GOP Contempt for Rule of Law Exposed

The following interesting identification appears in a Vox story about a ruling against a particularly odious anti-abortion law in Texas:

With SB 8, Texas legislators not only passed a restrictive abortion ban but they empowered ordinary Texans to interpret and prosecute the ban. That compounds the risk for physicians who provide abortion care, in some sense, because they don't know the conditions under which they can do so -- or who might bring a $10,000 lawsuit against them for doing their jobs. [bold added]

This brings to my mind the following quote by Ayn Rand regarding how truly vile and dangerous such vague laws are:

Image by Katie Moum, via Unsplash, license.

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear. [bold added]

While we aren't living under a dictatorship, Rand's point stands; and it is interesting to note how Republican officials have responded to attempts by physicians to achieve clarity on what procedures they can perform:

"Physicians have been begging for guidance [...] since SB 8 went into effect," Molly Duane, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox in an interview. "No one from the state has provided any guidance, and in fact the only thing the attorney general's office has done is file their own lawsuit challenging some guidance from Health and Human Services -- the federal department that oversees the practice of medicine -- saying that a federal statute called EMTALA which allows abortion care and any other care in an emergency, that that shouldn't apply in Texas."

Observe that, when push comes to shove, if there is a choice between achieving something actually good that they have a reputation for favoring (e.g., law and order), vs. banning abortion, banning abortion wins.

The article is too kind to note that Republican lawmakers might have been grandstanding in the good ole days of Roe, when they could pass whatever laws they wanted without having to worry about the unpopular consequences of enforcing them.

That might well be true. But look at how they are behaving now, when the opportunity to make their own laws clearer presents itself.

-- CAV