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STANDING UP TO TEXAS
As president Biden has said, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value”. There’s a corollary to that in the Texas state legislature’s latest attack on abortion rights; Show me your legislation and I’ll tell you what you despise. There’s little doubt that many of the Texas legislators are acting out of personal moral and religious beliefs as they try to destroy a woman’s constitutional right to choose an abortion. Looking at the law they carefully crafted to avoid Supreme Court review, there’s also little doubt about what they are willing to destroy to get their way.
Their bill attempts to move enforcement of state law out of state hands and into those of private citizens, a ploy to shield it from Supreme Court review. To do this they have aimed a bulldozer directly at a central pillar of the U.S. judicial system and locked down the throttle. That pillar? They’ve aimed their juggernaut at the principle of standing, which governs who can bring a lawsuit. The principle is fairly straight forward. To bring a suit against a private citizen In U.S. courts you must establish the plausible likelihood of three things; that you have sustained an injury in fact, that the plaintiff’s actions have caused that injury, and that the court can act to redress or compensate you by imposing consequences on the party who caused the injury.
