After ‘unconstitutional’ Texas win, Florida legislators too eager to stomp on abortion rights | Opinion
Update: The Justice Department sued the state of Texas on Thursday saying its new six-week abortion ban is “clearly unconstitutional” and “enacted in open defiance of the Constitution.”
No, Florida Republicans salivating over the political opportunity to all but ban abortion in the state don’t care about babies’ well-being.
If they did, Gov. Ron DeSantis wouldn’t be leaving unclaimed up to $820 million in pandemic federal food assistance for more than 2 million of Florida’s hungry children.
Children going to school and to bed without nourishment, parents scrambling to make ends meet without proper healthcare or facing eviction are of no concern to DeSantis and the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature.
But these men are obsessed with ruling over the consequences of the intimate moment in a woman’s life when a man enters her body and impregnates her — whether the woman wants it or not. And now, they think they have the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval to submit women’s bodies and women’s health to their beliefs.
Supreme Court decision
Thanks to the partisan, conservative-majority Supreme Court shaped by the appointments of former President Donald Trump, copycat Florida legislators already are at work to bring backward, Texas-style abortion-banning legislation to the state.
And, in at least one county, Manatee, a city commissioner made a rousing bid to ban abortion before a slate of women dressed in the lookalike red robes of maidens forced into pregnancy in the fictional “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Statewide, leading the Florida assault on women’s rights are DeSantis, House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, and Senate President Wilton Simpson, an egg farmer who hails from the small rural community of Trilby and wants to run for agriculture commissioner in 2022.
What is it about abortion and white males with oversized ambition?
You’ll hear them, from now and through the January session, pushing the keyword “heartbeat” ad nauseam to drum up support for a bill that would make abortion illegal after the sixth week, when many women have no clue they’re pregnant.
When you hear them, think of the hungry kids whose “heartbeat” they don’t give a damn about.
Listen to dissenting judges, Florida, before you go all Texas.
Everything about the Supreme Court decision letting the Texas ban on almost all abortions stand is eerie.
First, the optics on how the blatantly unconstitutional decision came about at the hands of men accused of sexual misconduct.
It wouldn’t have been possible without Trump’s political appointments of biased anti-abortion judges. Trump is a documented misogynist widely accused of sexually assaulting women and a rape.
One of the appointees who upheld the Texas law, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of sexually assaulting at least two women while drunk during his college days, but Trump’s Republican-dominated Senate confirmed him nevertheless.
Then, there’s the way the single-paragraph 5-4 decision was handed down, unsigned, shortly before midnight on Sept. 1 without any of the usual rendering of the justices’ reasoning. A highly controversial topic handled without the highest court in the land hearing oral arguments or lawyers submitting to justices’ questions.
The hasty decision is a misuse of what’s called “a shadow docket,” which allows the court to make quick decisions when time is of the essence. This wasn’t such a case, but acting to uphold with expedience gives Republicans a major political victory going into the midterms.
The only reason we know details about the Supreme Court vote is that the four dissenting justices, including conservative Chief Justice Roberts, released individual signed statements, some blistering, explaining their dissent.
Sotomayor: It’s unconstitutional
Texas’ SB8, Justice Sonia Sotomayor,wrote, “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.”
She added: “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 purposely tried to circumvent existing law, taking “the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the state could not,” Sotomayor said. “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.”
The scariest part: “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,” Sotomayor wrote.
Think this one through: Is turning anti-abortion advocates in Florida into legalized vigilantes in a state with a sordid history of abortion-related violence what we want?
Women of Florida, prepare for the fight of our lives.
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
