The lawsuit challenging mifepristone should have never been heard by any court.
The Supreme Court appeared listless, even bored, during Tuesday’s oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the case asking the courts to ban the abortion drug mifepristone.
Their frustration with the Alliance case is understandable, since they’ve been dealing with it for nearly an entire year. Last April, after two lower courts issued decisions that would have effectively removed mifepristone from the market, the justices voted 7-2 to leave access to mifepristone intact while this case was being appealed.
On Tuesday, it appeared likely that the justices would break down along the exact same lines — with only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito voting to halt access to the drug.
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Based on the justices questions on Tuesday, however, it seems unlikely that the Court will even reach the question of whether the FDA violated its legal obligations. That’s because the second question before the Court is whether any federal judge had jurisdiction to hear this case in the first place.
Nearly all of the justices’ questions on Tuesday focused on this threshold question — a strong sign that the Court is inclined to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds, without even getting into the question of whether the FDA violated the law.
They’re working on fixing that.
It’s about time too. Republican’s weren’t the sole user of the tactic but they’ve surely been abusing the shit out of it since Biden assumed office.
I guarantee you that they will find ways to get to the Fifth Circuit anyway.
I’m sure they will but they won’t be able to get to that specific judge in the 5th who always goes their way. Instead they’ll get a random judge assigned from the pool.
“Court Shopping” will still happen, and it too needs to be fixed, but right now “Judge Shopping” is the biggest problem.