Liberal commentator Elie Mystal, whose expertise is legal issues, demanded Thursday that President Joe Biden “deputize” doctors to create a federal force of physicians who can perform abortions in defiance of a pro-life Texas law.
Abortion advocates have been expressing outrage this week after the Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law that outlaws abortions after roughly six weeks into pregnancy.
What are the details?
Mystal advocated on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that Biden should use the power of the pen to unilaterally establish a federal force of doctors to skirt the Texas law and continue to perform abortions.
“We need to go and get women in Texas and protect their constitutionally protected medical rights. And the way you do that is that you deputize doctors,” Mystal said. “You federalize doctors through an executive order an army of federal doctors who are going to go into Texas and protect the Constitution by consulting women about their privacy rights and medical history.”
By establishing “an army of federal doctors,” Mystal claimed doctors would then be protected by qualified immunity.
“[F]ederalizing the doctor force, that would protect those abortion providers from the Texas law, which, as we all said, it’s a bounty system. Only private citizens can enforce it. Well, you know what federal officials are protected from private civil actions by qualified immunity? Which I don’t like, but, you know what? It is time to play hardball, right? It is not go high time. This is go time,” Mystal said.
Mystal, a Harvard Law School graduate, went on to say:
So you send in the doctors. They’re protected with qualified immunity. And the way you get around the Hyde Amendment, which is this ridiculous rule that the government can’t spend money on abortions because, apparently, poor people don’t get the same health care and everything else, fine. But what you get around the Hyde Amendment is that you made abortions free, which, by the way, they probably should be already, and you privately fund the doctors who are doing this service in defense of the Constitution. Biden could do that law tonight and you could have the doctors on their way to Texas tomorrow. That’s what he would do if he needed to go get some people off roofs from a flooding situation.
From last night’s Joy Reid — ‘Mad Scientist Fat Albert’ (as @VaradMehta like to call him) says Biden should deputi… https://t.co/6R1af2XxLn
— Curtis Houck (@Curtis Houck)1630705976.0
Show host Joy Reid responded to Mystal’s proposal by calling it a “great idea.”