Vox Sentences: Wendy Davis couldn’t stop Texas’s abortion law. Will Anthony Kennedy?

A Scalia-less Court hears 2016's big abortion case; the post–Super Tuesday landscape (is a blighted hellscape for the GOP); how to think about the Apple/FBI battle.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Undue burdens

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

• On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a suit over a Texas law restricting abortion clinics.

  [SCOTUSBlog / Lyle Denniston]

• This was the first major case to be heard without Justice Antonin Scalia, but because it's a big culture-war case, the swing vote was always Justice Anthony Kennedy anyway.

  [Orin Kerr via Twitter]

• The case, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, challenges a law Texas passed in 2014 (the one famously filibustered by Wendy Davis). The law requires all abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals and all clinics to be equipped for surgery (even if they didn't perform surgical abortions).

  [SCOTUSBlog / Lyle Denniston]

• Since the law's passage, many clinics have closed, though supporters of the law dispute that it caused the closures.

• Women's groups claim the closures could put an undue burden on women seeking abortions, something that Supreme Court precedent considers unconstitutional.

  [Huffington Post / Cristian Farias and Laura Bassett]

• During oral arguments, the Court's women justices emphasized that the new regulations were unnecessary to improve safety.

  [Time / Charlotte Alter]

• It seems likely that Kennedy will kick the can down the road on the case, perhaps by sending it back to the lower courts for more evidence on how much the new laws have restricted abortion access.

  [MSNBC / Irin Carmon]

• While the Court deliberates, check your knowledge on abortion in the US with this quiz from Vox's Alvin Chang.

  [Vox / Alvin Chang]

Trump vs. Anti-Trump

John Moore/Getty Images

• Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the big winners from Super Tuesday, leading their opponents to wonder where they go from here.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Most clear-eyed observers think that after Tuesday night, the GOP has two options: Trump or a brokered convention.

  [National Review / David Alberta]

• It might honestly be too late for the brokered convention, which requires GOP voters to hate Trump as much as Republican and conservative professionals do.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• It is definitely too late for a non-Trump option. Maybe if other candidates had actually attacked him — something this graphic demonstrates they didn't do until far too late — things would have been different, but here we are.

  [Neil King via Twitter]

• It also might be too late for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Tuesday night proved that Sanders hasn't expanded his coalition. And he wasn't winning the support of his key demographics at the same rate he was in New Hampshire.

  [New Yorker / Benjamin Wallace-Wells]

• And it is realistically too late for Ben Carson, who announced today that his campaign wouldn't be going forward. On the other hand, he's not formally suspending it. It's not clear whether anything real will change, since he was kind of a nonfactor anyway.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

The 3 fights between Apple and the FBI

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• The FBI's lawsuit against Apple over a phone formerly belonging to suspected San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook continues this week.

• The argument over the lawsuit can get very muddled. Ben Thompson, at Stratechery, offers three ways to think about it: the case at hand (Farook's phone), the PR battle over protecting privacy, and the ongoing legal battle over encryption.

  [Stratechery / Ben Thompson]

• The case at hand is confusing enough in its own right. The FBI actually had the phone unlocked, then locked itself out — and it's not clear that the phone had anything relevant to the investigation of Farook.

  [NYT / Cecilia Kang and Eric Lichtblau]

• It's similar to other cases that the FBI has tried to pursue against Apple compelling phone unlocking. One FBI request from October 2015 was totally smacked down on Monday by a federal judge, James Orenstein, in a ruling that gave a lot of hope to Apple's defenders in the Farook case.

  [Motherboard / Sarah Jeong]

• There is something a little less than ideal, as Navneet Alang acknowledges, about relying on Apple (or corporate interests generally) to be the defenders of privacy in court.

  [New Republic / Navneet Alang]

• And the need to win the PR battle is leading Apple to some weird legal arguments — like claiming that code is speech, so any mandate from the FBI would trample Apple's First Amendment rights.

  [Re/code / Dawn Chmielewski]

• Neil Richards persuasively argues that this argument kind of mischaracterizes what code is.

  [MIT Technology Review / Neil Richards]

• Worth remembering, though: The parts of the case we see could also be a proxy for a battle going on behind the scenes. Apple might be worried about slippery slopes to kinds of FBI requests we don't know about. Guan Yang offers very useful background on this.

  [Guan Yang]

MISCELLANEOUS

The best photos from Scott Kelly's year in space. [Digg / Benjamin Goggin]

• Uber, but for cheating on high school homework.

  [Bright / Doug Bierend]

• The Texas State Board of Education is surprisingly powerful, wielding influence over textbooks nationwide. And a woman who thinks Barack Obama was a drug-addicted gay prostitute in his 20s is looking like she's about to win a seat there.

  [Slate / Laura Moser]

• Zootopia may be the first Disney film being marketed explicitly to the furry community.

  [BuzzFeed / Katie Notopolous]

• Schools are starting to test kids for "grit," and even researchers who think the trait is important are opposed.

  [NYT / Kate Zernike]

VERBATIM

"Chris Christie has seen things. Things you wouldn’t believe. Things that would make your hair fall out and turn grey all at once. But he cannot speak of them. He can only stand there. Chris Christie is the bearer of a hideous knowledge that hangs on him like a horrible weight. But he has no way to say it." [Washington Post / Alexandra Petri]

• "'Go back to Fuckheadistan,' growls Neanderthal Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) as he knifes a faceless goon about halfway through the grab bag of dog-whistles and dog-shit filmmaking that is London Has Fallen."

  [AV Club / Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

• "This blurs the frontier between viruses and cells and ask for reconsideration of what should be considered as alive."

  [Chantal Abergel to the Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• "Congressman Harris voted against the Maya Angelou post office naming because she was a communist sympathizer."

  [Spokesperson Shelby Hodgkins to NBC News]

.

• "Trying to turn lead into gold is nothing compared to taking something mechanical like an instrument—a string and a bow—and using it to evoke a human soul, preserved through the centuries."

  [Christian Tetzlaff to New Yorker / Jeremy Eichler]

WATCH THIS

How architecture changes for the deaf [YouTube / Estelle Caswell, Gina Barton, and Johnny Harris]

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