Americans often fall apart over the legal issue of abortion. However, the fight for Texas’ anti-abortion legislation has brought together gun rights advocates and abortion rights activists.
Firearms Policy Coalition is a national group for gun rights that filed yesterday a friend-of-the court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support Whole Woman’s Health. This abortion rights group leads the legal battle against Senate Bill 8 which was recently enacted in Texas.
The gun rights group said that Texas’s approach to avoid pre-enforcement reviews of its restrictions on abortion, and delegating enforcement to private litigants, was not legal. “But other states could use it to limit First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, or virtually any established or discussed constitutional right.” Firearms Policy Coalition stated that it “no longer holds a position regarding whether abortion should not be protected by law.” However, the brief said, “but believes the judicial review on restrictions to established constitutional rights, particularly those covered under the Court’s case, can’t be bypassed in the way Texas has done.”
S.B. Eighth was designed by Texas legislators in order to let the state avoid responsibility for its laws before federal courts. What is the way? How? By outsourcing the enforcement of law to private parties. S.B. 8, “any person” may sue “any person who…aids or abets the performance or inducement of abortion” and win a $10,000 bounty plus legal fees if the civil suit is successful. Texas claims that this law shields the state, since it is not enforced by any state officials.
With a majority of 5-4, the Supreme Court voted to allow the law to go into effect. It stated that Whole Woman’s Health raised serious questions about the Texas constitution. However, the law brought up “complex and new antecedent procedural problems” that the majority was unwilling to deal with.
Firearms Policy Coalition now calls on the Supreme Court for direct attention to these questions. The gun rights group said that the case was important “not because it deals with abortion”. However, they also criticized Texas’s contemptuous and inexcusable mechanism to shield from review any potential violations of Constitution rights. This Court’s precedents have determined this. Firearms Policy Coalition warned that, in a clear message to Court justices who are concerned about the Second Amendment, pre-enforcement review could be avoided in abortion contexts. However, this can also be used to shield from review potential violations of constitutional rights as determined by the Court’s precedents.
This is just right. Texas’ legal maneuver to ban abortion will be replicated by other states in order to block other rights. Liberals should be concerned about this law. Conservatives too should be concerned about this law.