The Row Over Roe Continues

“It has come to our attention that Sidley Austin [very large national law firm with offices in Texas] has decided to reimburse the travel costs of employees who leave Texas to murder their unborn children… [To the extent Sidley is facilitating illegal abortions], it is exposing itself and each of its partners to felony criminal prosecution and disbarment.” 

 Letter sent to Sidley by a conservative bloc of Texas state legislators and posted on Twitter

Pundits and pollsters project that there is insufficient voter anger over the Trump-reconfigured Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs vs Jackson (reversing Roe vs Wade) to alter the projected GOP wins in Congress in the upcoming midterms. The inability of a 10-year-old rape victim (9 at the time of the crime) to get an abortion in her home state of Ohio (with no rape or incest exceptions to their abortion ban) didn’t change the overall picture. Fox News even initially labeled the story a left-wing perpetrated “hoax” until the purported rapist was arrested, and then shifted the focus to the fact that he was an undocumented alien. The young victim had to travel to neighboring Indiana, a red state with a rape exception and a longer waiting period, to get the procedure done.

Indiana challenged the doctor who performed the procedure, who apparently did in fact comply with existing local requirements. But then: “Indiana asked the Supreme Court on Thursday [7/14] to speed up the process of officially transmitting its opinion overturning Roe v. Wade so the state can put its strict abortion law into effect. The request comes as more than half of the states in the US are expected to bar or severely restrict abortion.” CNN July 15th. While many GOP candidates are sidestepping directly addressing the issue, instead focusing on hot button economic issues, GOP leaders in Congress have made clear that a Democratic effort to codify Roe vs Wade under federal law is dead on arrival.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order “Protecting Access to Reproductive Health Care Services. This Executive Order builds on the actions his Administration has already taken to defend reproductive rights by:

• Safeguarding access to reproductive health care services, including abortion and contraception;

• Protecting the privacy of patients and their access to accurate information;

• Promoting the safety and security of patients, providers, and clinics; and

• Coordinating the implementation of Federal efforts to protect reproductive rights and access to health care.” [White House press release]

The effort, justified under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), would also protect the right of women to travel to obtain an abortion and those providing her with information and assistance. Texas immediately filed suit (Texas vs Becerra), in a conservative Northern Texas federal court, to void the order. The suit says the Biden administration was trying to use federal law “to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Texas has become one of the lead states aggressively banning abortion, enacting PAGA laws (allowing private citizens to sue abortion seekers and their helpers for statutory damages) and standing firmly with direct state prosecution in such cases. Free speech and free interstate travel are not considered barriers to heavily gerrymandered Texas – while most big cities in Texas are blue, by extending city voter districts into surrounding rural areas, they are rendered red.

The above-noted letter, from the self-labeled “Texas Freedom Caucus,” “cites a never-repealed law enacted before Roe v. Wade that bans abortion in the state, with exceptions to save the life of the mother. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is supporting enforcement of the law… According to the letter, the pre-Roe law makes it a felony for any person to furnish ‘the means for procuring an abortion knowing the purpose intended.’ The letter claims the criminal prohibition extends to ban medication abortions if any part of the drug regimen is taken in Texas.” Journal of the American Bar Assn, July 11th.

As blue states from California to Connecticut declare themselves open to abortion seekers, completely rejecting the possibility of cooperating with red states seeking to punish their citizens seeking or assisting those seeking abortions, some red states are threatening to use the “full faith and credit” of the Constitution to force that compliance. We have long assumed that, at least in theory, the First Amendment set a very clear rule separating church and state, but this blockbuster statement, in the July 6th Rolling Stone, throws severe doubt that this rule is followed by conservative members of the Supreme Court, who seem to favor an autocratic theocracy:

“At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week [immediately after Dobbs was announced], a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. ‘We’re the only people who do that,’ Peggy Nienaber said.

“This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling… In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.”

This practice is hardly new, but with the newfound right-wing dominance within the court, it takes on much more significant relevance. Especially since a major segment of the MAGA nationalist movement supports designation of Christianity as our state religion. The designation of the time a fetus is deemed viable, as embodied in red state anti-abortion laws, is decidedly a Christian perspective. For example, an unborn fetus in Jewish law is not considered a person (Hebrew “nefesh,” literally, “soul”) until it has been born. But evangelical Christianity is solidly embedded in the ethos of most conservative SCOTUS justices, who have clear theocratic leanings.

Indeed, “Rob Schenck, the former leader of a religious group called Faith and Action, says he prayed with three conservative Supreme Court justices at the court and recruited wealthy volunteers to entertain them, according to reports by Rolling Stone and Politico.

“Schenck told Rolling Stone he hosted prayer sessions in chambers and on Supreme Court grounds with Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia from the late 1990s through the mid-2010s when he left the group. Scalia died in February 2016 at the age of 79… ‘The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support—to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them,’ Schenck told Rolling Stone.

“Schenck told Politico he had recruited wealthy volunteers to, in Politico’s words, ‘wine, dine and entertain conservative Supreme Court justices while pushing conservative positions on abortion, homosexuality, gun restrictions and other issues.’… About 20 couples were recruited. The justices they entertained were Thomas, Alito and Scalia, Schenk said… Schenk said he coached volunteers not to mention specific Supreme Court cases. Instead of commenting on a gay-rights case, for example, the volunteers were told to ‘talk about the importance of a child having a father and a mother,’ Schenk said.” ABA Journal. For those escaping religious persecution who traveled to the New World to seek freedom, clearly a founding plank in our nation’s birth, this current effort to foist evangelical views on the entire nation is an affront to everything this nation stands for.

Sounds like a resurrection of the pre-Civil War Dred Scott vs Sandford case (1857) in which the Supreme Court ruled (7-2) that African descendants were not U.S. citizens and had no standing to sue for freedom even though he entered a “free state” which gave freedom to any slave who entered its territory. It also ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court overturned the earlier precedents and established new limitations on African Americans. Democracy has left the building! God, the NRA and right-wing states-righters rule!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I think the name “United States of America” needs to be revisited.