The news cycle has been relentless of late. I wrote about yesterday’s big news yesterday afternoon. This morning, I’m writing about one of last week’s big stories: the abortion pill case. This story, however, has legs. Let’s take it for a walk around the proverbial block.

First the case itself. I was NOT surprised by the Supreme Court’s shadow docket action. The opinions from Judge K and the Fifth Circuit were terrible both substantively and procedurally. The original title of this post was, Abortion Pill Still Standing. The plaintiffs in the Amarillo courtroom didn’t have standing to sue. I’ll let Slate’s  Mark Joseph Stern explain why:

“The plaintiffs are a group of anti-abortion doctors who do not prescribe the medication. To establish standing, they claimed they might one day treat a patient injured by mifepristone, a totally conjectural future “injury” that may well never happen. To claim that the medication is dangerous, they rejected more than 100 scientific studies proving it’s safe and effective, and instead cited anonymous blog posts from an anti-abortion website. To seek relief, they asked for a nationwide decree overruling the FDA’s approval of the drug, removing it from the market even in states where abortion remains perfectly legal.”

None of this made sense. A hypothetical future injury that rests on a series of conjectures does not establish standing. A judge cannot toss out real scientific evidence in favor of baseless propaganda. And no court can simply yank a drug from the market by overriding FDA approval —which is why no court has ever tried to do so until now. “

That’s a fancy way of saying that the case was a procedural mess and what I called it two weeks ago an abuse of discretion.

It’s unclear what will happen when the case returns to SCOTUS but even the dissenting justices didn’t attempt to defend the decision on any legally recognizable grounds. Instead, they vented and fulminated. especially Sam the Sham Alito. Take a chill pill, Sam.

The nationwide injunction by Judge K in Amarillo also violated a fundamental tenet of the Dobbs decision, which was to let the several states handle the abortion issue. Judge K not only mishandled the abortion pill case, he manhandled it leaving his fingerprints all over this disgusting decision.

One would have thought that the author of Dobbs, Sam the Sham Alito, would have abided by the states’ rights rationale of his own decision. Instead, he pitched a Trump-level tantrum. Take a chill pill, Sam.

I dig how another lawyer turned pundit, the WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin, described the written shit fit pitched by a 73-year-old man:

“Alito has the temerity to assert that there would be no irreparable injury in denying the stay because “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts” — by whom? where does this standard come from? — “that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections.” This unprecedented attack on the government’s obedience to court rulings — based on nothing — is out of order. There is zero evidence — stray pundits and legislative backbenchers don’t count — that the Biden administration would essentially put itself in contempt of court.

Moreover, Alito’s dissent demonstrates that he does not care one whit about the women affected if the drug were suddenly made unavailable.”

Take a chill pill, Sam.

Women are usually left out of the equations propounded by anti-abortion extremists. They view their cause as a religious one. Once they connected abortion to slavery in their own minds, they were blind to logic and reason. Slavery was a pox on our society that led to the War of the Rebellion. Abortion rights give women control over their bodies and lives. The abortion pill enhances those rights. Mifepristone is safe and effective and should be legal wherever abortion is.

I’ve rarely seen so much nonsense coming from an angry judge. Sam the Sham was overshadowed by Scalia for many years. The resentment he felt at being dismissed as Scalito seems to have boiled over since Scalia’s death. It’s made Alito as angry as a Trenton cab driver stuck in traffic, mindlessly honking his horn. Scalia was often wrong but the only horn he tooted was his own: his opinions were well-written whereas Alito’s are extended rants. Take a chill pill, Sam.

Justice Alito is an angry man aggrieved over what he sees as moral decay caused by judicial liberalism. The Dobbs opinion reads more like a religious screed than a judicial opinion. Who died and made him Pope?

I learned something new about Alito while researching this post: he’s an April Fool’s baby. Unfortunately, the joke is on us.

Repeat after me: Take a chill pill, Sam.

The last word goes to Oasis: