|
Only have a minute? Listen instead
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to use taxpayers’ money to clog our courts with lawsuits seeking to impose conservative policies through judicial fiat rather than through the legislative process prescribed by our Constitution. Paxton brags that he has sued the Joe Biden administration nearly 80 times in the past 3½ years, seeking to overrule laws enacted by our Congress and policies that apply and clarify them. He was just as active against the Barack Obama administration, suing that administration more than 20 times during the two years his tenure coincided with Obama’s.
Some of Paxton’s recent lawsuits seek to infringe on basic rights the Constitution protects.
Last month he sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over an April 22 federal ruling by its Office of Civil Rights that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 prohibits disclosure of protected health information related to lawful reproductive health care. The rule states that it seeks to better protect patient confidentiality and prevent medical records from being used against people who obtain or provide lawful reproductive health care. This includes abortions in states that allow them. The law prohibits doctors and other medical professionals, insurance companies and others who might have access to patients’ records from sharing them with other parties without the patients’ consent.
HIPAA allows law enforcement agencies to obtain medical records when investigating crimes, determining treatment for victims in emergency situations or to determine cause of death. In many cases they need a court order to obtain such information.
The law is not intended to allow agencies to troll for information that might incriminate a person with no other reason to suspect a crime has been committed. The April rule sought to make that restriction clear.
People who leave the state for an abortion or any other medical procedure should be protected from prosecution here. If they left Texas, they committed no crime here, and if abortions are legal where they receive the procedure, they committed no crime there either.
Article IV of the Constitution requires states to respect the laws, records and court rulings of other states.
Law enforcement agencies certainly can investigate possible crimes if evidence exists or is suspected. However, seeking to gather data for “fishing expeditions,” as Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley characterized Paxton’s similar efforts to collect its records of services given to legal immigrants they’ve received from federal officials, are beyond the scope of his public charge.
Whether the attorney general is on a moral crusade or merely using the power of his office to impose conservative political policies upon the public regardless of existing laws, bulk gathering of personal data without evidence of a crime, just to see if women have had abortions, clashes with one of basic rights that most Americans cherish most: the right to privacy.
Paxton should use his office — and our money — to help investigate crimes where evidence exists, not to turn over rocks looking for blemishes that might or might not be there.
