June 27, 2024

“Today, the Supreme Court failed to reverse the Biden Administration’s absurd pro-abortion interpretation of a Reagan-era law, instead allowing a lower court’s pause on Idaho’s pro-life law while the case makes its way through the courts,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “In 1986, a bipartisan coalition in Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) which was designed to prevent emergency rooms from turning away patients who could not afford to pay and which includes express protections for the unborn. Nearly forty years later, after the Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the Biden Administration announced its novel interpretation that EMTALA ensured that abortion was among the stabilizing treatments EMTALA required emergency rooms to provide. As we explained in our amicus brief, this reinterpretation has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the statute and everything to do with the Biden Administration’s anti-life agenda. The Court’s decision puts both unborn children and hospitals around the country at risk. In this instance, as justice Alito notes in his dissent in this case, ‘[a]pparently, the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.’ AAF will continue to fight for life in this and future cases to ensure that no child’s chance at the blessings of liberty is snuffed out by abortion.”

You can read the amicus brief here.

“In a very important decision today, the Court took another step towards reviving the separation of powers established by the Constitution, ruling that defendants against charges of fraud are entitled a jury trial before an Article III court,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “Today, the Court decided SEC v. Jarkesy, clawing back significant power from the administrative state’s in-house ‘administrative law judges’ (ALJs) requiring instead, as the Constitution requires, that civil actions alleging fraud be brought in front of independent Article III courts. As we argued in our amicus brief in this case, the ALJ system is one of the many ways the administrative state flies in the face of the constitutional separation of powers and thus in the liberty of the people that system was designed to protect. There is much work to be done but today’s decision brings us one step closer to reining in the administrative state.”

You can read the full brief here.