Two Texas jurisdictions will consider measures this week to outlaw the act of transporting another person along their roads for an abortion, part of a strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Commissioners in Lubbock County are slated to vote on the proposal on Monday. A few hours north, the Amarillo City Council on Tuesday will weigh its own such law, which could lead to a future council or city-wide vote.
Lubbock and Amarillo are the biggest jurisdictions of the 10 places in Texas that have considered restrictions on abortion-related transportation since the June 2022 end of Roe, which had granted a nationwide right to abortion. Five cities and counties in the state have passed bans.
The real problem is this notion that these abortion bans are enforced through private lawsuits, and not by actual law enforcement. The law was crafted this way on purpose, to evade judicial review: you can't sue the State over its enforcement if the state doesn't enforce it. The article even quotes someone pointing out that all this does is get localities involved in private lawsuits.
Conservatives are super afraid of the Government intruding on people's lives but have no problem at all empowering nosy neighbors to do it.
As an experiment, a Liberal city with strict gun laws ought to pass similar laws empowering nosy neighbors to sue people they suspect of harboring illegal firearms, and Transporting them across state lines. It may be the only way to get this Conservative Supreme Court to address this practice.
More specifically, they have no problem with the government empowering itself to act on behalf of a specific faction of nosy neighbors by rendering judgments and using the power of the state to enforce them in a way that's functionally equivalent to treating those neighbors as witnesses to a crime.
If the Supreme Court was a judicial body and not an instrument of the Republican party, they would have stuck down the Texas law as an obvious "fuck you" to judicial authority based entirely on playing dumb about what RvW allows. But it turns out they didn't care because they were already planning on overturning RvW anyway, along with concepts like standing and precedent.
God I hate them so much.