More stories

  • in

    Two disbarred lawyers sued a Texas doctor who performed an abortion. Flustered ‘pro-lifers’ are backpedaling | Moira Donegan

    OpinionUS politicsTwo disbarred lawyers sued a Texas doctor who performed an abortion. Flustered ‘pro-lifers’ are backpedalingMoira DoneganAnti-choice groups are embarrassed that their draconian law is being enforced the way it was designed

    Democrats present last line of defense for abortion rights
    Sun 26 Sep 2021 06.27 EDTLast modified on Sun 26 Sep 2021 13.08 EDTDr Alan Braid, an OBGYN based in San Antonio, broke the law on purpose. In an essay published in the Washington Post last Saturday, the doctor announced that he performed an abortion on a woman who was past six weeks of gestation, the limit imposed by Texas’s new abortion ban, SB8. The doctor wrote that he felt morally obliged to perform the procedure, his worldview shaped by his years in obstetric practice having conversations with patients who revealed that they were terminating their pregnancies because they couldn’t afford more kids, because they had been raped, because they were with abusive partners, or because they wanted to pursue other dreams.He wrote, too, of beginning his practice in 1972, the year before Roe v Wade, the last time an outright ban on abortion was in effect in his state. “At the hospital that year, I saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions,” Dr Braid wrote. “One I will never forget. When she came into the ER, her vaginal cavity was packed with rags. She died a few days later from massive organ failure, caused by a septic infection.” Dr Braid reasoned that to avoid such needless deaths, he had a “duty of care” to the woman whose newly illegal abortion he performed.He was promptly sued. Two complaints – both from men living out of state – were filed against Dr Braid on Monday morning. One, a rambling, weird document, comes from a convicted felon and disbarred former attorney named Oscar Stilley, who is serving a prison term on house arrest in Arkansas. That complaint, which Stilley seems to have written himself, makes multiple references to Dr Braid’s conduct regarding “bastards” and his supposed belief in a god referred to by the Hebrew name “Elohim.” Stilley, who has said he does not personally oppose abortion, feels strongly that “if there’s money to be had, it’s going to go in Oscar’s pocket.”The second lawsuit is from a man named Felipe Gomez of Illinois, another disbarred lawyer, who labels himself “pro-choice plaintiff”, and whose complaint asks only that SB8 be overturned. These test cases, strange and off-putting as they are, now represent the best chance for SB8 to be vacated, and for abortion rights to be returned to Texans – at least for now.It didn’t have to be this way. When a conservative state passes an abortion ban – as they do with some regularity – state employees are usually tasked with enforcing the law, those employees are named as defendants in lawsuits brought by pro-choice groups, and the law is blocked from going into effect by courts that declare it unconstitutional before any real patients are denied abortion care. But Texas’s SB8 was designed to elide this normal process of judicial review, with a novel enforcement mechanism that bars state agents from acting to enforce the law. Instead, the law can only be enforced by private civil suits against people suspected of facilitating abortions – lawsuits, that is, like the ones filed by Stilley and Gomez.This private enforcement mechanism is like a legal Rube Goldberg machine built into SB8, creating a clever way to evade courts recognizing the bill’s abortion ban as unconstitutional. Created by an insidious conservative lawyer named Jonathan Mitchell, the loophole was designed to confound lawsuits against the law’s constitutionality with procedural, rather than substantive, questions, and to guarantee that SB8 would go into effect. The device is transparent bid to circumvent the authority of the federal courts. But those same federal courts, by now warped by decades of anti-choice influence on the judicial nominations process, let it slide anyway. Judges on the fifth circuit court of appeals, and later on the supreme court, found that the procedural questions that were engineered by SB8 provided them a sufficient pretext to do what they wanted to do anyway: allow a state to outlaw abortion within its borders, and effectively end Roe.And so, when the supreme court allowed SB8 to go into effect, it left the pro-choice movement with no choice. Pre-enforcement litigation failed on flimsy and artificial procedural grounds; what was needed was an illegal abortion, performed by someone willing to take on enormous personal risk, to create a test case. Only a deliberate legal violation would allow SB8 could be reviewed on the merits. This is where Dr Braid comes in. In addition to the enormous service he gave to the patient whose abortion he performed, he also did a service to the pro-choice movement, and to women statewide. He took on enormous personal liability so that the question of their right to an abortion could get a fair hearing.Interestingly, the anti-choice movement doesn’t seem entirely happy that the lawsuits that enforce the abortion ban they championed are now actually arriving in Texas courts. John Sego, a legislative director of the anti-choice group Texas Right to Life, which supports SB8, expressed displeasure that the law is being enforced – well, exactly the way it was designed. He called the lawsuits “self-serving legal stunts”. Yet he also claimed that “Texas Right to Life is resolute in ensuring that [SB8] is fully enforced.” If Sego and other anti-choice groups want the law enforced, why do they oppose private citizens enforcing it, using the bill’s own remedy?It might be that Sego and his anti-choice colleagues are embarrassed to have their interests represented by a plaintiff like Stilley, with his flamboyant feloniousness. Maybe they have realized that the bounty-hunting provision of the law is deeply unpopular, and that the suits are terrible PR for the anti-choice movement. At any rate, it is hard to take Sego seriously when he says, “We believe Braid published his op-ed intending to attract imprudent lawsuits, but none came from the pro-life movement.” In fact Sego’s group is legally not able to file bounty-hunting lawsuits to enforce SB8: although the group established an “abortion snitch” website that seemed designed to solicit tips about possible defendants in SB8 enforcement suits against those who facilitate abortions, a judge issued a restraining order preventing Texas Right to Life from filing them.But perhaps the real reason Sego is displeased with the lawsuits against Braid is that SB8’s bounty hunting enforcement system was only one small part of the anti-choice vision for the law. The real way that abortions would become inaccessible in Texas under SB8 wasn’t that people would sue; it was that abortion providers, faced with the prospect of being bankrupted by lawsuits, would preemptively stop performing abortions. It was an attempt to do by intimidation what the anti-choice movement was not confident they could do by law: strip Texan women of their constitutional right to control their own bodies and lives. And, mostly, this gambit has worked. In the more than three weeks since SB8 went into effect, legal abortions after six weeks have come to a halt in Texas. Fearing liability, clinics are turning pregnant patients away. So far, only Dr Braid has called the anti-choice movement’s bluff.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
    TopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionTexascommentReuse this content More

  • in

    Texas, Spurred By Trump, Announces Election Audit in 4 Counties

    Eight and a half hours after former President Donald J. Trump made a public demand for Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to back legislation to create a “forensic audit of the 2020 election,” the Texas secretary of state’s office announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of the results from four of the state’s largest counties.The quick response by state officials in Texas, which Mr. Trump carried last year by more than five percentage points, was the latest example of the former president’s enduring influence over the Republican Party, particularly when it comes to his efforts to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of his loss last year to President Biden.“Governor Abbott, we need a ‘Forensic Audit of the 2020 Election,’” Mr. Trump said in a midday open letter to Mr. Abbott. “Texans know voting fraud occurred in some of their counties.”Texas is currently without a secretary of state, after the May retirement of Ruth Ruggero Hughs. Mr. Abbott, a Republican, has yet to appoint a successor.Nevertheless, the office released a two-sentence statement late Thursday stating that it would examine ballots from the 2020 election in Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant Counties. The news release called those counties the “two largest Democrat counties and two largest Republican counties” in the state, but of the four, only Collin County backed Mr. Trump against Mr. Biden in the 2020 election. The statement said the audit process had already begun.Since Arizona Republicans began a review of more than 2 million ballots in Maricopa County, Trump-aligned Republicans across the country have sought to replicate the effort. In Wisconsin, a former State Supreme Court justice is investigating the election results and said Monday that an audit of ballots is possible. Pennsylvania Republicans last week sought driver’s license data and Social Security numbers for every voter in the state as part of an inquiry into the 2020 election there.The various reviews have not uncovered any significant evidence of fraud or impropriety in the vote counting. But they have created a new kind of security risk as third parties gain access to voting equipment and raised questions about the use of public resources to investigate Republican conspiracy theories.To date, there have been no serious allegations that the Texas election was flawed.Texas Democrats called the audit the latest attempt by Mr. Abbott and the state’s Republicans to cater to Mr. Trump.“This is all an organized effort to overturn the will of the people in an effort to fuel the ‘Big Lie’ and stroke Trump’s ego,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. More

  • in

    Beto O’Rourke Draws Closer to Entering Texas Governor’s Race

    Mr. O’Rourke has been calling Democratic leaders in Texas to tell them he is seriously considering challenging Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022. HOUSTON — Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman who became a darling of Democrats after nearly defeating Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, is inching closer to announcing a run for governor of Texas, according to three people who have spoken with him.In recent weeks, Mr. O’Rourke has been making calls to Democratic leaders across Texas to inform them that he is seriously considering taking on Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who is up for re-election next year. And he has begun talking to supporters about having them join his campaign staff. A decision could be made in the coming weeks, the three people said, possibly as soon as October. Democrats in Texas have been urging Mr. O’Rourke to get into the race for governor almost from the moment he dropped out of the 2020 race for president, a quixotic effort that stumbled early and failed to gain traction amid a crowded primary field. But despite his troubles on the national stage, Mr. O’Rourke has maintained a deep wellspring of support in Texas, where many Democrats still display the black-and-white Beto signs from the 2018 campaign on their lawns and on their cars. Mr. O’Rourke did not respond to calls or text messages seeking comment. David Wysong, a longtime adviser to Mr. O’Rourke, cautioned that “no decision has been made” on a run for governor. The three people who discussed their conversations with Mr. O’Rourke are Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about conversations that were meant to be private.No Democrat has been elected governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990. And no prominent Democrat has emerged to take on Mr. Abbott next year. The governor, who has built up a war chest of more than $55 million, has appeared more concerned with insulating himself from challengers on his right in a Republican primary than worrying about the general election. But Democrats see a potential opening. Over the last few months, Texas has bounced from crisis to crisis — including a surge in pandemic deaths and a winter failure of the electric grid — while Republican leaders in Austin have steered the state even farther to the right on issues from guns to elections to abortion. In a survey last month, a majority of Texans told pollsters they thought the state was heading in the wrong direction.Amid the political turmoil, Mr. O’Rourke has stayed active in the state. “He’s been not just making pronouncements, he’s been out there knocking on doors, leading marches, setting up rallies all over the state,” said Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. Mr. Hinojosa said the Supreme Court’s decision to let a strict new abortion law passed by the Texas Legislature go into effect had galvanized many Democrats in the state. The new law effectively bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy and is structured in such a way as to avoid an immediate court challenge.“This whole abortion legislation has changed the dynamics incredibly,” he said. In the 2018 campaign, Mr. O’Rourke showed that he was able to energize Democrats, raise significant sums of money and campaign aggressively across Texas, a large and notoriously difficult place to run a statewide campaign. Even in defeat, his margin against the incumbent Mr. Cruz — 51 to 48 percent — helped lift Democratic candidates in local races and led to gains in the State Legislature that year. The prospect of a run by Mr. O’Rourke against Mr. Abbott — reported by Axios on Sunday — would present Democrats with the biggest and most direct test yet in their attempts to loosen the Republican grip on power in Texas. During his failed presidential run, Mr. O’Rourke took positions, including a hard line on confiscating assault weapons, that could make him vulnerable in any new campaign in Texas. “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” Mr. O’Rourke said during a Democratic debate in Houston in 2019, referring to military-style rifles that have been used in mass shootings.David Carney, a campaign adviser to Mr. Abbott and a longtime Republican political consultant, said that he would not be surprised if Mr. O’Rourke jumped into the race. “O’Rourke has been planning to run since he got crushed in his presidential flop,” Mr. Carney said. “He is a target-rich environment with positions way, way out of the mainstream.” More