President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he is directing his administration to look into ways the federal government can fight Texas’s pro-life law limiting abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected.
Yet again, as it did by attempting to renew an unconstitutional eviction moratorium, the administration appeared ready to flout the judgment of the US Supreme Court in the process of protecting its partisan agenda.
In a statement, Biden called the law “bizarre” and slammed the Supreme Court for declining an emergency request to block it on Tuesday.
The court’s 5–4 ruling, which was based on the defendants’ failure to prove legal standing, is an “unprecedented assault” on women’s rights that must be met with a federal response, Biden claimed.
“By allowing a law to go into effect that empowers private citizens in Texas to sue health care providers, family members supporting a woman exercising her right to choose after six weeks, or even a friend who drives her to a hospital or clinic, it unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts,” Biden said.
Biden then signaled his administration would take unilateral action against Texas.
The Gender Policy Council and White House Counsel will begin “a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision,” he said.
Biden said he would further tap the Health and Human Services Department and the Justice Department “to see … what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”
The White House also called on Congress to codify the controversial Roe v. Wade decision—long upheld by the Left as an abortion “right” despite its having never been conferred legislatively.
The Supreme Court’s majority decision in dismissing the case did not address the constitutionality of Texas’s law, which empowers private individuals rather than state officials to enforce abortion restrictions.
Instead, the court determined that the abortion providers bringing the suit against the law did not have legal standing since the law had not yet been enforced.
“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit,” the justices wrote.
“In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts,” they wrote.
