General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"It's hard to overstate how radical these two decisions are"
It’s been a day of body blows for reproductive rights. On Thursday night, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision to temporarily block a provision of the omnibus Texas abortion law that requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The appeals court found that it’s constitutionally OK for the requirement to trigger the closure of fully one-third of the reproductive health clinics in the state, because the Supreme Court has found that “the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion cannot be enough to invalidate it.” The ruling will be catastrophic, measured in access for women to a procedure they have the constitutional right to obtain. The decision was written by Judge Priscilla R. Owen, a George W. Bush appointee, and joined by two other judges who are women—oh how the right is crowing—and also Bush appointees.
<snip>
On Friday, morning, it was the turn of another extremely conservative woman chosen for the bench by Bush, Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Brown handed down a similarly dramatic decision holding that the provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires companies to provide health care coverage that includes contraception "trammels" the religious freedom of an Ohio-based food service company, Freshway Foods, which claimed that the mandate violated its Catholic faith. This is a company we are talking about, not its owners. But following headlong in the wake of the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded finding in Citizens United that corporations are people, too, Brown found that the mandate violates the company’s strongly held religious convictions. To make the company provide a health care plan—from an outside insurer—that offers contraceptive coverage is a “compel[led] affirmation of a repugnant belief,” Brown wrote. The argument that a for-profit secular company has a religious conscience—separate and apart from the religious beliefs of its owners—is a notion that vaults the concept of personhood from the silly (“corporations are people, my friend”) to the sublime (also they pray)
It’s hard to overstate how radical these two decisions are. So it should be especially dispiriting for the left that the other really big thing that happened Thursday was the filibuster by Senate Republicans of Patricia Ann Millett, Obama’s centrist nominee to fill a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit, despite her exemplary credentials. Millett is no radical—no lefty retort to Owen and Brown. She’s a partner at Akin Gump who worked in the solicitor general’s office for both Clinton and Bush and has represented the pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She’s a military wife. That didn’t stop Republicans from claiming that simply by putting up a judicial nominee of his choosing, President Obama was attempting the “pack the court.”
What’s the thread through these three stories? Just this. If Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown sound familiar to you, that’s because they were the two Bush judicial nominees at the center of the Great Filibuster Showdown of 2005. In May 2001, just after taking office, Bush introduced 11 nominees for vacancies on the federal appellate courts. He was signaling his intention to reshape the federal judiciary, and his willingness to fight for his nominees, right down to the bloody end. Because that’s what his base demanded. Democrats blocked some of those appointments. Bush stuck to his guns. In 2004, immediately following his re-election and emboldened by Republican gains in the Senate, he pushed forward a list of judges he planned to renominate, despite what he characterized as years of Democratic obstruction. Both Owen and Brown were on that list. And as Charlie Savage detailed at considerable length in 2008, the effect of the Bush nominations on the federal judiciary was staggering. It still is. As we’ve seen it again this week.
<snip>
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/11/texas_abortion_restrictions_and_the_obamacare_contraception_mandate_bush.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)women are being shoved back decades. Without reproductive rights, all other women's rights are threatened. Not to mention that women will die.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)The women who advanced Roe v Wade were radicals. They upended and revolutionized the existing system.
Those that seek to roll back the radicals victory are reactionaries.
cali
(114,904 posts)but that's just verbal nitpicking in the face of a fucking disaster. in any case, if it's so important to you take it up with one of the foremost legal experts on this issue: Emily Bazelon. She and Lithwicke wrote the piece.
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
Freddie
(9,258 posts)Studies have proven that if a woman does not allow her body to rest and recover between pregnancies and gets pregnant again too soon after childbirth, she is at risk for serious complications and premature birth. The contraception mandate is "preventive care" because it allows her to space her pregnancies in a healthy way (at least 2 years apart per most OBs). I'm glad they consider saving lives a "repugnant belief."
Volaris
(10,269 posts)PERSONS have a right to speech (and religion, expression, peaceable assembly, protest, and Redress of Grievance, as extensions of speech) because a Person can see an injustice in the world, and then express moral outrage, even IF that expression has consequences for that individual that that individual might prefer to avoid. CORPORATIONS have no such mechanism, as ANY action that negatively effects an ever-increasing profit margin is, BY DESIGN OF CORPORATE CHARTER, not only "approved of" but EXPRESSLY ILLEGAL.
jsr
(7,712 posts)Clinics in Fort Worth, other cities stop providing abortions, prepare to shut down
Published: 01 November 2013 04:29 PM
Updated: 01 November 2013 11:49 PM
McALLEN — The day after a federal appeals court cleared the way for Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect while it faces a legal challenge, many clinics across the state said they had stopped performing abortions. The clinics were preparing to shut down, leaving women seeking their services distraught.
“Patients are walking through the door; they are crying — they are freaking out,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates six abortion facilities in Texas and, she said, expects to close its locations in Fort Worth, McAllen and San Antonio. “We can’t stay open without any sources of income.”
The Texas law, passed by the Legislature in July, requires doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the facility where the procedure is performed, among other new rules.
In places such as the Rio Grande Valley and rural West Texas, the mandate put hundreds of miles between many women and abortion providers.
cali
(114,904 posts)
starroute
(12,977 posts)The Gang of 14 was a term coined to describe the bipartisan group of Senators in the 109th United States Congress who successfully negotiated a compromise in the spring of 2005 to avoid the deployment of the so-called nuclear option over an organized use of the filibuster by Senate Democrats.
The Democrats had been using the filibuster to prevent the confirmation of conservative appellate court candidates nominated by President George W. Bush. In the Republican-controlled 108th Congress, ten Bush judicial nominees had been filibustered by the minority Democrats. The ten Bush appellate nominees who were filibustered were Miguel Estrada, Priscilla Owen, Charles W. Pickering, Carolyn Kuhl, David W. McKeague, Henry Saad, Richard Allen Griffin, William H. Pryor, William Gerry Myers III and Janice Rogers Brown.
As a result of these ten filibusters, Senate Republicans began to threaten to change the existing Senate rules by using what Senator Trent Lott termed the "nuclear option" and which Republicans tended to call the "constitutional option." This change in rules would eliminate the use of the filibuster to prevent judicial confirmation votes. . . .
Three of the filibustered nominees (Estrada, Pickering and Kuhl) having withdrawn, in the 109th Congress, five of the seven filibustered nominees (Owen, McKeague, Griffin, Pryor and Brown) were allowed to be confirmed as a result of the deal brokered by the Gang.
