Yesterday's Supreme Court hearing was on the insultingly dumb Texas law requiring family planning clinics where abortions are performed to meet rigid standards that virtually no other medical clinic where outpatient procedures are done must meet. The three women justices kicked so much ass that asses miles away felt it. Justices Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, along with liberal male Justice Breyer, were all over Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller, taking apart the absurdity of his argument that the closure of all but 10 clinics in the entirety of Texas wasn't an "undue burden" on the women of the huge fucking state.
Of course, back on the conservative side, Clarence Thomas didn't say a goddamned thing, having gone back into a decade-long hibernation, like a particularly dumb and cruel cicada. Anthony Kennedy was at his weaselly peak in figuring out how not to make a decision. And John Roberts attempted to undo the arguments of clinics' attorney Stephanie Toti. The ghost of Antonin Scalia was screaming from Hell.
But the king dickhead of the day was Samuel Alito, the bespectacled worm of the court. Alito took it upon himself to try to get Toti to admit that the clinics didn't close because of the law. This mattered to him more than the lives of the women or the distance they had to travel or the money they had to spend or anything else, even though he was utterly fucking wrong:
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, there is very little specific evidence in the record in this case with respect to why any particular clinic closed. Basically, your argument is that the law took effect, and after that point, there was a decrease in the number of clinics...As to how many, of the total that you claim closed, do you have direct evidence about the reason for the closure?
MS. TOTI: Well, 11 of them, Your Honor, closed on the day that the admitting privileges took effect.
JUSTICE ALITO: Yeah. And as to how many...how many are you claiming total closed as a result of the law?
MS. TOTI: To...to date, roughly 20 clinics have closed.
JUSTICE ALITO: And of the 20, how...as to how many do you have direct evidence?
MS. TOTI: I...approximately 12, Your Honor, direct evidence.
JUSTICE ALITO: Because if...if you go through this now we're not talking about a huge number of facilities.
A few minutes later, Justice Kagan punched Alito right in the nutsack when she said, "Is it right that in the two-week period that the ASC requirement was in effect, that over a dozen facilities shut their doors, and then when that was stayed, when that was lifted, they reopened again immediately?" Toti said that was true. Kagan then put mighty fist to tiny balls as she concluded, "It's almost like the perfect controlled experiment as to the effect of the law, isn’t it? It’s like you put the law into effect, 12 clinics closed. You take the law out of effect, they reopen?"
Who knows how this will go at this point. But, obviously, there could be a law called "Keep That Fuckin' Baby, Whore of Babylon" and Alito would justify it somehow.
