Wisconsin Supreme Court's liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban
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Sheboygan County District Attorney Joel Urmanski, a Republican, defended the ban in court, arguing that the 1849 ban could coexist with the newer abortion restrictions, just as different penalties for the same crime coexist.
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Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled in 2023 that the 1849 ban outlaws feticide — which she defined as the killing of a fetus without the mother's consent — but not consensual abortions. Abortions have been available in the state since that ruling but the state Supreme Court decision gives providers and patients more certainty that abortions will remain legal in Wisconsin.
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Urmanski asked the state Supreme Court to overturn Schlipper's ruling without waiting for a decision from a lower appellate court. It was expected as soon as the justices took the case that they would overturn the ban. Liberals hold a 4-3 majority on the court and one of them, Janet Protasiewicz, openly stated on the campaign trail that she supports abortion rights.
Democratic-backed Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel for an open seat on the court in April, ensuring liberals will maintain their 4-3 edge until at least 2028. Crawford has not been sworn in yet and was not part of Wednesday's ruling. She'll play pivotal role, though, in a separate Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin lawsuit challenging the 1849 ban's constitutionality. The high court decided last year to take that case. It's still pending.
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an hour ago
- Boston Globe
The Supreme Court stripped judges of a powerful tool to fight Trump's autocracy. Congress must give it back.
But now they can't. Based on the Supreme Court's reading of a 1789 law, lower courts can now only take such action on specific cases before them, meaning that even clear-cut violations of the law could continue against those without the wherewithal to go to court. Advertisement Congress can and must correct this mistake. Lawmakers should pass legislation that protects judges' ability to provide robust equitable remedies when people's rights are threatened by legally or constitutionally dubious administration actions. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Now, it's true that there have been problems with universal injunctions, and judges have sometimes misused them. But the court's ruling took a sledgehammer to a system that should have been fixed by Congress with a scalpel. And in the case of Trump, the ruling opens the door for him to strip birthright citizenship from American-born babies, continue whisking migrants to countries foreign to them with little notice and without due process, and engage in other actions that threaten people's rights and freedoms. Advertisement The court's 6-3 ideologically split opinion, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was based on the majority's interpretation of the Judiciary Act of 1789. The justices considered if the statute authorizes broad preliminary injunctions like that issued by Boston-based US District Court Justice Brian Murphy, which paused Trump's executive order to deny birthright citizenship to children born to some migrants. 'The answer is no,' Barrett wrote for the majority. Instead, the court held, challengers of the policy who have standing to bring suit can only obtain such preliminary relief for themselves. '[P]rohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship,' Barrett wrote. 'And extending the injunction to cover everyone similarly situated would not render her relief any more complete.' This is untenable, and will only lead to a cruel game of judicial whack-a-mole that fails to provide adequate protection to those most imperiled by these policies. The onus should not fall on those who are targeted by these policies to fend for themselves. It should fall on the administration to show that it is acting in a lawful way. The court did just the opposite, holding that it is the administration that will likely suffer irreparable harm if courts dare to exercise their authority as a check on the executive. The overuse of universal injunctions has been an issue of increasing bipartisan concern, particularly since the Obama administration. In the last two decades, both the number of executive orders issued and the number of temporary injections blocking them have steadily ballooned. But the number of executive orders Trump has issued in his second term is without historical precedent, even exceeding Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who issued a flurry of edicts in an effort to implement his New Deal agenda. Advertisement And many of Trump's orders are based on strained legal or constitutional arguments, such as the administration's claim that the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship protection only extended to children of enslaved people, that the Alien Enemies Act allows migrants to be deported without due process, or that the Immigration and Nationality Act allows the government to send migrants to countries where they've never been and to which they have no connection. Judges must have the ability to decide when relief extending beyond named plaintiffs is warranted. Should there be limits on that power? Yes, and Congress can include them in its bill. It can also underscore that states can still seek statewide relief from policies they can demonstrate harm all of their residents, and ease the process for class actions to be formed at the earliest stages of litigation to give relief to groups of people who demonstrate a need for protection. Judges handling the flurry of Trump-related litigation need more tools, not fewer. It's lawmakers' duty to give those tools to them. The Supreme Court must also swiftly take up and decide the constitutional and legal questions presented by Trump's orders. The justices could have rejected the Trump administration's erroneously limited reading of the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship protections, but opted instead to leave that question for another day. But given the risks of the order, there is no time like the present. And in the meantime, federal judges must do all they can to help challengers who will be harmed by Trump's policies. The Supreme Court did not tie judges' hands completely when it comes to equitable relief. Quick certification of class actions and swiftly granting relief to states that demonstrate the peril to their residents are among the arrows still in judges' quivers. They must use them. Advertisement We are not as bound or doomed by history as the Supreme Court's justices believe. The public needs to demand that members of the legislative and judiciary branches stand up and reclaim their powers to check a president who believes he is above the law and the Constitution. Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us
2 hours ago
US completes deportation of 8 men to South Sudan after weeks of legal wrangling
WASHINGTON -- Eight men deported from the United States in May and held under guard for weeks at an American military base in the African nation of Djibouti while their legal challenges played out in court have now reached the Trump administration's intended destination, war-torn South Sudan, a country the State Department advises against travel to due to 'crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.' The immigrants from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan arrived in South Sudan on Friday after a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate them in a case that had gone to the Supreme Court, which had permitted their removal from the U.S. Administration officials said the men had been convicted of violent crimes in the U.S. 'This was a win for the rule of law, safety and security of the American people,' said Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin in a statement Saturday announcing the men's arrival in South Sudan, a chaotic country in danger once more of collapsing into civil war. The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the transfer of the men who had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan. That meant that the South Sudan transfer could be completed after the flight was detoured to a base in Djibouti, where they men were held in a converted shipping container. The flight was detoured after a federal judge found the administration had violated his order by failing to allow the men a chance to challenge the removal. The court's conservative majority had ruled in June that immigration officials could quickly deport people to third countries. The majority halted an order that had allowed immigrants to challenge any removals to countries outside their homeland where they could be in danger. A flurry of court hearings on Independence Day resulted a temporary hold on the deportations while a judge evaluated a last-ditch appeal by the men's before the judge decided he was powerless to halt their removals and that the person best positioned to rule on the request was a Boston judge whose rulings led to the initial halt of the administration's effort to begin deportations to South Sudan. By Friday evening, that judge had issued a brief ruling concluding the Supreme Court had tied his hands. The men had final orders of removal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said. Authorities have reached agreements with other countries to house immigrants if authorities cannot quickly send them back to their homelands.
2 hours ago
Trump branded, browbeat and prevailed. But his big bill may come at a political cost
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama had the Affordable Care Act. Joe Biden had the Inflation Reduction Act. President Donald Trump will have the tax cuts. All were hailed in the moment and became ripe political targets in campaigns that followed. In Trump's case, the tax cuts may almost become lost in the debates over other parts of the multitrillion-dollar bill that Democrats say will force poor Americans off their health care and overturn a decade or more of energy policy. Through persuasion and browbeating, Trump forced nearly all congressional Republicans to line up behind his marquee legislation despite some of its unpalatable pieces. He followed the playbook that had marked his life in business before politics. He focused on branding — labeling the legislation the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' — then relentlessly pushed to strong-arm it through Congress, solely on the votes of Republicans. But Trump's victory will soon be tested during the 2026 midterm elections where Democrats plan to run on a durable theme: that the Republican president favors the rich on tax cuts over poorer people who will lose their health care. Trump and Republicans argue that those who deserve coverage will retain it. Nonpartisan analysts, however, project significant increases to the number of uninsured. Meanwhile, the GOP's promise that the bill will turbocharge the economy will be tested at a time of uncertainty and trade turmoil. Trump has tried to counter the notion of favoring the rich with provisions that would reduce the taxes for people paid in tips and receiving overtime pay, two kinds of earners who represent a small share of the workforce. Extending the tax cuts from Trump's first term that were set to expire if Congress failed to act meant he could also argue that millions of people would avoid a tax increase. To enact that and other expensive priorities, Republicans made steep cuts to Medicaid that ultimately belied Trump's promise that those on government entitlement programs 'won't be affected.' 'The biggest thing is, he's answering the call of the forgotten people. That's why his No. 1 request was the no tax on tips, the no tax on overtime, tax relief for seniors,' said Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. 'I think that's going to be the big impact.' Presidents have seen their signature legislative accomplishments unraveled by their successors or become a significant political liability for their party in subsequent elections. A central case for Biden's reelection was that the public would reward the Democrat for his legislative accomplishments. That never bore fruit as he struggled to improve his poll numbers driven down by concerns about his age and stubborn inflation. Since taking office in January, Trump has acted to gut tax breaks meant to boost clean energy initiatives that were part of Biden's landmark health care-and-climate bill. Obama's health overhaul, which the Democrat signed into law in March 2010, led to a political bloodbath in the midterms that fall. Its popularity only became potent when Republicans tried to repeal it in 2017. Whatever political boost Trump may have gotten from his first-term tax cuts in 2017 did not help him in the 2018 midterms, when Democrats regained control of the House, or in 2020 when he lost to Biden. 'I don't think there's much if any evidence from recent or even not-so-recent history of the president's party passing a big one-party bill and getting rewarded for it,' said Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst with the nonpartisan University of Virginia's Center for Politics. Democrats hope they can translate their policy losses into political gains. During an Oval Office appearance in January, Trump pledged he would 'love and cherish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.' 'We're not going to do anything with that, other than if we can find some abuse or waste, we'll do something,' Trump said. 'But the people won't be affected. It will only be more effective and better.' That promise is far removed from what Trump and the Republican Party ultimately chose to do, paring back not only Medicaid but also food assistance for the poor to make the math work on their sweeping bill. It would force 11.8 million more people to become uninsured by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office, whose estimates the GOP has dismissed. 'In Trump's first term, Democrats in Congress prevented bad outcomes. They didn't repeal the (Affordable Care Act), and we did COVID relief together. This time is different,' said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. 'Hospitals will close, people will die, the cost of electricity will go up, and people will go without food.' Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., repeatedly argued the legislation would lead to drastic coverage losses in his home state and others, leaving them vulnerable to political attacks similar to what Democrats faced after they enacted 'Obamacare.' With his warnings unheeded, Tillis announced he would not run for reelection, after he opposed advancing the bill and enduring Trump's criticism. 'If there is a political dimension to this, it is the extraordinary impact that you're going to have in states like California, blue states with red districts,' Tillis said. "The narrative is going to be overwhelmingly negative in states like California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey.' Even Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who eventually became the decisive vote in the Senate that ensured the bill's passage, said the legislation needed more work and she urged the House to revise it. Lawmakers there did not. Early polling suggests that Trump's bill is deeply unpopular, including among independents and a healthy share of Republicans. White House officials said their own research does not reflect that. So far, it's only Republicans celebrating the victory. That seems OK with the president. In a speech in Iowa after the bill passed, he said Democrats only opposed it because they 'hated Trump.' That didn't bother him, he said, 'because I hate them, too.'
