You really have to hand it to some people for other, absolute tone deafness. The lawyer for the State of Texas waltzes into the Supreme Court, turns to the nine justices on the bench, and then proceeds to piss on their legs. He tells them that they have no constitutional power to overturn Texas Senate Bill 8, but maybe Congress can give Texas' opponents the relief they are looking for. Well, good luck with that. The problem with that notion is that of Texas can do it, so can every other State that wants to poke their thumb in the Constitution's eye. From the tenor of the argument advanced by Texas, and the responses from the assembled justices, it doesn't appear that they are buying any of it. I am not the least bit surprised. It is also apparent that Texas knows that they are going to lose the case, and their lawyer's grand show of defiance is simply political theater for the yahoos back at home for whom any form of subtlety is beyond their ability to comprehend. This is a case that might aptly be recaptioned Swagger v. Decorum. These people have decided that they're going to go down in flames, and if so, it will be in a blaze of glory. A kamikaze attack on the high court's ability to ride herd upon whether, and under what conditions state law might supersede federal decisional law, as enunciated by the Supreme Court and the federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Their attack is likely to fail, but the political damage that might be done to the country as a whole might be incalculable.
Several justices were quick to point out that the tactical approach adopted by the Texas Legislature might be used with equal measure by other States interested in deterring or restricting things that are close to the hearts of Texans — gun control first and foremost, but there are other items on the menu that red-blooded Conservatives would be loath to give up. They made their point, and now they are going to be on their way home congratulating themselves for having stirred up the pot to the consternation of all. They are acting like a bunch of cowboys fresh off the trail, and having moved there herd of cattle up to the railhead, are heading into town to have some fun, shooting up the place, drinking themselves into a stupor, and servicing every prostitute within a day's ride of the place. People like these are not likely to anticipate the ripple effects flowing from the disruptions they have caused. But, it is not as if any of them cared about the damage they do.
Don't be surprised if Chief Justice Roberts informs the Texans that he's the sheriff in town, and that he's not about to let himself be locked in his own jail. On the other hand, among the erstwhile Conservatives who otherwise constitute the current majority on the court, one or two of them might say something in a concurring opinion that the Texans, or those allied with them, might find useful in future litigation. These are all big egos, some of whom habitually speak out of turn, saying stuff that would embarrass more respectable jurists. You never know. Some of them might be hankering to go back to the 1783 Articles of Confederation, or concepts borrowed from the Constitution of the Confederate States during the Civil War. From the post-Revolutionary War onward, conservative elements have never been comfortable with the idea that they have to share anything in the way of power or prerogatives with those that are unlike themselves. That was the way the early Federalists behaved; and after the election of 1800, that was the mantra of the Southern Democrats, basically until they blew up the existing political arrangements in 1861. Texas is simply traveling a well trodden path. Disruption breeds disunity, and that is what were facing now in ever increasing severity.
Entirely apart from their visceral and instinctive defiance and rebellion, conservatives have shown that they don't really believe in a United States of America. This is been obvious since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. They were happy to have united country when it served their purpose to spread slavery over the entire length and breath of what was then the United States, basing their argument on property rights. Political rights are different; and to protect political rights one must accept certain obligations that go with them, especially of political rights are, by definition open to all. The tension between differentially applied political rights claimed by the Texans, but also the residue of what is left of the Southern Confederacy, and the rest of us is stark and palpable. They were willing to keep things quiet and beneath the surface until the Civil Rights movement ripped the bandage off the wound that they had been nursing since 1865. A country populated by Black and Brown people more numerous than they would be an anathema to their 'whites only' mindset. Already, they are nurturing a nascent combination of nativism and fascism that intends to subordinate whatever democracy might be left to someplace far from the levers of power that they intend to dominate. That is the risk we face right now.
So I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court won't stand for Texas (or any state, for that matter) giving them the literal, figurative and legal finger in passing laws that 'forbid' review by the court because the SC has more than a few law books in their libraries that will possibly hold a citation of law that Texas does not know about. After all, the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the laws, and if they can't find one measly law to overrule Texas with, we're shit out of luck.
Is there any legal way to sell Texas back to Mexico? Pretty please?
Texas has a proud liberal tradition that, I'm convinced, will be re-awakened despite the efforts to subdue it. I'm thinking of Ann Richards, Ralph Yarborough, Molly Ivins, Sissy Farenthold, and my old drinking buddies Kinky Friedman and Jim Hightower.
Yes, with the exception of the Kinkster and Jim Hightower. Still, the ideas they stood for continue to resonate with many Texans, and a new generation, exemplified by Beto O'Rourke, carries on the tradition.
I live here, but I am not OF here (thank goodness.) This state has been so badly gerrymandered that the current bunch of hotshot "lawyer" types who camp out in our legislature and our governor's abode represent a shrinking (thank goodness) bunch of white supremacists and not the majority of us. These guys are so in love with themselves and are so power drunk, they not only do not know how tone deaf they appear to the rest of the world, they simply do not care. It's a state with a bunch of white, aging, yet adolescent frat boys running everything. Eventually, one or more of them will fall dead drunk off the roof and that will be that. "Splat" will sound oh, so good to my ears! In the meantime, behind the scenes we're working hard to get people like Beto O'Rourke and Matthew Dowd elected, so we can restore some semblance of sanity to this outhouse of a state. Hope you'll hop on board and help us - and forgive those of us who have no control over the idiots who showed up at the SCOTUS yesterday and showed their a$$$$!
I think I want to stop paying federal taxes, because Texas gets some of my money. Paying taxes to Texas violates my right to tell Texas to go fuck itself. Please secede and go away.
Take your gun laws, your abortion laws, your hatred of women and people of color, your Stasi Law where one citizen informs on another, and your Einsatzgruppen(Texas Rangers:See Comanche and Kiowa) and just fucking go away.
When Justice Sotomayor eloquently reminded her colleagues of the states just waiting for the opportunity to poke the Constitution in the eye, I hoped it gave them pause. Can you fathom if other states got away with enacting any law with retroactive changes-that fucked the Constitution even further? That dystopian world is here, isn’t it?
You can't fight City Hall, when City Hall owns the rule book and the police. Your rational Biden Administration should fly over the top of their hysterical little heads and provide for regularly scheduled, free to pregnant women passengers plane trips to domestic and other cities where abortion is legal and well medically providef for. Cuba? Mexico? Ireland?
Wow! If my late Constitutional Law professor, Archibald Cox, best remembered as the Watergate Special Prosecutor fired in the "Saturday Night Massacre," had presented the case against the Texas statute as a hypothetical in a Con Law final, he would have given your analysis an "A+."
Are you sure you didn't go to law school when none of us were watching?
And so, any number of other states so inclined are emboldened to copy and enforce the Texas S.B.8. Do we never get any relief from such devilish standards?
As Lucian points out, so much hangs in the balance with this decision, well beyond the right to choose. If the Justices allow the S.B. 8 to stand, they have opened Pandora’s Box and the deboning of Democracy in this country will be well on it’s way. To my view, the real aim of S.B.8 is to reduce women’s rights as citizens. Texas has essentially said that a teenage girl who is raped by her father must carry a resulting pregnancy to term after 6 weeks. While the father may be charged with statutory rape, possibly, the girl-child must deliver. This reduces her to an almost chattel status. And it’s hard to separate that view from that, of say, Josh Hawley, who blames feminism for the prevalence of porn and video games, see below. A toxic mix, for certain.
The Supreme Court knows the difference between serious laws and cynical mischief. No one on this planet can claim superior authority over a women's natural right to procreate or to change their mind and end a pregnancy. Any effort to do so, means trying to circumvent the right of self awareness, conscience, and to lock women into a box invented not by God, nature, or human experience, but by some white men in Texas. The Supreme Court will never permit such foolishness. Texas hopes to prolong this hustle for a few years. Eventually the court will get tired of it and slap Texas down.
Hard to believe legislators in Texas were this smart. Guess if you infiltrate all the law schools, indoctrinate enough students, feed your proposed legislation to enough state institutions. . . it will pay off big time. Damn scary situation.
Sorry to the many good people of Texas. Keep up the good fight. I sometimes forget to look at all the good people who are hidden by the forest of assholes.
And sometimes I forget too, that Austin, like West Berlin, is a Blue Stadt surrounded by a sea of Red.
You really have to hand it to some people for other, absolute tone deafness. The lawyer for the State of Texas waltzes into the Supreme Court, turns to the nine justices on the bench, and then proceeds to piss on their legs. He tells them that they have no constitutional power to overturn Texas Senate Bill 8, but maybe Congress can give Texas' opponents the relief they are looking for. Well, good luck with that. The problem with that notion is that of Texas can do it, so can every other State that wants to poke their thumb in the Constitution's eye. From the tenor of the argument advanced by Texas, and the responses from the assembled justices, it doesn't appear that they are buying any of it. I am not the least bit surprised. It is also apparent that Texas knows that they are going to lose the case, and their lawyer's grand show of defiance is simply political theater for the yahoos back at home for whom any form of subtlety is beyond their ability to comprehend. This is a case that might aptly be recaptioned Swagger v. Decorum. These people have decided that they're going to go down in flames, and if so, it will be in a blaze of glory. A kamikaze attack on the high court's ability to ride herd upon whether, and under what conditions state law might supersede federal decisional law, as enunciated by the Supreme Court and the federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Their attack is likely to fail, but the political damage that might be done to the country as a whole might be incalculable.
Several justices were quick to point out that the tactical approach adopted by the Texas Legislature might be used with equal measure by other States interested in deterring or restricting things that are close to the hearts of Texans — gun control first and foremost, but there are other items on the menu that red-blooded Conservatives would be loath to give up. They made their point, and now they are going to be on their way home congratulating themselves for having stirred up the pot to the consternation of all. They are acting like a bunch of cowboys fresh off the trail, and having moved there herd of cattle up to the railhead, are heading into town to have some fun, shooting up the place, drinking themselves into a stupor, and servicing every prostitute within a day's ride of the place. People like these are not likely to anticipate the ripple effects flowing from the disruptions they have caused. But, it is not as if any of them cared about the damage they do.
Don't be surprised if Chief Justice Roberts informs the Texans that he's the sheriff in town, and that he's not about to let himself be locked in his own jail. On the other hand, among the erstwhile Conservatives who otherwise constitute the current majority on the court, one or two of them might say something in a concurring opinion that the Texans, or those allied with them, might find useful in future litigation. These are all big egos, some of whom habitually speak out of turn, saying stuff that would embarrass more respectable jurists. You never know. Some of them might be hankering to go back to the 1783 Articles of Confederation, or concepts borrowed from the Constitution of the Confederate States during the Civil War. From the post-Revolutionary War onward, conservative elements have never been comfortable with the idea that they have to share anything in the way of power or prerogatives with those that are unlike themselves. That was the way the early Federalists behaved; and after the election of 1800, that was the mantra of the Southern Democrats, basically until they blew up the existing political arrangements in 1861. Texas is simply traveling a well trodden path. Disruption breeds disunity, and that is what were facing now in ever increasing severity.
Entirely apart from their visceral and instinctive defiance and rebellion, conservatives have shown that they don't really believe in a United States of America. This is been obvious since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. They were happy to have united country when it served their purpose to spread slavery over the entire length and breath of what was then the United States, basing their argument on property rights. Political rights are different; and to protect political rights one must accept certain obligations that go with them, especially of political rights are, by definition open to all. The tension between differentially applied political rights claimed by the Texans, but also the residue of what is left of the Southern Confederacy, and the rest of us is stark and palpable. They were willing to keep things quiet and beneath the surface until the Civil Rights movement ripped the bandage off the wound that they had been nursing since 1865. A country populated by Black and Brown people more numerous than they would be an anathema to their 'whites only' mindset. Already, they are nurturing a nascent combination of nativism and fascism that intends to subordinate whatever democracy might be left to someplace far from the levers of power that they intend to dominate. That is the risk we face right now.
So I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court won't stand for Texas (or any state, for that matter) giving them the literal, figurative and legal finger in passing laws that 'forbid' review by the court because the SC has more than a few law books in their libraries that will possibly hold a citation of law that Texas does not know about. After all, the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the laws, and if they can't find one measly law to overrule Texas with, we're shit out of luck.
Is there any legal way to sell Texas back to Mexico? Pretty please?
Texas has a proud liberal tradition that, I'm convinced, will be re-awakened despite the efforts to subdue it. I'm thinking of Ann Richards, Ralph Yarborough, Molly Ivins, Sissy Farenthold, and my old drinking buddies Kinky Friedman and Jim Hightower.
correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most of them either somewhat or completely DEAD?
Yes, with the exception of the Kinkster and Jim Hightower. Still, the ideas they stood for continue to resonate with many Texans, and a new generation, exemplified by Beto O'Rourke, carries on the tradition.
And now Matthew Dowd.
Killjoy!
And, shame on me for forgetting her, Barbara Jordan.
...as I just said....
Such memories…Ann Richards, Molly Ivins…and Kinky Friedman! Thank you for making me smile
I live here, but I am not OF here (thank goodness.) This state has been so badly gerrymandered that the current bunch of hotshot "lawyer" types who camp out in our legislature and our governor's abode represent a shrinking (thank goodness) bunch of white supremacists and not the majority of us. These guys are so in love with themselves and are so power drunk, they not only do not know how tone deaf they appear to the rest of the world, they simply do not care. It's a state with a bunch of white, aging, yet adolescent frat boys running everything. Eventually, one or more of them will fall dead drunk off the roof and that will be that. "Splat" will sound oh, so good to my ears! In the meantime, behind the scenes we're working hard to get people like Beto O'Rourke and Matthew Dowd elected, so we can restore some semblance of sanity to this outhouse of a state. Hope you'll hop on board and help us - and forgive those of us who have no control over the idiots who showed up at the SCOTUS yesterday and showed their a$$$$!
I think I want to stop paying federal taxes, because Texas gets some of my money. Paying taxes to Texas violates my right to tell Texas to go fuck itself. Please secede and go away.
Take your gun laws, your abortion laws, your hatred of women and people of color, your Stasi Law where one citizen informs on another, and your Einsatzgruppen(Texas Rangers:See Comanche and Kiowa) and just fucking go away.
When Justice Sotomayor eloquently reminded her colleagues of the states just waiting for the opportunity to poke the Constitution in the eye, I hoped it gave them pause. Can you fathom if other states got away with enacting any law with retroactive changes-that fucked the Constitution even further? That dystopian world is here, isn’t it?
Thanks Lucian for taking the time to follow this case and for providing your analysis.
You can't fight City Hall, when City Hall owns the rule book and the police. Your rational Biden Administration should fly over the top of their hysterical little heads and provide for regularly scheduled, free to pregnant women passengers plane trips to domestic and other cities where abortion is legal and well medically providef for. Cuba? Mexico? Ireland?
Wow! If my late Constitutional Law professor, Archibald Cox, best remembered as the Watergate Special Prosecutor fired in the "Saturday Night Massacre," had presented the case against the Texas statute as a hypothetical in a Con Law final, he would have given your analysis an "A+."
Are you sure you didn't go to law school when none of us were watching?
And so, any number of other states so inclined are emboldened to copy and enforce the Texas S.B.8. Do we never get any relief from such devilish standards?
As Lucian points out, so much hangs in the balance with this decision, well beyond the right to choose. If the Justices allow the S.B. 8 to stand, they have opened Pandora’s Box and the deboning of Democracy in this country will be well on it’s way. To my view, the real aim of S.B.8 is to reduce women’s rights as citizens. Texas has essentially said that a teenage girl who is raped by her father must carry a resulting pregnancy to term after 6 weeks. While the father may be charged with statutory rape, possibly, the girl-child must deliver. This reduces her to an almost chattel status. And it’s hard to separate that view from that, of say, Josh Hawley, who blames feminism for the prevalence of porn and video games, see below. A toxic mix, for certain.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/01/josh-hawley-feminism-men-pornography-video-games?utm_term=56a63e29fe2dd2915a4ed679db035f12&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email
The Supreme Court knows the difference between serious laws and cynical mischief. No one on this planet can claim superior authority over a women's natural right to procreate or to change their mind and end a pregnancy. Any effort to do so, means trying to circumvent the right of self awareness, conscience, and to lock women into a box invented not by God, nature, or human experience, but by some white men in Texas. The Supreme Court will never permit such foolishness. Texas hopes to prolong this hustle for a few years. Eventually the court will get tired of it and slap Texas down.
Never say never because this group of conservative justices are not to be trusted.
Jeebus... this is really scary
Hard to believe legislators in Texas were this smart. Guess if you infiltrate all the law schools, indoctrinate enough students, feed your proposed legislation to enough state institutions. . . it will pay off big time. Damn scary situation.
Proving, once again, that old adage: "Everything's Bigger In Texas". That includes - especially - their arrogant, ingrained deep-dish stupidity.
Colossally delusional, they really have nothing, zero, "zilch con nada" to be proud of.
Sorry to the many good people of Texas. Keep up the good fight. I sometimes forget to look at all the good people who are hidden by the forest of assholes.
And sometimes I forget too, that Austin, like West Berlin, is a Blue Stadt surrounded by a sea of Red.
Dear Texas, when you secede, please take morons like Cruz, Gohmert and Abbott with you.