The Texas abortion bounty hunter law is creating a boom in interstate commerce, state Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed in a court filing fighting the Justice Department’s attempt to intervene in the law. 

The Justice Department has sued to get the Texas law declared invalid, with one argument for why the federal government has a right to intervene, being that the law impacts interstate commerce. Paxton’s answer to that was that so many women are having to leave Texas to get abortions, it’s an overall plus: “What evidence that does exist in the record suggests that, if anything, the Act is stimulating rather than obstructing interstate travel,” Paxton wrote.

It’s true that a lot of Texas women are being forced to travel for abortions. It’s also awful.

”About two-thirds of our [Oklahoma City clinic] patient appointment calls now come from Texas patients seeking abortions that are unavailable throughout their home state,” a court filing by clinic organization Trust Women said, a big increase from the past, when a quarter of the clinic’s patients had been from Texas. Kansas is also seeing a big increase due to the Texas law: CNN reports that “where in 2019 only 25 abortion patients were from Texas, approximately half of the calls to its Wichita clinic are now coming from Texas patients, according to the filing.”

By this standard, a state could really juice its interstate travel by, say, banning medical care of all kinds.

But every time a woman has to travel from Texas to Oklahoma or Kansas or New Mexico to get medical care, it’s a massive blow to her rights. And many women will not be able to afford the travel or have time to make the trip, forcing them to remain pregnant because they either didn’t realize they were pregnant immediately or didn’t make a decision within days of learning they were pregnant.

Paxton’s main defense, though, is that the Texas law was designed to evade judicial scrutiny by empowering anyone, literally anyone, to enforce it by suing people who “aid or abet” an abortion beyond six weeks for $10,000 and attorneys’ fees. “No federal court can hear a case to determine the constitutionality of a statute that the sovereign defendant is not enforcing,” he wrote. Which the Trump Supreme Court has upheld, at least for the moment, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade with an unsigned, single-paragraph shadow docket decision. 

Paxton knows his would-be-laughable-if-it-wasn’t-so-offensive interstate commerce argument doesn’t need to work, because Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump packed the federal courts to engineer the end of reproductive rights in this country.