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Abortion Access Under Threat in Texas [1]

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Date: 2023-04-10  

Within a year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v Wade and end federal abortion rights, abortion is once again under threat. A Texas federal judge, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, ruled that the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) two-decade old approval of mifepristone was done unlawfully. Mifepristone, when used in conjunction with misoprostol, is the most common way to get a medical abortion in America. The decision came after anti-abortion doctors, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, sued to overturn the FDA’s approval. The Department of Justice has filed a notice of appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. If the approval is overturned, it will represent a massive blow to abortion rights in the U.S.

A Tainted Ruling Made in the Federalist Society

The ruling has triggered a storm of outrage, with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) delivering a floor speech in which he called for President Biden and the FDA to keep mifepristone on the market, regardless of the court’s ruling. Sen. Wyden said what everyone else was thinking, when he opined that, “The awful reality is, from the moment this case landed in front of Judge Kacsmaryk, it’s been a rigged game all along.” Judge Kacsmaryk serves as the U.S. district judge of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas. His CV gives the game away: he is a Trump appointee who, between 2014 and 2019, worked for the Christian conservative legal organization First Liberty Institute, a firm that shaped his right-wing convictions . In 2015, he submitted an amicus brief for a lawsuit before the Supreme Court, arguing against a Washington law obliging pharmacies to provide contraceptives. Since 2012, he has been a member of the Fort Worth chapter of the Federalist Society.

The Federalist Society is the spear of the Republican Party’s onslaught on the U.S. Constitution and the rights of women and minorities. It espouses an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. That interpretation claims that, centuries after the Constitution’s authorship, it is possible to know what the original meaning and intention of its writers was, and that, essentially, the Constitution is a frozen document whose meaning must be kept to what was intended centuries ago. It is that notion that inspired the Supreme Court to strike down the Constitution. Anyone who has ever read a historical work or piece of literature knows how impossible it is for there to be a consensus about what some work meant to the author, but that is not really what the Federalist Society is after. They are not concerned about the real meaning of the Constitution, but about a conservative interpretation of the Constitution that rolls back the rights of women and minorities. The Washington Post has argued that, with six of the Supreme Court’s nine members current or former members of the Federalist Society, namely, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett, it has achieved an "unprecedented peak of power and influence." Politico says that the Federalist Society "has become one of the most influential legal organizations in history—not only shaping law students' thinking but changing American society itself by deliberately, diligently shifting the country's judiciary to the right."

Judge Wyden’s decision was not the product of any careful deliberation. It was made long ago, the moment he joined the Federalist Society. The lawyers and judges who make up the society are not objective, even-handed judges, they are ideologues who are abusing their position to drive their agenda and reshape the nature of American life. This won’t be the last time this happens, and Americans should brace themselves for more attacks on their fundamental rights.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/10/2163268/-Abortion-Access-Under-Threat-in-Texas

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