A follow-up to these two posts of mine on what the oral argument in the Texas Heartbeat Act cases seems to signal.
This email from a federal-courts maven and former Supreme Court clerk captures the intense exasperation that I’m hearing from lots of folks:
If we can’t trust a 6-3 court not to screw up an issue that is both so dictated by precedent and so consistent with bedrock principles of separation of powers and judicial restraint, then it makes me question what we’ve been fighting for all these years, other than to make the politicians in robes more conservative (at least when the political pressure isn’t too intense or their institutional concerns aren’t too acute).
From another brilliant legal mind:
Is the Supreme Court going to tell the Fifth Circuit that it should have allowed the clinics to sue all the clerks in Texas under Ex parte Young? That is so stupid I would not have believed it until yesterday.