I‘ve written before about the GOP’s quest to ban Mifepristone, a drug used to end a pregnancy, which has been on the market for 20 years. The initial brief was full of weird references and straight up lies. Oh and something something Comstock Act. You know, typical GOP stuff.

Then the next phase doubled down on the weird elements in the GOP’s legal arguments and tried to make the argument that doctors had standing to bring cases and provided a bunch of weird reasons that had nothing to do with actual legal standing.

This legal illiteracy was on display Tuesday morning when the GOP brought its circus to the Supreme Court. I’m not an attorney so I don’t tackle the legal arguments–I leave that to Our Fearless Leader. I knew this was going to be a farce when I read that one of the GOP’s attorneys was Josh Hawley’s wife. If you can’t remember who Josh Hawley is, here’s a refresher:

The main discussion was about standing, and whether anyone on the GOP’s side had any legal harm as a result of women they don’t even know getting medical treatment, which is all protected, confidential information.

I wrote about those standing arguments, and I want to quote a passage so we all have the context of how ridiculous Tuesday’s standing discussion was.

One reason in original brief was that pregnant women who chose to have an abortion are taking care from pregnant women who elect to carry to term:

When I must perform surgery [for] complications from chemical abortions, this takes attention away from my other patients. As a hospitalist, I am often supervising multiple laboring patients on labor and delivery. When I am called to the operating room to address an emergency resulting from chemical abortion, this necessarily means I may not be immediately available if an emergency should occur with one of my laboring patients.

I have to point out here that today’s oral argument contained a discussion of women who need emergency room treatment for mifepristone complications, and I found out that that has never happened. BUT IT COULD, I guess. And that the GOP had 7 doctors who claimed this happened to them, actually none of it did and it was just a waste of all of our time. Whew.

And it continued like that. The GOP wants to ban abortion and birth control and they really don’t have one legal reason to do so. They can’t even find ONE person who was harmed. A lot of time was spent on the idea that mifepristone should disappear in case one day a doctor is forced to help a patient with mifepristone complications even though that doesn’t happen.

I will say that I was wrong about how it was all going to unfold. I thought there would be a lot of stupid arguments put forth by the plaintiffs (and there were) and that the court was going to ban mifepristone because nothing matters at the Supreme Court anymore. But the justices seemed pretty focused on the standing angle as a disqualifying event.

I have to wonder how much of this newfound concern about facts is part of the backlash to the Dobbs decision, with the less extremist justices wondering if any damage control can be done.

And I wonder how much of it is the court realizing that the legal argument today–that even if hospital employees don’t have to ever treat a patient with a mifepristone complicated, they still want it banned, because harming women is the point and they can’t help but shout about it all the time now, having ripped off any pretense of trying to accommodate conscience issues.

In any case the mask slipped today and I don’t think most people liked what they saw.

Here’s the earworm the title might have given you: