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Bad laws get passed all the time in the United States. What makes bounty-style laws so pernicious is how they undermine the way that civil rights laws and constitutional protections are supposed to work. Section 1983, the flagship federal civil rights mechanism for lawsuits, is designed to protect private individuals from the depredations of state and local officials. In Jackson, the court effectively ruled that S.B. 8 had found a way around it in the short term. As a result, Texas and the conservative justices legitimized a too-clever-by-half way to deprive someone of their federal constitutional rights by making it much more difficult to vindicate those rights in court.

The clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Courts rulings, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a partial dissent joined by the courts three liberal justices. He appeared to be keenly aware of the stakes. Indeed, if the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery, he continued, quoting from one of the courts precedents. The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake.

There is also a chilling strain of authoritarianism at work here. It is one thing to simply ban abortion; the states and Congress ban plenty of things, for good or for ill. If enough voters think such a ban is wrong, they can theoretically vote out the lawmakers who did it and get it lifted. Bounty-style laws diffuse that feedback loop by directly turning Americans against each other: neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member, citizen against citizen, on issues where Americans have profound and sometimes irreconcilable disagreements. Just as Warsaw Pact dictators relied on vast networks of informants to achieve their goals in the twentieth century, so too will right-wing state lawmakers pit their constituents against each other to accomplish theirs.

These tactics are proliferating beyond the abortion context. A Florida bill, described as the Dont Say Gay bill by its opponents, aims to severely restrict discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. The bill also states that school officials may not discourage or prohibit parental notification of and involvement in critical decisions affecting a students mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being, a move that could compel educators to out LGBTQ students to their parents. If a parent believes that a school district is violating the law, they can sue for damages or force the state to appoint special magistrates to investigate educators at the districts expense.

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Texas's Abortion Bounty Law Is Inspiring Republican Lawmakers Around the Country - The New Republic