Texas gets bitch slapped on abortion!

[TheRealJoeFish]

For anyone interested, here's a summary of the Supreme Court's holding:

Majority Opinion (Breyer, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan):

1. This case is not barred by res judicata. Res Judicata basically means "if you lose in a court case, you can't bring the very same claim again." People had tried to block this law from going into effect, but it was enacted anyway. The Supreme Court said that challenging the law after it's been enacted is not "the very same claim" as the attempt to block the law beforehand, so this was a valid legal case. This is mainly because, before the law goes into effect, you don't have a good sense of how clinics and access to abortions will be affected, whereas after you can point to concrete closures and obstacles.

2. Both parts of the law - that all abortion doctors needed admitting privileges and that all abortion centers meet the requirements of a "surgical center" under Texas law - are "an undue burden on abortion access and thus violate the Constitution." In particular,
a) any obstacle presented by a law (such as the one at issue) must be weighed against the medical benefits provided by that obstacle;
b) the evidence showed that there was no medical benefit to the admissions privilege requirement (especially compared to the previous law, "which required providers to have a 'working arrangement' with doctors who had admitting privileges); and
c) the requirement that all abortion centers meet "surgical center" standards provides no benefit that could arise in the context of an abortion and "that abortions taking place in abortion facilities are safer than common procedures that occur in outside clinics not subject to Texas's surgical-center requirements.
d) Additionally, Texas did not waive any of the requirements for any abortion centers, as it had for other non-hospital surgical centers.
e) "The [trial] court found that it 'strained credulity' to think that the seven or eight abortion facilities [left in Texas] would be able to meet the demand" in the state.

In his dissent, Thomas says that the "decision [in this case] exemplifies the Court's troubling tendency 'to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.'" (That's his dear departed buddy Scalia he's quoting there.)

In the dissent that focuses on actual law, Alito (joined by Thomas and Roberts) argues that this case should indeed have been barred by the previous case that tried (and failed) to stop the law before it was enacted.