The transition leaders at the Department of Justice have a lot on their plate, but dismissing abusive cases brought by the Biden DOJ ought to be easy to accomplish. I’m glad to see that the new DOJ promptly dismissed the outrageous prosecution of Dr. Eithan Haim.

Another such case that comes quickly to mind is the Biden DOJ’s abortion lawsuit against Idaho, which claims that Idaho’s life-of-the-mother exception might conflict in some circumstances with what the federal law known as EMTALA (the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act) supposedly requires. I’ve written various posts explaining some basic flaws in the “intolerable federal power grab” that the Biden DOJ was trying to pull off, and I won’t repeat those here.

On remand from the Supreme Court’s curious decision last June to dismiss the certiorari petitions that it had granted, the en banc Ninth Circuit heard oral argument in the case on December 10, 2024. While it could be a long time before the Ninth Circuit rules, DOJ ought simply dismiss its complaint forthwith. In conjunction with DOJ’s dismissal, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (a subagency of HHS) should withdraw and de-publish its July 2022 memo that launched the federal power grab.

Abortion demagogues would try to contend that a dismissal disserves the interests of pregnant women in emergency conditions. But as Justice Barrett spelled out in her concurrence in the Court’s dismissal decision:

[S]ince we granted certiorari, the parties’ litigating positions have rendered the scope of the dispute unclear, at best….
At the merits stage, … the United States disclaimed [what Idaho understood to be the federal government’s] interpretations of EMTALA. First, it emphatically disavowed the notion that an abortion is ever required as stabilizing treatment for mental health conditions…. Second, the United States clarified that federal conscience protections, for both hospitals and individual physicians, apply in the EMTALA context.
Narrowing happened from the other direction too. The United States identified PPROM, placental abruption, pre-eclampsia, and eclampsia as conditions for which EMTALA requires an emergency abortion to be available…. But in this Court, [Idaho officials] represent that [Idaho law] permits physicians to treat each of these conditions with emergency abortions, even if the threat to the woman’s life is not imminent….