https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65356390 US Supreme Court preserves abortion drug access Published Just now The US Supreme Court has preserved access to a commonly used abortion pill, ruling the drug can remain available while a legal case continues. In a split decision, it also rejected restrictions on mifepristone implemented by a lower court, essentially maintaining the status quo. The future of the drug was questioned after a Texas judge sought to invalidate its long-standing approval. The case could have wide-ranging implications for abortion access. Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regiment that now accounts for more than half of abortions in the US. It has been used by more than five million women in the country to safely end their pregnancies. It was first approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more than 20 years ago after four years of review. The FDA placed mifepristone in a select category of just 60 drugs that is regulated under a system of extra restrictions, which are repeatedly re-evaluated. Its safety and effectiveness is supported by mainstream medical organisations including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists (ACOG) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Given how over reaching and strained logic was in the previous ruling was I expected this to be the ruling. That said with this court you can’t always tell. My guess is that Roberts and possibly Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were in the majority while Alito, Thomas and Barrett were for keeping the ban.
Split? The Supreme Court needs to be disbanded or expanded with term limits the fact this was a split and not unanimous is concerning maybe they can leave womejs health alone and focus on trying to get that ****ing laptop and it’s charged in order!
Turley: The Court used the “shadow docket” (used for procedural decisions) to dispense with the case. It did not include a majority decision or list the justices voting to restore the availability of the drug. However, Thomas and Alito did publish a dissenting opinion by Alito that lashed out at their colleagues not only for their decision but the use of the shadow docket for this purpose. Justice Alito noted that the decision of the Court was unnecessary because the FDA could have still made the drug available pending appeal. Thus, the FDA could have used its enforcement discretion to allow Danco to continue distributing mifepristone pending final resolution in the case. As such, Alito argued that “the applicants are not entitled to a stay because they have not shown that they are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the interim.” The discussion of the use of the shadow docket was interesting for a number of reasons. First, Alito called out three colleagues by referring to past objections from Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Amy Coney Barrett in the use of the shadow docket. The referral to the justices was a peevish moment for the Court since Justice Alito was previously criticized for the use of the shadow docket to make major rulings. He used this occasion to level the same objection and suggest a degree of hypocrisy in the majority. The term “shadow docket” is often credited to University of Chicago law professor William Baude who used it to describe the summary decisions in a law review article.in 2015. He noted that the Court was issuing “a number of noteworthy rulings which merit more scrutiny than they have gotten. In important cases, it granted stays and injunctions that were both debatable and mysterious.” The shadow docket often handles emergency requests, but the docket is meant to resolve largely procedural, not substantive questions. Alito noted that he has defended the use of the docket in the past only now to find critics on the Court using the docket for the same purpose. Indeed, he leads off the opinion with that shot across the bow of his three colleagues. He cited Justice Kagan for a dissenting opinion in 2022 (Merrill v. Milligan) in which she criticized as stay “based on the scanty review this Court gives matters on its shadow docket.” He noted Kagan also criticized another stay in 2021 (Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson) in a dissent objecting that the order was “emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-docket decisionmaking— which every day becomes more unreasoned.” Likewise, he noted that Justice Sotomayor objected in 2019 (Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant) to the use of the docket to “shortcut” the process of review. Finally, he noted that Justice Barrett in 2021 (Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant) objected that the Court should not act “on a short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument” in a case that is “first to address the questions presented.” While he did not mention commentary, the objections of these three justices were supported by liberal pundits and press who railed against the use of the shadow docket in such cases. Critics slammed the conservatives for using the shadow docket as more evidence of “a wildly undemocratic institution” and makes decisions “in the middle of the night” with “zero transparency or explanation, takes it to a whole other level.” Some of those critics are now applaud this use of the docket. Alito could not resist the irony of the moment and noted “I did not agree with these criticisms at the time, but if they were warranted in the cases in which they were made, they are emphatically true here.” I expect the justices would respond that this order preserves the status quo rather than renders a major change in the existing precedent or practices. Chief Justice John Roberts also criticized the use of the shadow docket in 2022 when the Court voted 5-4 to restore a Trump-era rule limiting states’ and Native American tribes’ power over large energy projects. However, that decision effectively overturned nearly 50-year-old interpretations of the Clean Water Act. He joined a dissent by Kagan in Louisiana v. American Rivers that said “renders the Court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all” but “another place for merits determinations — except made without full briefing and argument.” I think that this use of the shadow docket was distinguishable and more defensible since it restored the status quo ante in the area. https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/...ity-of-abortion-pill-in-shadow-docket-ruling/ more at the link
The Supreme Court's Mifepristone Stay https://reason.com/volokh/2023/04/22/the-supreme-courts-mifepristone-stay/ excerpt: On the merits, I think Justice Alito makes some good points and some less good ones. I think he is right that in any individual case, the existence of two conflicting district court orders can be the result of gamesmanship, whether by the courts or the parties, and so it is probably a mistake to let that gamesmanship force the Supreme Court's hand. (Of course, taking a broader view, the Court might want to think about whether it has adopted or tolerated legal rules that make those conflicts and games more prevalent, such as overbroad injunctions and vacatur in the administrative law context . . . .) But as to irreparable injury, the Justices have repeatedly invoked a principle that whenever the government is enjoined from enforcing its policies, it has suffered irreparable injury. (In fact, I wrote about this principle in The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket and it is the best explanation for many of the emergency orders sought and received by the Solicitor General during the Trump administration.) If that principle does not exist or does not apply any more, I am not sure why. As for Justice Alito's more meta-level critique about criticisms of the so-called shadow docket, again I think he both makes a good point and misses some others. He is right that there are lay and folk complaints about the shadow docket that are inconsistent or miss the point (perhaps even opportunistic complaints by other Justices as well). Often it is a bad idea for the Supreme Court to intervene too often and too quickly outside the more regular course of its business—but sometimes it should, and when those times are depends on the facts and the merits, making it difficult or even impossible to prescribe truly neutral principles for the shadow docket. That is not a reason to abolish the shadow docket. But that also does not mean that we should accept that shadow docket decisions will be arbitrary, or worse, systematically skewed. The more serious concern about the shadow docket, however, is that these are not the circumstances in which the Court does its best work. These are also not the circumstances in which the Court puts its best face forward. Justice Alito's failure to grapple with the governmental irreparable injury presumption is one example. Similarly, the point he raises about conflicting injunctions, government gamesmanship of injunctions, etc., is a complicated and important one. Indeed it is so complicated that the Court had to DIG the case it had about this issue last term (Arizona v. San Francisco, the concurrence to which Alito cites). A vote on whether or not to grant a stay pending appeal to the Solicitor General, with one week's consideration, does not seem like the best place to resolve them. And the fact that those principles are so unclear is itself an artifact of the shadow docket. For that reason, I think the Court was wise to simply preserve the status quo and allow the case to proceed in the more regular course of business, where they can give it their best attention when the time comes. more at the link
Just a delay before the inevitability. “With Friday's ruling, the mifepristone case now returns to the lower 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. It is likely that the case will come before the Supreme Court once again, setting up the most significant ruling on the issue of abortion since Roe was overturned.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/22/alito-mifepristone-supreme-court-abortion/ Alito’s dissent shouldn’t be ignored, for it perfectly encapsulates the degree to which he’s become “unmoored from reason,” as legal scholar Norman Eisen tells me. The opinion is so lacking in judicial reason and tone that Supreme Court advocates and constitutional experts with whom I spoke were practically slack-jawed. They cite a batch of objectionable arguments and remarks in his dissent. First, Alito’s dissent begins with an extended, bitter and unnecessary rant about the shadow docket (the use of emergency rulings that have major policy consequences without the benefit of full briefing). He has railed at critics before, but now he cannot restrain himself from venting in an actual opinion. He goes on at length to recall the accusations, choosing to single out a warning against overuse of the motions docket from none other than Justice Amy Coney Barrett. (That alliance might be on the rocks.) It’s entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand and, as with so much of Alito’s writing, utterly intemperate. But it gets much worse. Alito has the temerity to assert that there would be no irreparable injury in denying the stay because “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts” — by whom? where does this standard come from? — “that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections.” This unprecedented attack on the government’s obedience to court rulings — based on nothing — is out of order. There is zero evidence — stray pundits and legislative backbenchers don’t count — that the Biden administration would essentially put itself in contempt of court. Moreover, Alito’s dissent demonstrates that he does not care one whit about the women affected if the drug were suddenly made unavailable. (At least he’s consistent; he also utterly ignored the interests of women in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, giving them no weight in contrast to the seemingly inviolate interest of states in commandeering women’s reproductive choices.) Their irreparable harm doesn’t register. Next, consider Alito’s hypocrisy in accusing the government of “leveraging” (i.e., judge shopping) by going to a court in the 9th Circuit to obtain a contrary opinion, thereby setting up a conflict between circuits. It takes some nerve to make that accusation, given how the case began when antiabortion activists searched out a single-district division in Amarillo, Tex., where they were certain to draw a judge who embraces their cause. Finally, Alito dishonestly asserts that a stay isn’t needed because this will all get decided quickly at the 5th Circuit or at the Supreme Court — probably in the government’s favor. (“Because the applicants’ Fifth Circuit appeal has been put on a fast track, with oral argument scheduled to take place in 26 days, there is reason to believe that they would get the relief they now seek — from either the Court of Appeals or this Court — in the near future if their arguments on the merits are persuasive.”) First, even if it is a matter of days or weeks, women denied the medication will of course be harmed. (See above: Women’s interests don’t count.) Second, any appeal to the Supreme Court and resolution on the merits will take months and months. This simply will not be all wrapped up, as he suggests, “in the near future.” Third, the far-right 5th Circuit is almost certain to rule against the government, so relief will not be forthcoming from that court. And finally, Alito already (prematurely and utterly improperly) seems to tell us that the Supreme Court is going to toss the case. We can only surmise that his fellow justices left him under no illusion that this case will succeed as a backdoor to a national ban on medical abortions. Looking at the entirety of Alito’s dissent, constitutional scholar Leah Litman reels off the outrages, including the plaintiffs’ sprint to Amarillo, the “whataboutisms” in the shadow docket and the “willful blindness to the effects of the Fifth Circuit ruling.” She adds, “It reads like a Fox News grandpa’s rant.” She points to the irony that the author of Dobbs, which stressed the role of states and elected branches, now is “most eager to support federal courts ordering bans on medication abortion protocols.” “There is some real chutzpah,” she adds. It’s interesting that this judicial travesty came after the delay in releasing the decision (originally due Wednesday), possibly as a courtesy to Alito from his colleagues. Next time, for the sake of the court, the rule of law and even Alito, the court might not give him the time he needs to embarrass himself.
A drug that is approved by the FDA does not freaking need old men and women to decide if the usage of its is legal or not. Our founding fathers did not have the foresight in this type of decision. There's literally no point to the fda if the court can just ignore the time and process to approve the drug and reject a usage of a drug everytime they get influenced by political/religious factors.
Alito and Thomas are against abortion. They make themselves look the fool when they try and justify their opinion with legal arguments.
Federal judge revives legal effort to limit access to abortion pill Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, allowed three states to go forward with a lawsuit that seeks to change how mifepristone is used. A decision by a federal judge last week is reviving the effort to limit access to mifepristone, opening a fresh round of litigation over a widely used drug that has grown in importance since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion nearly three years ago. U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas ruled Thursday that three states — Missouri, Kansas and Idaho — can move forward with a lawsuit that seeks to change the way the drug is prescribed and used. Kacsmaryk, who was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2019, has a history of strong antiabortion views, The Washington Post reported in 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/21/mifepristone-abortion-pill-lawsuit/ Liberal states should do the same thing with guns and firearm paraphernalia...
