I noted, here, that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told Fox News that the grievous injustice suffered by Florida State's football team, which was not selected for the 4-team championship series, had forced him to seek a $1 million set-aside in the state's next budget to cover the cost of litigation with the selection committee. (Editor: he could save the taxpayers a million bucks by letting a dead dog lie, but, as I said, the injustice is grievous.) Now the state's attorney general announced, yesterday, that her office is investigating. It seems she means to prove that the committee broke anti-trust laws—she's requesting "more information about the nature of possible contracts, conspiracies in restraint of trade or monopolization of trade and commerce relating to anticompetitive effects of the College Football Playoff."
The executive director of the College Football Playoff issued a statement that said: "We will carefully review this demand for information, but it sure seems to be an overly aggressive reaction to a college football ranking in which some fans somewhere were bound to be disappointed."
Meanwhile, there have also been developments in the case of the Dallas woman I mentioned in that same laser-focused essay. Her problem does not concern any of the football teams in Texas. She is carrying a nonviable fetus that, according to doctors, could if carried to term cause health complications for her. They advise an abortion but, as the fetus's condition was detected at 20 weeks and Texas has a 6-week ban, she sought and received a lower court's permission to do as doctors indicated. At the request of the Texas attorney general, the state supreme court reviewed the case and issued a temporary stay of the lower court's ruling. I had written that perhaps the justices would mull over the legal complexities until the woman went into labor, thereby rendering their reasoning skills useless except for when years ago they took the Law School Aptitude Test. That turns out to have been harsh. A day or two after issuing the stay, the Texas supreme court ruled that the circumstances did not merit an exception to the state's abortion ban, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. The woman has since left Texas to get an abortion.
The supreme court's opinion is here. The rubber hits the road at approximately this passage:
Dr. Karsan asserted that she has a "good faith belief" that Ms. Cox meets the exception's requirements. Certainly, a doctor cannot exercise "reasonable medical judgment" if she does not hold her judgment in good faith. But the statute requires that judgment be a "reasonable medical" judgment, and Dr. Karsan has not asserted that her "good faith belief" about Ms. Cox's condition meets that standard.
Republicans have sometimes argued that their abortion bans aren't really bans since they allow for "reasonable exceptions." These "reasonable exceptions," however, are just a talking point. They don't refer to any set of conditions that might ever be shown to exist. For example, Ms. Cox can't have an abortion in Texas because her doctor, Karsan, doesn't know what magic words have to be pronounced.
If government is to be “limited,” maybe one thing it shouldn’t do is play word games with people who are in tough situations.
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