Here’s a peculiarity: The Trump Administration blasting down on a lawsuit filed by Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador and two other Republican AGs on a hot-button issue with national import: Abortion.
Why would this happen? And no less significantly, what will Labrador do about it?
The legal case on abortion law emerged last October, though its roots run older. After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, a group of anti-abortion organizations sued to require the Food and Drug Administration to overturn its long-standing approval of mifepristone, which is often used to induce abortion and is very widely taken nationally, by some estimates accounting for more than half of all abortions.
In June 2024 the Supreme Court unanimously threw out the lawsuit not on its substance but on the argument that the plaintiffs had no “standing,” or specific basis for a direct complaint. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “The plaintiffs do not prescribe or use mifepristone. And F.D.A. is not requiring them to do or refrain from doing anything.”
Last fall, Labrador and counterpart AGs in Kansas and Missouri decided to take another crack at mifepristone from a slightly different standing angle, filing in a Texas federal court, before a judge who has ruled against the pill before. (He was the one who ruled in favor of the anti-mifepristone case the Supreme Court later rejected.)
The state AGs were careful to include a roster of rationales for why they – or their states – have standing. They had some, well, inventive arguments (you can see them starting on page 141 of the filing), arguing among many other points that they “have suffered injury to their sovereign interests in enacting and enforcing their laws” and regulations allowing the bill are “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase.”
Given the Trump Administration’s stance against abortion, a first thought might be that it might drop the Food and Drug Administration’s legal defense against the AGs – meaning, just cave on the case in a move toward banning mifepristone.
But that’s not what happened. Insead, the Trump Administration technically is continuing the Biden Administration’s defense by asking the Texas court to dismiss the AGs’ case – a rebuff, apparently, to Labrador and his counterparts. And it did so in strong terms.
Or is that what’s going on here?
Probably not.
Here’s another take from the website The Cut that seems to cohere strategically: “By saying that Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri lack standing in the mifepristone case, Trump’s DoJ could set a similar precedent for the rest of these legal challenges. And if Trump does direct the FDA to restrict access to mifepristone, his administration could then argue that Democratic-led states have no standing to challenge those regulations.”
That’s not an unusual take. The substack, Abortion Every Day (which is on the choice side) put it a little more bluntly: “this isn’t just about good optics – it’s a legal strategy. The Trump DOJ is trying to establish a precedent that states don’t have the authority to challenge FDA rules. That way, when the Trump FDA restricts or bans abortion medication, pro-choice states won’t be able to fight back.”
What Trump has said – as during his 2024 campaign – is that abortion should be a state-run matter: “Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others.”
The new administration filing seems aimed differently, and shows why the reality could never be so simple: How could states realistically ban abortion if mifepristone is legal, or effectively be pro-choice if it is not? The new federal court action looks like an attempt to override the states with rulings from within his administration.
So, back to the local question: What does Labrador have to say about this? What will be the nature of his defense of state’s rights if the Trump Administration is on the other side of the question?
It presents a conundrum for the Idaho attorney general.
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