by Ken Klukowski at Breitbart
Establishment media botched covering when the Supreme Court flubbed the punting of a case, accidentally posting early an order dismissing the case without any decision on the showdown behind the Biden administration’s ER abortion mandate and Idaho’s pro-life law.
EMTALA is the acronym for a federal law requiring hospitals who receive federal dollars to provide emergency room (ER) care for urgent medical matters without regard to whether the patient can pay.
Joe Biden’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a regulation treating abortion as emergency medical care under EMTALA. Specifically, if a doctor decides that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve” a pregnant woman’s medical emergency, the regulation forces the ER to provide the abortion, overriding any state law to the contrary.
Idaho has a pro-life law on the books, the Idaho Defense of Life Act. The Biden administration sued, arguing its new EMTALA rule supersedes Idaho law. A federal district court in Idaho issued a preliminary injunction in favor of HHS. Idaho appealed to the Ninth Circuit, after which the Supreme Court took the extraordinarily rare step of granting “cert before judgment” – shorthand for the Supreme Court granting review (called a writ of certiorari) before the appeals court finishes deciding the appeal.
Turns out the Supreme Court has now decided that early move was a mistake, voting 5-4 to dismiss the grant of certiorari as improvidently granted – what Supreme Court practitioners call a DIG.
While DIGs happen once or twice per year,…
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