The ludicrous, according to legal experts, decision by US District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas, directing the FDA to restrict access to abortion drug mifepristone, might appear to have the potential to give independents and moderate conservative voters another reason to disregard far-right conservative candidates in upcoming elections. and the contradictory decision by Judge Thomas Rice in Washington (State), which directed the FDA to not change its approach to the drug, does little to mitigate any such anger.
But today SCOTUS, receiving an emergency appeal from the Biden Administration, may be moving, to continue the analogy, to throw this hand grenade in the river.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday extended a hold on a lower court ruling that would have imposed restrictions on access to an abortion drug, a temporary move meant to give the justices more time to consider the issue.
Alito said the order is stayed until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday. He also asked plaintiffs to respond on or before noon ET Tuesday.
The case is the most important abortion-related dispute to reach the high court since the justices overturned Roe v. Wade last term. It centers on the scope of the US Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate a drug that is used in the majority of abortions today in states that still allow the procedure.
Alito issued a so-called administrative stay on the ruling while the high court considers an emergency appeal filed by the Biden administration and a manufacturer of the drug, mifepristone. The move does not reflect the final disposition of the case. [CNN/Politics]
What I’ve been reading suggests that the issue, faux or not, is whether or not the safety protocols were properly followed twenty years ago when the drug was introduced, and the idea that a federal judge can negate the judgment of the FDA, especially in the face of an excellent safety record, is appalling to those experts.
I suspect SCOTUS‘ conservative wing is looking to toss out the decision banning the drug on the grounds that a Federal judge is ill-suited for contradicting the judgment of trained and experienced drug safety experts.
And that’s the crux on which political strategists will fight the war. Conservative message shapers will try to convince independents that this is all that happened; their liberal counterparts will attempt to counter that an attempt to outlaw an abortion procedure is an attack on abortion access.
They might not be wrong.
But as conservative message makers have generally proven more effective than their opponents, it’s worth remembering that liberal message shapers labor at a disadvantage, if they’re smart, and that’s to avoid lying with more care than the conservative message shapers. I believe that, without that disadvantage, the conservatives’ message will win out.
Which is not to suggest that Republicans will be winning the Senate or the Presidency in 2024, or even retaining the House. Like forecasting the weather, in politics what happened before is likely to happen again. That’s what keeps incumbents in office. And the Republicans have a solid history of blundering foolishness, the mark of fourth-raters, in 2018, 2020, and 2022; the off-year election of 2021 is an exception, but so small that it’s only important in that it is not yet clear that the Democrats have figured out how they lost so badly in the State of Virginia.
The Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe, has incredibly long shirt tails, no matter how much conservatives, trying to savor their bitter, bitter victory in Dobbs, tut-tut and predict it’ll fade. They remain frantic to ignore the existential dangers of pregnancy, not to mention situations of exceptional injustice, and how that negates the feeble fantasy that a fetus is a person. In the end, it may be difficult to distinguish the effects of the Dobbs decision from whatever SCOTUS decides to do here.
But I think that, when elections come, this may not prove to be a major factor, assuming SCOTUS throws out Kacsmaryk’s decision.
