Lunchtime Reads for Tuesday, May 7

Hate to burst your balloon, but the “heartbeat bill” won’t actually do anything.

Here’s how it’s going to go down….

Someone is gonna file a lawsuit. As part of the lawsuit they’re going to ask for a preliminary injunction blocking the law from going into effect. The preliminary injunction is going to be granted because there’s well-established case law saying a PI is appropriate in abortion rights cases. The case will proceed to litigation. Motions will be filed. Time will pass. The law will not go into effect.

Eventually, the District Court will rule that the law is unconstitutional because it blatantly violates Roe‘s proscription of regulation of abortion prior to fetal viability. Then the case will be appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, More time will pass. Nothing will have changed with respect to abortion access in Georgia.

After some time, the Eleventh Circuit will affirm the District Court’s decision because, and I can’t stress this enough, the law is blatantly unconstitutional. The State will appeal again, this time to the Supreme Court.

There’s no point in debating anything I’ve said prior to this point. Every legislator who voted on this thing did so knowing it would be declared unconstitutional in the District Court and at the Eleventh Circuit. These bodies are bound by the precedent set in Roe. The “hope” for this bill is that the Supreme Court will grant cert and use this as an opportunity to strike down Roe. That only comes after wasting millions of dollars on litigation and appeals. That only comes after a couple of years winding its way up the ladder. And it relies on two very faulty assumptions.

First, we don’t know what the Court is going to look like in 2021 or 2022. Two, there’s no guarantee the Court grants cert. We just saw them reject two abortion cases last year which would have stripped PP of Medicaid funding. In February, C.J. Roberts sided with the “liberal” justices on a Louisiana admitting privileges law that would have left the state with just one abortion provider. He’s publicly expressed his concern about the legitimacy of the Court and its public perception… I’m not that confident he’s going to want to take on a case that would requiring shredding any semblance of judicial non-partisanship in order to dispense of Roe.