By a 5-3 vote, the US Supreme Court today invalidated two key features of Texas’s H.B. 2. In an opinion by Justice Breyer, the Court invalidated the requirement that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals and the requirement that abortion clinics meet the standards Texas sets for ambulatory surgical centers. Here is a link to the opinion. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_p8k0.pdf
Because the vote was 5-3, Justice Scalia’s participation in the decision would not have affected the outcome.
Justice Thomas’s dissent notes that the decision “exemplifies the Court’s troubling tendency ‘to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.'” He continued: “I write separately to emphasize how today’s decision perpetuates the Court’s habit of applying different rules to different constitutional rights–especially the putative right to abortion.”
Richard M.