#tempting to clean this up and put on main blog but ehhh

[mourning-again-in-america]

Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center is surprisingly interesting case; in 2018, Kentucky passed an anti-abortion bill which was immediately challenged by a woman’s health clinic, EMW Women’s Surgical Center. Because of ex parte Young[3], the AG (a Democrat) was sued and declined to participate[1] and someone else (a secretary of whatever) who was part of enforcing the law stepped up to represent the case. the case went through the district court and ran against the gov’t, finding the law unconstitutional. the secretary of whatever then declined to appeal. the deadline to appeal passed, and the AG (now a Republican, who was elected while the case proceeded) found out that this happened and tried to step up and take the case on appeal on behalf of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (who the secretary was also sort of representing, it’s complicated, see [3]). He was blocked from doing so, perhaps because of the lapsed appeal, idk, i haven’t read any of the opinions.

Should he be allowed to intervene in the case and be allowed to appeal, which the state (so he says), as co-equal sovereign with the USG, has an interest in doing if he had met the deadline (because of the previous actions of the AG)?[5] Even if the answer there is “yes”, what about the fact that he didn’t meet the deadline? [1]: Specifically, he ~agreed to not be a party to the suit on the state’s behalf, binding himself to the final (appealable) judgment [3]: n.b. IANAL and i have not actually read any materials primarily on ex parte Young, i’m relying on Baude’s relation of it on Divided Argument in re: US v. Texas and Dobbs v. Whole Woman’s Health; ex parte Young very roughly means that even though you can’t sue a state directly, you can find the relevant party to sue by finding someone[4] who’s going to enforce the law against you, typically the AG [4]: subject to a lot of conditions, e.g. you can’t sue a judge who’s enforcing an unconstitutional law against you because it’s kinda weird and judges don’t want to have to deal with that shit, that’s part of what the AG gets paid to do [5]: the best part of this all is: the AG who bound himself back in 2018 when the case was first starting, is now the governor. so what *is* the state’s sovereign interest?