.
  • making “abortion effectively unavailable” after six weeks, “Texas has, in short, successfully nullified” the Supreme Court’s “decisions within its borders.”
  • Rather than handle the request on the so-called shadow docket, Fletcher also suggested in his filing that the justices could treat the request as a petition for review, schedule full briefing and oral argument, and resolve the merits of the case without waiting for the litigation to conclude in the lower courts.
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  • To make it more difficult to challenge the law in court, especially before it went into effect, the Texas law turns to private individuals, rather than government officials, to enforce the ban, deputizing them to bring lawsuits against anyone who either provides or “aids or abets” an abortion. The law also establishes an award of $10,000 for a successful lawsuit.
  • By a vote of 5-4, in a one-paragraph order issued late at night, the court said that the providers had “raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law.” But the majority nonetheless refused to stop the law from going into effect because, the court wrote, it wasn’t clear whether the state officials whom the abortion providers had named as defendants in the case “can or will seek to enforce the Texas law” in a way that would allow the court to get involved in the dispute at that stage.
  • In a 39-page filing on Monday, Fletcher asked the justices to wipe away the 5th Circuit’s stay of Pitman’s order. That relief would reinstate Pitman’s decision blocking the law while the litigation continues.
  • take up the case on its merits docket and definitively resolve the legality of Texas’ unusual enforcement scheme without waiting for a final ruling from the 5th Circuit — a maneuver known as a petition for certiorari before judgment. On Monday afternoon, the court granted the providers’ request to fast-track the justices’ consideration of their petition, directing the defendants in the case to file their response to the petition by noon on Thursday, Oct. 21.
  • In a 113-page ruling on Oct. 6, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted the administration’s request to put the law on hold. Observing that the right to obtain an abortion before the fetus becomes viable is “well established,
  • Texas was “[f]ully aware that depriving its citizens of this right” directly would be “flagrantly unconstitutional”
  • The majority’s refusal to intervene on an emergency basis sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral argument in early December.
  • The Biden administration’s request went to Justice Samuel Alito, who fields emergency requests from the 5th Circuit. Alito acted quickly, ordering the state to file its response by noon on Thursday, Oct. 21, and — with the order later on Monday directing a response in the providers’ case — setting up the possibility that the court could act on both S.B. 8 cases at the same time.
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