The Trump Justice Department has asked a federal district judge in Amarillo, Texas, to throw out an abortion pill case filed by the Attorneys General of Idaho, Missouri and Kansas. Federal lawyers correctly point out that the suit was filed too late, that it was filed in the wrong place and that the three states do not have standing, that is, the right to sue. Anyone with a basic understanding of the law would have known that a suit with just one of those major infirmities would not survive even casual scrutiny. Aside from all of that, the case is completely without merit–no beef in their 199-page complaint.
The original lawsuit was filed in 2022 by a group of doctors who claimed the pill, mifepristone, was dangerous to women seeking early termination of their pregnancies. As matters progressed, it was revealed that those doctors had never prescribed the drug and their so-called scientific evidence was badly flawed. Nevertheless, the district judge, a long-time abortion opponent, ruled that the drug had to be taken off of the market.
At that point Raul Labrador and the other two AGs sought to intervene in the case. They wanted to ban mifepristone, but also another medication, misoprostol, which has been safely used for a variety of purposes for decades. The original case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The three states asked to join in the appeal but their request was denied. The Supreme Court decided last June that the group of doctors did not have standing to bring the suit. The case was sent back to the Texas judge for disposal.
Rather than accept a well-deserved defeat, Labrador and the other two AGs tried to resuscitate the case last October. That is when they asked for permission to file their 199-page complaint. That complaint dropped the misoprostol issue but doubled down on challenging the imagined dangers posed by mifepristone. They did not seek a total ban of mifepristone. Rather, they targeted rules the Food and Drug Administration adopted in 2016, during Trump’s first term, to make it more readily available.
Although the new complaint was substantial in length, it failed to establish that any of the three states had standing to sue. The AGs needed to show that their state suffered a concrete injury from the 2016 rules in order to establish standing. Labrador’s injury claim was that the eased rules made mifepristone more available to internet-savvy younger women, which would result in fewer Idaho births, which would result in a “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds.” The Trump lawyers were seemingly unimpressed with that flimsy standing argument.
The federal lawyers also pointed out that Texas was not the proper place, or venue, for the suit. Venue for a suit exists in a location where some of the operative facts take place. A third fatal flaw raised by the Trump lawyers is that the suit was filed too late because any challenge to the 2016 rules had to be brought within 6 years.
The Justice Department’s motion to toss the lawsuit did not get into the merits of the case, but the lengthy complaint contained absolutely no competent evidence that mifepristone was dangerous to women. In fact, the overwhelming weight of medical evidence in the record of the original case supported the Food and Drug Administration’s determination that mifepristone is safe and effective.
All told, the lawsuit was a tremendous waste of time and resources for all concerned. But there is another aspect of the case that is even more troubling. The original lawsuit by the group of doctors was engineered by a well-heeled Christian nationalist group, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The Southern Poverty Law Center, which took down the Aryan Nations hate group in Kootenai County in 2000, has listed ADF as a hate group. ADF has worked closely with Labrador on a number of cases in the last two years and it is hard to tell who is calling the shots. ADF purports that it is providing free legal service to Labrador, while Labrador tries to give the impression that he controls
any litigation.
It appears that ADF is using Labrador’s position as Idaho’s chief legal officer to accomplish what it cannot do as a private litigant. That is, use Idaho’s sovereign position as a state to add strength to its litigation posture. It would be totally unacceptable for an outside extremist group to use Idaho’s sovereignty and good name to advance its private interests. The move by the federal lawyers to abort the case may indicate it is even too extreme for Trump’s taste.
