"I Dissent"
The Midweek Conversation
Here at Steady we believe in the power of words. And we know that you do too. So for our Midweek Conversation we would like to use words as a lens through which to consider a grave national issue — the attack on legal abortion in my home state of Texas.
We have published below, in full, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the case (as did The Nation and other publications). It is not a long read, but it is powerful, in its composition and its unflinching examination of what this decision means. We would like to hear your thoughts after reading it. Do you agree with her arguments?
Dissent is a powerful tool in American history. We wrote about it in our book What Unites Us, about how a view of the minority can become a guiding principle for the majority. However, the polling on abortion suggests Sotomayor’s view is already held by a majority of Americans. With that in mind we also want to hear your thoughts more generally on what is happening to abortion rights:
What do you make of the Supreme Court’s actions?
Do you see opposition mobilizing?
How important an issue will this be in the upcoming elections?
Has this been an issue you have discussed a lot with family and friends?
Here is Sotomayor’s writings. Hope to see you in the comments section.
The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the Court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the State’s own invention. Because the Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent.
In May 2021, the Texas Legislature enacted S. B. 8 (the Act). The Act, which took effect statewide at midnight on September 1, makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they either detect cardiac activity in an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity. This equates to a near-categorical ban on abortions beginning six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period, before many women realize they are pregnant, and months before fetal viability. According to the applicants, who are abortion providers and advocates in Texas, the Act immediately prohibits care for at least 85% of Texas abortion patients and will force many abortion clinics to close.
The Act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents. The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law.
The Texas Legislature was well aware of this binding precedent. To circumvent it, the Legislature took the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the State could not. The Act authorizes any private citizen to file a lawsuit against any person who provides an abortion in violation of the Act, “aids or abets” such an abortion (including by paying for it) regardless of whether they know the abortion is prohibited under the Act, or even intends to engage in such conduct. Courts are required to enjoin the defendant from engaging in these actions in the future and to award the private-citizen plaintiff at least $10,000 in “statutory damages” for each forbidden abortion performed or aided by the defendant. In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.
The Legislature fashioned this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of enforcing the law. By prohibiting state officers from enforcing the Act directly and relying instead on citizen bounty hunters, the Legislature sought to make it more complicated for federal courts to enjoin the Act on a statewide basis.
Taken together, the Act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas. But over six weeks after the applicants filed suit to prevent the Act from taking effect, a Fifth Circuit panel abruptly stayed all proceedings before the District Court and vacated a preliminary injunction hearing that was scheduled to begin on Monday. The applicants requested emergency relief from this Court, but the Court said nothing. The Act took effect at midnight last night.
Today, the Court finally tells the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked. The structure of the State’s scheme, the Court reasons, raises “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that counsel against granting the application, ante, at 1, just as the State intended. This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry. Moreover, the District Court held this case justiciable in a thorough and well-reasoned opinion after weeks of briefing and consideration. Instead, the Court has rewarded the State’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the Court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the State’s own creation.
The Court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.
I dissent.
Some ground rules for these Wednesday chats (and also the comments sections on other posts):
I want a space where people feel safe to express their views, as long as they are offered in good faith.
I want a space where ideas can be challenged, especially my own.
I want debate. But I want it to be civil.
I want people to come here with open minds, and open hearts.
I want this to be fun as well as serious.
We can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.
As others commented in regards to vasectomies and other methods, we men are (and should) be equally responsible for birth control with our own bodies. It is the same old-time patriarchy in our government (and voters) that are still throwing most, if not all, the sexual responsibilities upon women in addition to dictating what to do with their bodies by law. I too, as a man, dissent.
I keep circling back to: not only do they think a woman should not have control over her own body, but now that body is under the control of her neighbor, the milkman, a passerby on the street, someone she has never met who sees her entering a clinic...essentially, anyone but her.