Court turns down Biden’s bid for intervention in Texas emergency abortion dispute

SCOTUS NEWS

The court began the 2024-25 term on Monday by issuing orders and hearing oral arguments in two cases. (William Hennessy)

After granting 15 cases from the justices’ “long conference” last week, the Supreme Court on Monday denied more than a thousand more petitions for review. Among the noteworthy actions on the 50-page list of orders released on Monday morning was the rejection of a request from the Biden administration to send a dispute over emergency abortions in Texas back to the lower courts, as well as the denial of a challenge by the company formerly known as Twitter to a nondisclosure order obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith for communications by former President Donald Trump.

The justices turned down a request from the Biden administration to send a dispute over the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act back to the lower courts for another look. That federal law requires emergency rooms in hospitals that receive Medicaid funding to provide stabilizing treatment to patients who arrive with an emergency condition that seriously threatens their lives or health. The law supersedes state laws that directly conflict with EMTALA’s requirements, such as, the Biden administration says, laws restricting abortion care. The court dealt with a set of similar cases out of Idaho in June without reaching a conclusive decision on the federal law.

The court’s denial on Monday leaves in place a lower court ruling for Texas, but the question at the center of the case remains unresolved nationally.

The case began as a challenge by Texas and two medical groups to guidance issued by the Department of Health and Human Services to remind hospitals that, in some cases, EMTALA may require hospitals to provide abortions to save a pregnant woman’s life or prevent serious harm to her health – even if state law would otherwise prohibit the abortion. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit disagreed and prohibited the federal government from enforcing the guidance against Texas.

After the Supreme Court’s decision in late June dismissing the pair of cases from Idaho, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked the justices to send the Texas case back for a new look. She cited not only the Idaho cases, but also the challengers’ suggestion that there is no conflict between EMTALA and Texas law and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in a case involving medication abortion – which, she wrote, “makes clear that the members of the” medical groups challenging the law “cannot be required to terminate a pregnancy against their conscience.” But the justices turned down Prelogar’s plea without explanation.

The court asked the Biden administration for its views in four cases:

• Alabama v. California – An effort by 19 Republican-led states to block lawsuits brought by five other states against oil and gas companies, alleging that the companies knew that their products contributed to climate change but instead misled the public about the cause of climate change and the risks of fossil fuels.
• Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections – Whether a plaintiff can sue a government official in his individual, rather than official, capacity, for violations of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The lawsuit was brought by a devout Rastafarian who, as part of his religious practice, had not cut his hair for nearly two decades. When he was transferred to a new prison, he provided prison guards with a copy of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit holding that Louisiana’s policy of prohibiting Rastafarian inmates from wearing dreadlocks violated the Constitution. A guard threw the copy in the trash, and – at the warden’s direction – forcibly restrained he and shaved his head to the scalp. He now seeks to hold prison officials personally liable for damages.
• M&K Employee Solutions v. Trustees of the IAM Pension – How to calculate the Employee Retirement Income Security Act’s instruction to compute “withdrawal liability” – when an employer withdraws from an underfunded multiemployer pension plan – “as of the end of the plan year.”
• Mulready v. Pharmaceutical Care Management – Whether the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act supersedes an Oklahoma law regulating pharmacy benefit managers.

Among the other cases in which the justices denied review were:

• X Corp. v. United States – A First Amendment challenge to a nondisclosure order that barred Twitter from notifying Trump or his representatives about a warrant seeking private communications sent and received by the former president during his presidency.
• Moylan v. Guerrero – Whether a Guam law on which that territory’s highest court relied to rule that a 1990 law that would largely ban abortion in Guam had been impliedly repealed violates the separation of powers by authorizing the court to issue declaratory judgments.
• No on E, San Franciscans Opposing the Affordable Housing Production Act v. Chiu – A challenge to the constitutionality of a San Francisco ordinance that (among other things) requires political committees that spend money on city elections to disclose both their major contributors and, if any of those contributors is a committee, the contributors to that committee.
• Campbell v. Kares – Whether the one-year clock for a state prisoner to file a petition seeking federal post-conviction relief stops when a prisoner seeks DNA testing.
• Hile v. Michigan – Whether a 1970 amendment to the Michigan constitution that prohibits the use of any public funding for private schools violates the U.S. Constitution. The challengers, the parents of children in private religious schools in Michigan, argued that the state constitutional provision violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection because it bars religious people and institutions in Michigan from being able to seek relief – such as public funding – from the state legislature on the same terms as other citizens.
• Mendoza v. Lumpkin – The case of Moises Sandoval Mendoza, a Mexican national who in 2005 was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2004 murder of Rachelle O’Neil Tolleson in Texas. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit last year denied Mendoza’s bid for federal post-conviction relief.
• Al Bahlul v. United States – Whether, in a case involving a Yemeni man who served as an assistant to Osama bin Laden who is now imprisoned at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, one of the judges who ruled on the prisoner’s appeal should have recused himself because he had represented the federal government in the prisoner’s pre-trial challenge to his prosecution by a military commission. (Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh recused themselves from this case.)

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.