, the Department of Justice has still not issued any public guidance for officials in states where some of those laws are mutually contradictory.
“I urge the people of our country to know the power that they have to have an impact on how the laws of their state are enforced by paying attention to who their attorney general is and where they stand on this important issue,” Harris said ahead of the meeting. As the top law enforcement officials in their state, Harris said, attorneys general have the responsibility to “[protect] reproductive rights and freedoms.
McQuade’s hypothetical has already begun to play out ahead of the Supreme Court ruling. After the leaked draft opinion was published, Michigan’s attorney general vowed not to enforce the state’s abortion ban originally signed into law in 1931, which criminalizes administering an abortion as a felony, including in cases of rape and incest.
The most immediate risk is at the local level, Murray said, where county prosecutors bring the vast majority of a state’s criminal cases and have wide discretion over which ones to pursue. Lawsuits within the state seeking to clarify whether or not Wisconsin’s criminal abortion ban is still viable could take months—with zero legal certainty in the meantime.
But the certainty of interstate conflict over abortion means that the Department of Justice will need to weigh in nearly immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision—and likely in the midst of the constitutional equivalent of a five-alarm wildfire.
But thanks for making women chattel.
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