WJI's daily reads for Sept. 16, 2021

Wisconsin Examiner: Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul joins challenge to Texas abortion law.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul is one of 24 attorneys general filing an amicus brief Wednesday supporting the U.S. Department of Justice’s challenge of Texas’ extreme new abortion ban that starts at six weeks of pregnancy. The group of AGs seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction of the law, which deputizes citizen vigilante enforcers, making it more difficult to challenge the near-ban on abortions in that state in court.

The brief asserts that the Texas law, which took effect on Sept. 1, bans “nearly all previability abortions within Texas’s borders” as well as violating “nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent affirming the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy before viability.”
The law has drawn additional scrutiny in Wisconsin as Republican gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Kleefisch stated this week that she wants Wisconsin to have a similar law.  “I will sign a heartbeat bill,” Kleefisch told conservative radio host Mark Belling, using the misnomer reference to a heartbeat, which is not present in the embryo that early in a pregnancy.  “I have a long history of being pro-life and I will fight for every human being with a heartbeat.”

Texas Tribune: Migrants left at bus station after their trespassing cases are dismissed.

Slate: The real problems with Justice Amy Coney Barrett's comments about the U.S. Supreme Court go deeper than their silliness.

The court has been so busy being partisan these past few weeks—it functionally ended legal abortion in Texas, reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and struck down the eviction moratorium—that it should have been hard for any of its members to find the time to give fatuous speeches about being nonpartisan. And yet, listening to Supreme Court justices busily instruct us on how to think about Supreme Court Justices seems to have occupied an outsize amount of judicial time this past summer. The terrible optics and annoying sophistry of Barrett’s specific remarks aside, there is real harm suffered when justices—and here Barrett is hardly alone—take it upon themselves to blame the press for things they have brought upon themselves. That, and not the cynicism, was the real problem with Barrett’s Kentucky foray into media criticism.

Axios: Racial equity in the cannabis industry remains elusive.

CNN: Federal judge denies Trump effort to halt E. Jean Carroll's defamation suit against him.

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