Portside

“In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”

The new private enforcement laws endorse what amounts to a civilized form of vigilantism. Recent years have seen an alarming number of vigilante threats or acts against immigrants seeking asylum, Black Lives Matters protesters and voting rights driv

This is the first time a six week ban has gone into effect and the ban has handed enforcement to private citizens, rather than authorities. The bill allows private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone they believe “aids and abets.”

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The statute is the culmination of a decades-long strategy to end abortion without actually banning abortion.

Texas conservatives are so exercised about the possibility of students learning more about slavery and racism that Governor Abbott has added discussion about a ban on the teaching of critical race theory to the special legislative session.

"No Senate rule supersedes people's constitutional rights," said the Democratic senator from Georgia. And shame on us if we're more committed to a Senate rule than we are to the principles of democracy," Senator Raphael Warnock added.

Three Texan authors build on a long tradition of dissent from patriotic accounts of Texas history in a new book on the racism baked into our story of the Alamo.

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