Scalia Wrote Supreme Court's Order Allowing Texas Abortion Law To Remain In Effect, Is A Dick

The story so far: Under a hail of imaginary bricks and pee jars and real sexy Wendy Davises, Texas's state legislature passed a law that says all current abortion providers must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinics. Supporters of the bill said it was to help ladies be healthier, not to stop them from getting abortions WINK WINK they are WINKing because of course it was to stop them from getting abortions, dummy!

Then we got excited when a District Court found the nobortions part of the law unconstitutional, but that Nice Time was short-lived because the Fifth Circuit court issued a stay of judgment against the District Court, what a dick move! Incidentally, saying "dick move" three times in front of a mirror is how you call Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who just wrote the Supreme Court's refusal (PDF) to vacate the thing that overturned the thing that stopped the thing that stopped the abortions. It's minor Scalia, but parts of it are interesting, like when Nino tells us about Logic:

the difficulty of a question is inversely proportional to the likelihood that a given answer will be clearly erroneous.

We had to think about this one a minute until it made sense, and then a little longer until we realized that it's wrong. In reality, the hardest questions are the ones with an apparently correct answer that isn't, and we very much doubt Scalia truly believes that any one person's opinions determine a question's objective difficulty, unless that person is Antonin Scalia.

Now, this next thing made us mad. One of the standards courts apply in deciding stuff like this is "whether the State would have been irreparably injured absent a stay." Apparently it's enough to argue that "‘[a]ny time a State is enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people, it suffers a form of irreparable injury.’" Oh gosh, the poor State! Their dumb hateful law they got out of an antique book of desert myths might not get to screw up the lives of thousands of people, what an irreparable injury! This standard is the legal equivalent of saying "We can't stop our toddler from destroying your house because he doesn't want us to, and you invited us over here anyway!" But that's the law, we guess.

The upshot is that the Texas abortion restrictions will remain in effect while Planned Parenthood's full appeal goes to the Fifth Circuit. In case you were wondering if Scalia cares that the interests of abortion providers and the women who needs them "would be harmed" if the law were allowed to continue in effect before the appeal is heard, HA! HA! Idiot. Of course he doesn't, because the State is "likely to succeed on the merits" of the constitutional question (because the State said so), plus all the above nonsense about irreparable harm to the fragile, defenseless State's interests.

There you have it! The Law, brought to you by a bunch of people who hate you and everything you stand for. Here is the balm of Breyer's dissent, showing how everything could be all right if and when this case or a similar one makes it to the Supreme Court.

The District Court concluded that “admitting privileges have no rational relationship to improved patient care” and “do not rationally relate to the State’s legitimate interest in protecting the unborn.” Id., at *5. And the court explained that, in its view, the admitting privileges requirement is unconstitutional because it is “without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” Id., at *2; see also Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 146 (2007) (A State “may not impose upon this right [to an abortion] an undue burden, which exists if a regulation’s purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability’” (quoting Casey, supra, at 878)).

This is settled law, which means Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy will be perfectly happy tossing it and signing Scalia's majority opinion that "abortions are wack, yo, do you even read the Bible? SCOTUS IN YA FACE!"

[ Yahoo! News / supremecourt.gov / CSM ]