Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom directed a profane tweet at Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.
“Louisiana plans to sue me because I won’t extradite a doctor for providing an abortion," Newsom wrote. “Go ---- yourself. California will never criminalize healthcare."
The tweet refers to an ongoing legal dispute where a California-based doctor supplied abortifacients to a resident that are illegal in the state of Louisiana. A similar legal battle is also underway between Louisiana and New York, where Governor Hochul has refused to extradite a doctor for the same action.
Monday, Murrill joined the Newell Normand show to address both cases.
“I mean, I've never met the man,” Murrill states about Newsom. “He was responding to a headline in a news article that's not even new. I've said this from the beginning when Kathy Hochul declined to comply with our extradition request. The next step would have to be litigation against the state of New York and the governor of New York. This is legally the next step for us because of their determined intent to support and protect people who are committing crimes in the state of Louisiana, so we’re going to take the next step to vindicate our laws. And this wasn't news, but apparently, he decided last Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday night was the night that he wanted to use vulgar language.”
Murrill explains that the New York case comes "from district attorney Tony Clayton, who has indicted a woman who coerced her 16-year-old daughter to take abortion pills and terminate a wanted pregnancy. She did that with the assistance of a doctor in New York who issued the pills to the mother."
The second case, Murrill says, is “against a doctor in California who did the same thing: Sent pills to a woman who was being coerced by her boyfriend. That case, I think, arose in the Mandeville area.”
“Both governors have refused our extradition paperwork,” Murrill explains. “And that puts us in a position of having to sue those governors in order to be able to enforce Louisiana law against these individuals who intentionally and knowingly wrote prescriptions and sent pills into our state, even though they knew it was illegal.”
The disputes call into question whether California and New York are violating the "full faith and credit" clause found in Article IV of Section I of the U.S. Constitution, which states, "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State."
Murrill argues that California and New York are directly supporting the violation of Louisiana law, which prohibits the use/prescription of abortion pills.
“If I sent guns to a state that has more restrictive policies on guns, concealed carry permits, or on the possession of a magazine of a certain size… they would absolutely want to prosecute me for the illegal violation of their gun laws. But they don't see it the same way. They've made a political decision that they don't like our laws, and so they're engaging in a political nullification process,” Murrill states.
While Newsom and Hochul refuse to comply with extradition, Murrill contests, claiming both state leaders are choosing to undermine the Constitution in support of their personal political beliefs.
"That's not how our Constitution is structured," says Louisiana's Attorney General. "They both say they're not going to criminalize reproductive healthcare. This isn't reproductive healthcare; this is coercion. They, they are not addressing the facts of the cases in both of these situations where these indictments have been issued; this has nothing to do with reproductive healthcare, even in their conception of it. Because they self-profess not to support coercion. And yet that's exactly what they're doing.”
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