(PresidentialWire.com)- The Supreme Court recently declined to stop Texas from implementing its new abortion law, but that isn’t going to stop the Department of Justice from trying to do something about it.
According to many sources close to the situation, the DOJ is expected to file suit against the state of Texas over the new law it put into place that outlaws almost all abortions. Fox News reported that the lawsuit could be filed sometime this week or early next.
Merrick Garland, the U.S. Attorney General, recently said the DOJ was “urgently” exploring “all options to challenge Texas S.B. 8 in order to protect the constitutional rights of women … including access to abortion.”
Democrats have been hooting and hollering at Garland and the Biden administration to take urgent action to prevent Texas’ law from going into effect.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the bill into law back in May, but it was set to go into effect this week. The law prohibits abortions in Texas once a medical professional can detect any cardiac activity. That typically happens around six weeks of pregnancy, which is before a lot of women even know they are pregnant.
Groups filed emergency requests to have the Supreme Court stop the law from going into effect while they filed challenges. The high court, though, ruled 5-4 that the law could take effect.
Following the decision, President Joe Biden said the ruling was an “unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights.” He further said it wasn’t a “final ruling,” and that it required “an immediate response.”
Now, it seems that immediate response will come in the form of a DOJ challenge.
Biden said he directed the Office of the White House Counsel and the Gender Policy Council to launch “a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision.”
They’d turn to the Department of Health and Human Services and the DOJ to “see what steps the federal government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions as protected by Roe, and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”
While many Republican-led states have passed restrictive abortion laws in recent years, Texas’ is considered the most restrictive by far. Twelve other states have enacted some sort of ban on abortions early in pregnancy. To this point, all of those have been blocked in court from officially taking effect.
The Texas law was allowed to take effect, though, because of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices to form the minority in the decision.
Each of those dissenting justices wrote their own opinion in the case that outlined why they disagreed with the decision.
In his, Roberts said that while the majority denied the emergency request for relief, “the court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”
Decisions on that particular topic will likely come during the DOJ’s challenge to the Texas law.
