Why Americans’ Rights Are in Mortal Danger This November
Now that the long slog of the primary is all but over, and Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, Americans must focus on what’s going to become incredibly apparent over the next month: the need for a President Clinton – and not a President Trump – to appoint new Supreme Court justices.
June is usually the end of the Supreme Court term, so barring the Court taking longer than usual with its remaining opinions, this month will see the Court finish its work, even though it remains short-staffed.
Yes, for those who forgot thanks to the Senate doing absolutely nothing about it, the Supreme Court still has only eight justices. Almost three months ago, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace late Justice Antonin Scalia and then pretty much everyone — most notably, the Republican members of the United States Senate — quickly forgot about him. It seems GOP senators received the nomination memo, filed it next to “do something about rising sea levels,” and moved on to agonizing over whether to “endorse” or to take a bold stand and merely “support” Donald Trump.
As for Merrick Garland, he’s left giving high school graduation speeches about Harry Potter and waiting for his last name to be turned into a verb: After the Senate defeated Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987, “to bork” now means “to harshly criticize and interrogate a nominee for judicial office,” and I have no doubt “to garland” will one day mean “to completely ignore, as if one doesn’t exist.” (e.g., “Every other episode of The Brady Bunch revolved around Jan complaining about being garlanded.”)
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court chugs along, doing the best it can without a full slate of employees. Over the next few weeks, we’ll hear from the Court about some of the biggest issues in American politics: abortion, affirmative action and immigration.
Abortion
The Court must decide whether a Texas law regulating abortion facilities and doctors goes too far in imposing a burden on women seeking reproductive health care. The two provisions of the law at issue – that clinics effectively become miniature hospitals (known as ambulatory surgical centers) and that doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals – sound innocuous on their face, but are pernicious in their effect. If allowed to stand, these medically unnecessary laws would reduce the number of clinics in Texas, the second largest state both geographically and in terms of number of people, from over 40 before the laws were passed to less than ten. Women from all over the state would have to travel huge distances to reach a clinic, but women from the poorest parts of the state – the Rio Grande Valley and West Texas – would be affected the most.