Distressingly, the opinion leaves breadcrumbs for [anti-abortion] activists to follow next time—and sets up some roadblocks to keep progressive activists out. For example, Kavanaugh writes that plaintiffs who aren’t actually affected by a given regulation, like the AHM, can still “thread the causation needle” if they show that the parties who are regulated “will likely react in predictable ways that in turn will likely injure the plaintiffs.” The Court also clarified that an organization does not have standing merely if it “diverts its resources in response to a defendant’s actions.”
Why does this matter? The diversion-of-resources argument comes from a landmark 1982 case called Havens Realty Corporation v. Coleman, in which a fair housing organization sought to sue an apartment complex for its refusal to rent apartments to Black “testers”—people who posed as potential renters to test compliance with the law. The Court ruled in Havens Realty that the organization, although it wasn’t actually trying to rent apartments, nonetheless had standing to sue, in part because the realty company’s actions forced the organization to use its limited resources to ferret out illegal discrimination.
Kavanaugh’s opinion declines to extend standing to the AHM under Havens Realty. But he also goes out of his way to call Havens Realty an “unusual case” that the Court “has been careful not to extend…beyond its context.” If this language signals that the Court is looking skeptically at future diversion-of-resources claims, that could be bad news for civil rights groups trying to use the courts to enforce the law.
It’s frustrating watching a handful of old men doom us all. This country is fucked and the writing is on the wall.
Kavanaugh isn’t old. Barrett isn’t a man. Trying to paint this as a generational or patriarchy thing is a mistake: the harmful ideas spread to young people (especially with shit like PraegarU in schools), so the problem will not go away on its own just by waiting for old people to die.
This one definitely feels like the only thing they could all agree on was that the people who brought the case had no business doing so.
I have mixed feelings because an explicit ruling that the FDA gets to make these decisions would have been more resoundingly good. But also that would have meant that they accepted that it was even a case the people who brought the case had reason to bring, which would have been pretty cruddy.
Don’t love that they pointed out the path to having standing, or that they were gently closing it (good), but that it’s gonna impact civil rights complaints (bad).
At least the basic outcome of continued access is something I can be happy with.
my guess is they recognize its an election year and will hop on to support this unpopular law chsnge next time. I don’t know why so many people keep getting tricked by the court that they think the court will uphold any kind of legal standard or consistency. They are a partisan court; they overturned roe after biden won last time rather than while trump was still on the ballot.
Yay, can’t wait to have to protest this one
