By the end of Tuesday, the Supreme Court could allow a Texas law that would effectively overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and they could do it from the shadow docket without hearing any oral arguments. Lawyers for abortion clinics appealed to the Supreme Court to block the Texas law, which would both ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and turn private citizens into bounty hunters, allowing them to sue to enforce the ban with the incentive of a $10,000 award if they successfully sue an abortion provider or health center worker who helped a woman obtain an abortion.

The deviousness of the law is astounding. At six weeks of gestation, many women aren’t even yet aware that they are pregnant. Proponents of the law say that’s when a fetal heartbeat begins. But the people who understand how biology works—doctors—describe what is happening at six weeks as a vibration in growing fetal tissue. There is no heart. There is nothing in that collection of tissue that could exist outside the womb, a biological fact that has been the basis of previous court decisions protecting a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion prior to viability. The six-week ban violates both Roe and Casey, but where Texas lawmakers got sneaky was turning enforcement over to private individuals, who are much more difficult to sue than the state.

Because private individuals would enforce the law through lawsuits against anyone who provides or “aids and abets” an abortion, it’s much harder for abortion providers and advocates to challenge the restrictions in court. They can’t sue the state, and it’s much harder to determine whether providers can or should be sued. This law was designed to prevent judges from blocking its implementation by taking government officials out of the enforcement.

It’s a devious ploy that could turn neighbor against neighbor, but also complicates the legal process. In their appeal to the Supreme Court, the clinics’ lawyers call the law an attempt to “replace normal civil litigation rules” with “distorted versions designed to maximize the abusive and harassing nature of the lawsuits and to make them impossible to fairly defend against.”

The lawyers wrote that if the law were to go into effect on Wednesday, it “would immediately and catastrophically reduce abortion access in Texas,” forcing most clinics to close. “Patients who can scrape together resources will be forced to attempt to leave the state to obtain an abortion, and many will be delayed until later in pregnancy,” they wrote. “The remaining Texans who need an abortion will be forced to remain pregnant against their will or to attempt to end their pregnancies without medical supervision.”

The providers’ lawyers found themselves having to roll the dice with the Supreme Court shadow docket because of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which delayed a hearing scheduled for Monday in a U.S. District Court. A coalition of advocacy groups, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union, had asked a federal judge to prevent court clerks from accepting the lawsuits brought by private individuals and to block any of trial court judges from enforcing the new law.

They sued a group including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a state judge, a county court clerk, and an individual anti-abortion activist named Mark Lee Dickson, director of Right to Life East Texas, who advocated for the law and has already volunteered to be a bounty hunter.

The defendants filed a motion to dismiss the case, which the district court denied on Aug. 25. The defendants appealed that dismissal to the 5th Circuit, asking that it stop any more district court proceedings, including a request for an injunction from the providers’ lawyers and the hearing for that injunction that was scheduled for Monday. A three-judge panel on the 5th Circuit granted the defendants’ delay, meaning that the providers’ lawyers had no other option than the emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

They request that the justices block enforcement of the law, and argue that they don’t have to deal with the substance of the dispute—the constitutionality of an abortion ban at six weeks. “An application for an injunction may be granted,” they write, “without serving as an expression of the Court’s views on the merits to prevent enforcement of a potentially unconstitutional statute.” The court is scheduled to hear another abortion case out of Mississippi in the term that starts in October. That law would ban abortions after 15 weeks.

In this Texas appeal, challengers write that if the court does not act to block the law, “the rights of Texas women to obtain a legal abortion” will be “in jeopardy for months or more” while the litigation moves through the courts. The Supreme Court could, the challengers suggest, simply lift the 5th Circuit’s order, which would allow the district court to consider the motions before it to block the law’s enforcement. At the very least, the challengers write, the court should allow the process in the district court. If the Supreme Court does not act, they wrote, “applicants and thousands of other Texans will be stripped of their fundamental constitutional rights on Wednesday without ever receiving a decision on their fully briefed request for a preliminary injunction.”

Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, told The Washington Post on Monday that there was a “decent chance” they could still hold that hearing and potentially block the law, but that the problem is the chances of that happening before it goes into effect are “dwindling by the moment,” Vladeck said. “And for women in Texas who want to avail themselves of their constitutional right to an abortion, that could become virtually impossible by the end of tomorrow night.” That would the end of Tuesday.

Justice Samuel Alito, who received the application as the justice in charge of this region, asked for a response from defendants by 5 PM Tuesday.

Given what the six conservatives on the Supreme Courts have been willing to do from the shadow docket—unconstitutionally attempting to direct President Biden’s foreign policy, second guessing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the scope of its ability to keep people safe in a pandemic—there’s no guarantee that they’ll respect their own precedent when it comes to abortion.

The radical Roberts’ Six on this court is as activist as it gets, and clearly sees itself as supreme over the other two equal branches. It’s acting with breathtaking arrogance, attempting to conduct foreign policy, attempting to direct the actions of federal agencies. Right now, the Biden commission is reviewing the problem of the courts that have been packed by Sen. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. That packed Supreme Court hasn’t acted as though it is concerned about anything that commission might come up with, and why should it be?

The commission includes a Hoover Institution fellow who was an official in the George W. Bush administration and a former judge nominated by Bush, and a few staunchly anti-abortion lawyers and Federalist Society members—as in the Federalist Society that has been the guiding force behind McConnell’s court-packing effort.