[U: Looks Bad, For Texas.] In About An Hour, The Supremes Will Hear Texas SB-8 Arguments...

Update -- I listened to all three hours -- and I think Texas loses here. End update.

It's been almost a half century. [Listen here.]

And still, certain people (in Texas) refuse to accept the settled law of the land. So, using an ultra-conservative but ill-informed lawyer, Texas passed a law to make a procedural mess so complex and disgusting (by authorizing private vigilantes -- like the idiot at right), most abortion providers (Texas hoped) would simply close rather than duke it out. I expect that gambit will fail, since it prevents the federal courts from saying what is -- and is not-- the law.

Starting today, we should get the sense that even Chief Justice Roberts feels this is well-beyond the pale. [The Supremes did enjoin local officials in Kentucky from thwarting the right of people to get marriage licenses to marry anyone they love, just three terms ago -- so I expect the same, here.]

Here is Merrick Garland's reply brief, and a bit:

. . .S.B. 8 is an affront to this Court’s constitutionally assigned role as the final arbiter of the rights the Constitution secures to the people of this Nation. Rather than forthrightly advocating for its preferred constitutional rule, Texas has nullified a right long recognized by this Court and attempted to prevent judicial review through the mechanisms Congress and this Court have deemed vital to protecting constitutional rights. That attack on the supremacy of federal law is why the United States has authority to bring this suit.

Texas’s assertion that this Court is powerless to stop the State’s ongoing nullification rests on a series of formalisms. The State says that S.B. 8’s unprecedented enforcement actions must be treated like ordinary private tort suits. It declares that it cannot be sued or enjoined because it claims to have no responsibility for the actions of the S.B. 8 plaintiffs it has empowered and incentivized to enforce its unconstitutional law. . . .

To be sure, no State has ever attacked the supremacy of federal law through this mechanism before. But the novelty of Texas’s unprecedented scheme does not render the federal courts powerless to redress the State’s ongoing violation of the Constitution. . . .

The Court has repeatedly reaffirmed a woman’s right “to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State.” Planned Parenthood of Se. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 846 (1992). In direct contravention of those precedents, S.B. 8 “prohibit[s]” abortion months before viability. . . . And the law has had its intended effect: S.B. 8 has eliminated access to abortions after six weeks of pregnancy throughout the State, nullifying a constitutional right. . . .

I expect Texas will lose, and even Roberts and Gorsuch will say this is an affront to the rule of law, not men. Onward, grinning. Just three days now to go. . . .

नमस्ते