Imagine if Madison Cawthorn’s brain worked even half as well as his legs did. That, right there, is the kind of stupidity that’s so overblown and comical that you can only point and laugh at it.
So now McCarthy is threatening telecom companies for cooperating with the Jan6 investigation. The GOP are criminally insane and fucking pathetic.
So the Supreme Court failed to intervene by midnight last night to at least temporarily stop the new Texas heartbeat abortion bill. Just silence. So as of today, a fetus more than 6 weeks old cannot be aborted. But also the law allows other private citizens to intervene with civil action and can be awarded $10k potentially for reporting people “aiding and abetting”. Regardless of your stance on abortion, I’m more curious as to how any of this is enforceable without a gross violation of someone’s HIPAA rights. How does anyone outside of the pregnant woman or maybe the father even know? Unless she is broadcasting her moves everywhere, I don’t see how a 3rd party could find themselves in possession such knowledge to the point where they would want to file suit. Let alone pay an attorney and court fees. One of the proponents of the heartbeat bill even made an anonymous tip website to report patients and doctors. https://prolifewhistleblower.com/ I don’t see how this website doesn’t get absolutely inundated with fake tips rendering it useless. While I think the law is gross and most women don’t even know they are pregnant until almost their 2nd missed period, I still don’t see how this law isn’t anything more than just red meat to the right wing base.
A great way to flip the state blue. They must be so dim down there that they forgot that women also live there. Women who will now resort to aborting their pregnancies the retro way by throwing themselves off a grain elevator,just like the “good old days” they wish still existed. Make something illegal that shouldn’t be, and people will simply find ways around it. That’s why the war on drugs is the biggest wall-to-wall failure in modern society, and why vice cops are the lowest life forms alive.
This really will only affect people who are poor and can’t leave the state easily. You’d be surprised at the amount of women in Texas who have no issue with abortion regs.
Puts the whole "Me Too" movement into perspective.... Yup.....XRay said it. Most of the folks down there can afford birth control, condoms, the day after pill and a healthy chunk of them, an emergency flight "down South" to take care of something like that. This just ensures women who are easy victims and in a cycle of poverty stay that way. I have to imagine this law being so problematic in so many ways it falls apart shortly, if the SC doesn't stop it entirely. But, Texas is gonna Texas, and if that doesn't send a message to the soulless libtards moving there, I dunno what will.
I’m going to guess that these women are not affected in any way, shape or form by this stupid law; and therefore wouldn’t give a shit about anybody else until it happens to them (see: COVID). And they’re probably a majority of pseudo-Christian twerps who, like most of them are only pro-birth and not pro-life whatsoever. If they want all these unwanted babies so much them they should adopt them. If you don’t want fetal cells tested then you should impregnate yourself with it. Go ahead, knock yourself up. And are they still going to ignore the objective fact that there are far too many people on this fucking planet? And the dumber people are, the more kids they have? Sterilize us, already.
The law is so comically unconstitutional it's absurd. The obvious Roe violation aside, it's a fucking tort without a tort. Someone rando in Wisconsin can sue an uber driver for driving someone to a Houston clinic? Completely lawless insanity. The fact that SCOTUS let this stand so they wouldn't have to sign their names to an overturn of Roe is cowardice of the highest order. The tatters of credibility the Roberts court had left are gone at this point.
It’s purely for the cooling effect, not that the law makes any sense in reality. The suing angle is just another “we aren’t banning abortions, just deal with these hoops while the courts figure it out” tactic.
Your mistake is thinking that Republican legislators care about facts or standing. The goal is to induce widespread harassment of anything tangential to abortions. Worth noting that if the complainant (hereafter referred as: the snitch) prevails, they are awarded attorney's fees but if the defendant prevails, they are specifically prohibited from being awarded attorney's fees: $10,000 is the minimum damage someone risks if they get sued under this law and lose.
Cool! They are bringing back witch hunting! I 'cuse you of abortin mah baby! Gimme 10k and a Stetson, hooker!
They're not monsters. There's a provision in there saying you can't sue your own rape victim for aborting your child. ...everyone else is free to sue a rape victim however.
Their base NEEDS fresh meat, x-ray. They're chomping at the bit for 2024, and they can't run the risk of the state going purple (because it AIN'T going blue). A LOT of people in this state aren't too happy with the GQP, so they need all the turnout and voter suppression/ fraud that they can get.
That was my first thought. How could anyone actually know about it? And if they did, they would be violating HIPAA but reporting it. Technically, HIPAA doesn’t apply when someone is reporting a crime to law enforcement, but reporting a random website is really strange and gets muddy quickly. I would imagine SCOTUS will have to rule on this law at some point just because of all of the bizarre components of it aside from the abortion aspect. They only refused to issue an emergency ruling on it. I would imagine part of that rationale is because it already conflicts with a handful is SC precedents so that may factor into their short-term decision here. Who knows?
HIPAA I believe only applies to healthcare workers who might have direct access to a persons protected health information. So by definition, if a nurse or something were to report the abortion, they would be violating HIPAA by default. Also, the new law is not a criminal statute. I believe it just allows for civil liability against someone knowingly terminating a pregnancy that is more than 6 weeks from the last menstrual period. It’s a pretty high bar of proof if you ask me. Some random dipshit would have no way of knowing what someone else is up to. I see a lot of examples out there of Uber drivers being reported and other examples, but again, how would they know?
It depends. Healthcare workers are usually part of a “Covered Entity” under HIPAA. CEs are providers, clearinghouses, and plan providers. But “Business Associates” are also bound by HIPAA, and that is a much wider net of people that are also required to be compliant. That aside, Texas also has a state healthcare privacy law that is actually stricter than HIPAA which casts a wider net on its own.
I also don’t think our overly bloated Court system is eager to get a bunch of frivolous abortion cases clogging the system.