Source: https://humboldtdems.wordpress.com/tag/scotus/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 09:59:22+00:00

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A new Utah law will subject women to medically unnecessary risk in order to ward off a problem that almost certainly does not exist. It makes a significant new incursion on what remains of Roe v. Wade — at a time when the Supreme Court is signaling that anti-abortion state lawmakers have moved too far. And it will likely either drive up the cost of abortions or cause many clinics to stop performing certain kinds of abortion because they will need to recruit new specialist physicians in order to continue serving all women.
The law, colorfully labeled the “Protecting Unborn Children Amendments,” requires abortion providers who perform “an abortion of an unborn child who is at least 20 weeks gestational age” to administer an anesthetic or analgesic to eliminate or alleviate organic pain to the unborn child.” The law’s supporters claim that human fetuses are capable of feeling pain around the twentieth week of pregnancy, and that this bill will help eliminate that pain.
Nevertheless, anti-abortion lawmakers frequently cite the idea that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks to justify restrictions on reproductive choice.
Utah law typically prohibits abortions around 22 weeks into a pregnancy, when the fetus is deemed viable. Thus, that state’s new law will primarily impact women who seek abortions during a narrow two-week period.
Yet the new law will subject those women to considerable risk. According to the Associated Press, the law will require doctors to either administer general anesthesia or “a heavy does of narcotics”to women impacted by the law. In rare cases, that could lead to a woman’s death. Though anesthesia-related deaths are in decline, approximately 34 patients per million died from anesthetics in the 1990s and 2000s.
It is as if Utah required women to consume a small dose of strychnine before they can receive an abortion.
As one doctor told the AP, “you never give those medicines if you don’t have to.” Now, however, thanks to this Utah law, doctors will have to.
Since Roe, however, the Supreme Court has carved away much of the right protected by that decision. Most notably, in Gonzales v. Carhardt, the Court upheld a ban on a method of abortion that was viewed by many doctors and medical associations as the safest method “for women with certain pregnancy-related conditions, such as placenta previa and accreta, and for women carrying fetuses with certain abnormalities, such as severe hydrocephalus.” Thus, in effect, the Court held that lawmakers could potentially make abortion less safe for many women who seek it.
Even after Gonzales, however, the Utah law is a significant escalation in the war against Roe. AfterGonzales, a woman who sought an abortion was still likely to receive a procedure that, in their doctor’s medical opinion, was the safest legal option — even if the single safest procedure was no longer legal. The majority opinion in Gonzales also claimed that “there is medical and scientific uncertainty” regarding whether to procedure at issue in that case was ever the safest medical option.
anesthesia or narcotics. It is as if Utah required women to consume a small dose of strychnine before they can receive an abortion. If the dose is small enough, it probably won’t kill the woman, but the state would still be exposing women to a very dangerous chemical without any health-related reason to do so.
When the Supreme Court met last January to hear an aggressive attempt to defund public sector unions, the news looked grim for organized workers. All five of the Court’s conservatives seemed ready to accept the plaintiffs’ legal arguments, a result that would have potentially had catastrophic financial consequences for many unions.
Then Justice Antonin Scalia died, and the anti-union litigants lost the fifth vote they needed to prevail.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court announced the widely expected consequence of Scalia’s encounter with his own mortality. In a single-sentence order, the Supreme Court announced that the judgment of a lower court rejecting this effort to defund public sector unions “is affirmed by an equally divided court.” Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association is dead. A four-decade-old opinion protecting public sector unions shall live to see another day.
The purpose of these fees is to ensure that non-members do not get something for nothing; they require those non-members to pay their share of the costs of obtaining the benefits of being in a union.
Prior to Friedrichs, the Court took two incremental steps in the direction of an eventual decision abolishing agency fees. Friedrichs was widely expected to be that decision. Instead, with the Court split 4-4, Friedrichs will have no effect and the Court’s previous precedents permitting agency fees will remain good law, binding on all lower court judges.
Ultimately, however, Tuesdays’ non-decision in Friedrichs only heightens the stakes in the battle to replace Scalia. If Scalia is replaced by a relatively liberal justice, whether that new justice is Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland or someone else, then it is exceedingly likely that agency fees will continue to be legal. Should Scalia be replaced by another conservative, however, then Tuesday’s order will likely provide to be only a brief stay of execution for public sector unions.
To explain, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has handed down a series of decisions that appear calculated to dismantle nearly all of Roe v. Wade within the three states (Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas) overseen by that court. In 2015, for example, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole gave states sweeping power to restrict abortion, so long as the restriction is dressed up as a health regulation. Among other things, this opinion blessed a provision of Texas law requiring abortion clinics to undergo expensive renovations in order to comply with regulations governing “ambulatory surgical centers,” even if the clinic does not actually perform any surgeries. Many Texas abortion clinics only offer medication abortions, which are induced by pills the woman takes orally.
An appeal of this Whole Woman’s Health decision is currently pending before the justices, and a majority of the Court appeared skeptical of the Fifth Circuit’s decision at oral arguments last Wednesday.
To be clear, it is normally a dangerous practice to read too much into a one-paragraph order like the one the Supreme Court handed down Friday. This order provides only a limited window into the Court’s thinking, and it deals only with a preliminary issue facing the Fifth Circuit in June Medical Services. The conservative appeals court will have another opportunity to hear this case, and that will give it another opportunity to make mischief for abortion providers.
But the Supreme Court is now signalling very loudly that a majority of the Court is not pleased with the Fifth Circuit’s efforts to pare Roe v. Wade down to near nothingness. If the lower court’s judges do decide to make more mischief, they will probably wind up on the receiving end of yet another judicial spanking.
What is the President Looking for in his SCOTUS Nominee?
A sterling record. A deep respect for the judiciary’s role. An understanding of the way the world really works. That’s what I’m considering as I fulfill my constitutional duty to appoint a judge to our highest court. And as Senators prepare to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to consider the person I appoint, I hope they’ll move quickly to debate and then confirm this nominee so that the Court can continue to serve the American people at full strength.
It was supposed to be an epic battle over the fate of Roe v. Wade.
Next week, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a challenge to Texas’s ambitious anti-abortion law HB2. If this law is upheld — a very real possibility in a conservative Supreme Court — Roe v. Wade would have most likely remained alive in name only. States would gain sweeping new power to shut down abortion clinics, so long as they dressed up the laws they enacted to end access to abortion as health regulations.
Except that opponents of abortion no longer have the fifth vote they need to gut Roe. Justice Antonin Scalia’s death means that Roe shall live at least another year. Whether it survives past next year, however, could very well be decided by whoever gets to fill Scalia’s seat.
HB2 is the brainchild of the sophisticated anti-abortion group Americans United for Life (AUL). The law imposes expensive architectural and other requirements on abortion clinics, as well as often-difficult-to-obtain credentialing requirements on abortion providers. If the Supreme Court allows the law to take full effect, at least 32 of the 40 abortion clinics that existed in Texas before it was enacted are expected to shut down.
Just over one week ago, Whole Woman’s Health appeared poised to become AUL’s crowning achievement. Under the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states may not enact laws that place an “undue burden” a woman’s right to choose abortion — a vague standard that’s proved quite malleable in the hands of abortion opponents. At the same time, states may legitimately regulate all medical clinics, including those that provide abortions, to protect the health of individuals who seek treatment from those clinics. Whole Woman’s Health asks what happens when a state enacts abortion restrictions disguised as health regulations.
The clinic regulations and credentialing requirements at issue in this case will do little, if anything, to advance women’s health. But they make it a whole lot harder to obtain an abortion. Thus, a decision upholding HB2 could potentially return women to a world much like the one that existed prior to Roe. States may not actually be allowed to openly ban abortion after such a decision, but they’d have broad authority to restrict abortion just so long as they are clever enough to devise anti-abortion laws that look like health laws. And if state lawmakers proved inept at this task, groups like AUL would be more than happy to give them a hand.
Now, however, with Scalia’s seat vacant and the Court evenly divided between Democratic and Republican appointees, the likelihood HB2 will be upheld outright is vanishingly small.
Thus, before conservatives lost their majority on the Supreme Court, the most important question in Whole Woman’s Health was likely to be which Justice Kennedy shows up to work next week — the one that consistently upholds abortion restrictions or the one that is unwilling to invalidate Roe in its entirety. Kennedy, moreover, gave hope to Team Choice when he cast the fifth vote to stay a lower court order upholding nearly all of HB2.
Now that the Court is evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, Kennedy no longer has the power to drive a nail in Roe‘s coffin, but he could still have the power to do considerable damage to the right to choose. The ordinary rule when the Court splits 4-4 is that the lower court’s decision is affirmed and the justices’ decision does not have any precedential value. Because the court of appeals largely upheld HB2, a 4-4 decision in Whole Woman’s Health would allow the Texas law to almost entirely remain in effect — at least until a fifth justice is confirmed to the Court and another abortion case reaches the justices.
There is, however, some uncertainty about whether Kennedy will have this option. As SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein notes, the Court’s past practice when a vacancy opened in the middle of a term was to hold cases where the justices split over until the next term, when the open seat presumably would be filled. Given the extraordinary obstructionism Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already planned against anyone President Obama sends up to fill this seat, it remains to be seen whether the justices will decide to hold over split decisions until next term or simply affirm the case by an evenly divided vote and be done with it.
Which process they choose could matter a great deal in Whole Woman’s Health. Recall that Kennedy provided the fifth vote to stay the lower court’s decision upholding HB2. That order provides that the stay shall last until “the issuance of the judgment of this Court.” Thus, if the Court holds the case over for reargument next term, the stay remains in effect until the Court decides the case, and HB2 does not go into effect. If the Court affirms the lower court by an evenly divided vote, by contrast, that counts as a “judgment” of the Supreme Court, so the clinics most impacted by HB2 will close.
The choice whether to hold the case over could also matter for an entirely different reason. If President Obama (or a similarly minded president) manages to fill Justice Scalia’s seat, one of the first matters taken up by the Court’s new liberal majority would be a major abortion case. That would not only give them the opportunity to strike down HB2, it would also give them the chance to expand a right to choose that has been gradually chipped away after decades of conservative decisions. The vague “undue burden” standard that now controls abortion cases was pushed by abortion opponents including the Reagan Justice Department and AUL itself before it was ultimately adopted by the Supreme Court. A more liberal Court could scrap this standard altogether or, at the very least, clarify it in a way that does not permit anti-abortion judges to take advantage of its vagueness.
Rather than becoming AUL’s crowning achievement, in other words, Whole Woman’s Health could be their most demoralizing defeat.
Yet that outcome depends entirely on who gets to fill Justice Scalia’s seat. If the next justice is more like Scalia, Whole Woman’s Health could still become AUL’s greatest triumph.
In a decision heralded as “great news for consumers and the environment,” the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld a rule meant to incentivize electricity conservation and idle dirty fossil fuel power plants normally used during periods of high demand.
The agency’s win is seen as a big loss for large “baseload” power sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, which have seen their profits decline over the last several years as electricity consumption has eased and renewables grew. Now they have to compete with industrial customers and others who will at times be paid at market rates to reduce their electricity use without having the costs of operating and maintaining a power plant themselves.

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