Behind the Texas Abortion Law, a Persevering Conservative Lawyer

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : Mr. Mitchell immediately cited the growing success of the municipal-level effort that had started in Waskom to alter the way anti-abortion laws would be enforced.
56% : For Mr. Mitchell, a onetime clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia, the decision was a stinging rebuke, and he vowed that if he ever had the chance to help develop another anti-abortion law, he would ensure it survived at the Supreme Court.
54% : Anti-abortion activists and legal experts closely watching the issue across the state -- and the country -- started taking notice.
53% : This article is based on interviews with anti-abortion activists who worked with Mr. Mitchell, reproductive rights advocates, friends and legal experts, and a review of Mr. Mitchell's writings.
52% : Instead of focusing on stacking the courts with anti-abortion judges, trying to change public opinion or pass largely symbolic bills in state legislatures, Mr. Mitchell has spent the last seven years honing a largely below-the-radar strategy of writing laws deliberately devised to make it much more difficult for the judicial system -- particularly the Supreme Court -- to thwart them, according to interviews.
50% : he was best-known for litigation seeking to limit the power of unions -- Mr. Mitchell, 45, is only now emerging as a pivotal player in one of the most high-profile examples yet of the erosion of the right to abortion.
46% : With Mr. Trump driving the Supreme Court rightward with his nominees, Mr. Mitchell calculated that the court would be more sympathetic to cases in areas like religious freedom, abortion, and affirmative action that big law firms would not take on because they were politically divisive.
40% : Drawing from an idea that he had first floated in a 2018 law review article, Mr. Mitchell said that there was a provision that could be added to the ordinance outlawing abortion in Waskom while stripping the town government of authority for enforcing the ban.
40% : At the time, the ordinance received little attention, even though it appeared to be the first time that a city in the United States had passed a law that outlawed abortion since the Roe v. Wade decision 46 years earlier.
37% : With its ideological balance recast by President Donald J. Trump, the court refrained from blocking a new law in Texas that all but bans abortion -- a potential turning point in the long-running fight over the procedure.
26% : The Texas abortion law, known as Senate Bill 8, amounts to a nearly complete ban on abortion in the state.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.