OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Liberals are not happy that the U.S. Supreme Court did not issue an opinion on Monday regarding Texas’ abortion law Monday morning.
Several prominent Democrats attacked the justices for failing to take action in the case and used the opportunity to call for packing the court with liberal justices.
“The Supreme Court has allowed Texas’s abhorrent anti-abortion law to remain in effect for 83 days,” Demand Justice, a pro-court-packing organization run by former Obama administration staffers, tweeted. “We cannot keep waiting for this Court to act in the interests of the American people – it’s time to #ExpandTheCourt.”
“Many guessed the Supreme Court would weigh in on the Texas law today but it turned out to be a giant head fake. It is insane we let the third branch of government conduct itself with so little transparency when it comes to rights this fundamental,” wrote Demand Justice Executive Director Brian Fallon, the former press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Below is a compilation from Fox News of the liberal outrage:
“John Roberts playing ‘haha made you look’ when it comes to abortion rights is about all you need to know about this Supreme Court. #ExpandTheCourt,” Demand Justice Chief Counsel Christopher Kang tweeted.
“SERIOUSLY. AN ORIGINAL JURISDICTION CASE,” Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser tweeted, using the legal term for disputes between states that go directly to the Supreme Court.
“LOLZ at all of us for thinking that the Supreme Court might do something sensible in an abortion case today,” he added. “The Supreme Court is bad, y’all.”
“If we still believed that the Supreme Court actually wanted to protect our constitutional rights that went out the window (once again) this am,” MiQuel Davies, who works with the group Physicians for Reproductive Health, said. “There is a constitutional right to abortion. S.B.8 is unconstitutional and cruel. I can’t.”
Last month, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor complained not happy about the court refusing to block Texas’ six-week abortion law.
Sotomayor called it “catastrophic” that Texas’ abortion ban law was been stopped.
In a seven-page written rant, Sotomayor not only attacked her conservative colleagues, she sensationally claimed that the court “cannot capture the totality of this harm in these pages.”
“But as these excerpts illustrate, the State (empowered by this Court’s inaction) has so thoroughly chilled the exercise of the right recognized in Roe as to nearly suspend it within its borders and strain access to it in other States,” Sotomayor wrote. “The State’s gambit has worked. The impact is catastrophic.”
“Sotomayor explained that while she agreed with the court’s decision to hear the cases on an expedited basis, she would have halted the law from being enforced. The justice explained that there are women who became pregnant when S.B. 8 took effect, and ‘as I write these words, some of those women do not know they are pregnant,'” The Hill reported.
“None of this is seriously in dispute. These circumstances are exceptional. Women seeking abortion care in Texas are entitled to relief from this Court now,” Sotomayor wrote. “Because of the Court’s failure to act today, that relief, if it comes, will be too late for many.”
In September, abortion advocates and providers in the Lone Star State appealed to the high court to hear their arguments against the Texas law, SB 8, before there was a final judgment in a lower federal court “because of the urgency of the harm” the law allegedly causes.
In its previous one-page decision, the Fifth Circuit Court Of Appeals set aside a lower court ruling that placed a temporary halt on enforcement of the law.
Senate Bill 8, signed into law in May, bars abortions in the state after fetal heart tones are detected, generally around six weeks. It empowers private citizens to sue anyone involved in providing an abortion after the establishment of heart tones.
