Yesterday, the world stopped because Milbank raised salaries the Supreme Court ruled in favor of bigotry against gay people.
Many have pointed out that the Masterpiece decision was narrow and punted on the major issues. But if you like punts, a Supreme Court order released earlier in the day is the Ray Guy of punting on critical social and political issues.
The Supreme Court vacated the decision of the D.C. Circuit in the case of Azar v. Garza. Garza is the case of the detained teen abortion.
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I find the facts of Garza one of the most horrifying examples of the right trying to reduce an immigrant human woman to the condition of chattel. Your results may vary.
For the uninitiated, border patrol caught a Jane Doe trying to enter the country illegally. She was a pregnant teen. The government kept her locked in a “shelter,” against her will, because she had indicated that she wanted to see a doctor to terminate her pregnancy.
If she had wanted to have the baby on U.S. soil, these same right-wingers would have accused her of birthing an “anchor baby” and would have done everything in their power to send her, and her child, back to whatever condition of poverty and strife she was fleeing. But since she wanted to have an abortion, those same right-wingers ALSO decided for her that she had to have a baby and tried to keep her locked up like a damn brood mother until she produced the child.
In case you can’t tell, I find these people hypocritical and disgusting. They claim to care so much about the “unborn” but don’t give a s**t about the actually living, and actively seek to destroy that fully-born life if it is a brown one trying to cross the border.
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In any event, the ACLU took up Jane Doe’s case, and the D.C. Circuit ruled that she couldn’t be held like an incubator and denied medical services. The Justice Department apparently intended to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, but the ACLU’s lawyers were able to schedule the abortion for the very next day, the very next morning, before government lawyers woke up to file their appeal. Procedure complete, the government’s case became moot. You snooze, you lose.
Reports indicate that Confederate Attorney General Jeff Sessions was livid. Jeff Sessions hates the thought of women making their own decisions, hates treating immigrants with dignity and respect, and hates being outlawyered. I bet he shook all of the cookies off of his Keebler tree that night.
Sessions asked the Supreme Court to vacate the D.C. Circuit’s opinion, and he wanted the ALCU lawyers sanctioned for… being better at their job than he is? That brings us to Azar v. Garza.
The Supreme Court considered the government’s petition in January… and for it to take until June to issue the order suggests a contentious conference on the core issues at play.
But the unsigned order, released with no dissents, studiously avoids saying anything important at all.
The Court did vacate the order, as the government asked. But (and Amy Howe does her usual excellent job explaining this on SCOTUSblog) it’s pretty standard for the Supreme Court to vacate orders under these circumstances. A lower court made a ruling, the government intended to appeal, and the case became moot — through no fault of the government — before the appeal was heard, so it makes sense to vacate the order instead of letting potentially bad precedent stand against the government when they didn’t have a chance to make their case for appeal.
As for the issue of sanctions, check out this mealy-mouthed language:
[T]he court then turned down the government’s suggestion that it should sanction the teenager’s lawyers – who, the government contended, made “what appear to be material misrepresentations and omissions” in an effort to “thwart” Supreme Court review. The justices acknowledged that they take such accusations “seriously” and stressed that “all attorneys must remain aware of the principle that zealous advocacy does not displace their obligations as officers of the court.” “Particularly in fast-paced, emergency proceedings like those at issue here,” the justices continued, “it is critical that lawyers and courts alike be able to rely on one another’s representations.” But at the same time, the court observed, “lawyers also have ethical obligations to their clients and not all communication breakdowns constitute misconduct.
I’m sure we can all guess about which justices felt the ACLU made “material misrepresentations,” and which ones felt there was a mere “communication breakdown.”
By vacating the D.C. Circuit on hyper-technical grounds, and then refusing to say anything of relevance about sanctions, the Supreme Court totally dodges the issue of whether Health and Human Services can treat pregnant teens like escaped Breeders in a Mad Max movie.
It’s a live issue. From PBS:
Even though Jane Doe was able to get an abortion, the lawsuit that began with her has continued and could return to the Supreme Court at a later date. Scott Lloyd, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors, has said he believes teens in his agency’s care have no constitutional right to abortion.
And since the Jane Doe case was filed, several other pregnant teens in his agency’s care have come forward seeking abortions and been represented by the ACLU. In two cases, the young women were released from custody and able to seek the procedure on their own while in another case the teen, a 17-year-old rape victim, got a court order allowing her to obtain an abortion and the government stopped attempting to block the procedure.
We live in a world where the government is trying to force teenage rape victims to have children while they are in government captivity.
And the Supreme Court doesn’t want to deal with it at all.
Justices throw out lower-court ruling in teen abortion case [SCOTUSblog]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.