WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is weighing every option to strike down a “reckless” ruling by a federal judge in Texas that suspended U.S. approval of a key drug used in medication abortions, Xavier Becerra, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said on Sunday.
The administration has already filed an appeal, Becerra said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He said that ignoring the Trump-appointed judge’s ruling, as some Democratic lawmakers have suggested, is another possibility.
“Every option is on the table,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon us as a country to make sure women have safe and effective medication available.”
Becerra said the U.S. District Court judge’s decision to suspend the decades-old federal approval of mifepristone, used often as part of a two-pill regimen to terminate a pregnancy within the first 10 weeks, was judicial overreach and endangers the entire drug approval process by the Food and Drug Administration.
“When you turn upside down the entire FDA approval process, you’re not talking about just mifepristone. You’re talking about every kind of drug. You’re talking about our vaccines. You’re talking about insulin. You’re talking about the new Alzheimer’s drugs that may come on,” he said.
The decision out of Texas from Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk will not go into effect for seven days from the time of the ruling, giving the Biden administration time to appeal to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, considered one of the most conservative in the country.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat from New York, said on CNN that the Biden administration should ignore the ruling, arguing there’s “an extraordinary amount of precedent” for doing so.
“The courts rely on the legitimacy of their rulings,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “When they make a mockery of our system, a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law, as what we just saw happen in this mifepristone ruling, then I believe the executive branch, we know that the executive branch, has an enforcement discretion.”
Kacsmaryk’s Friday ruling was almost immediately contradicted by a Democratic-appointed judge in Washington state who affirmed the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and blocked the government from restricting access.
The competing orders just minutes apart signal the issue is almost certainly bound for the U.S. Supreme Court, potentially setting up another politically seismic ruling a year after the high court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade.
