— Roe v Wade is dead and, along with it, are equal rights for women in Texas. For over 50 years, Republicans have fought the Equal Rights Amendment and with their new vigilantism abortion legislation they're tightening the screws on the rights to privacy, equal protection and bodily autonomy women still had. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: "This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry. ... [The] Court has rewarded the State's effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the Court's precedents, through procedural entanglements of the State's own creation. The Court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law." The question now, as I posited in Thursday's Daily Rant, is whether the voters of Texas will reward or punish that state's GOP (and, indeed, Republicans across the country) for this.

Read more at HartmannReport.com.

-Thom