H.R. 758 has been proposed with the intent to prevent wasteful lawsuits. It would amend the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to require courts to order the plaintiff to pay any of the defendant’s expenses reasonably caused by a frivolous lawsuit. Today courts are empowered but not required to impose such sanctions. The bill would also remove text allowing plaintiffs to avoid penalty by withdrawing or correcting lawsuits within 21 days of service of the motion for sanctions.

Why such a partisan response?

Costa, Cuellar, and Peterson were the only three Democrats to vote in favor.

The controversy behind the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act comes from a disagreement about the actual effects of the legislation on legal efficiency, as well as the effects on civil rights cases. The bill has received major support from Republicans under the belief that the threat of significant penalties will reduce cases of pointless or harmful lawsuits that waste the court’s time. However Democrats have come out against the law for two reasons. According to Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD5), making sanctions mandatory would waste more time on court cases to dispute sanctions and would create an unfair bias against civil rights cases.

How could it impact civil rights cases?

The bill would not actually change the criteria for a frivolous lawsuit, but it would make a court response mandatory. Among these criteria is requirement that a lawsuit be warranted by an existing law or a reasonable case for changing existing law. Hoyer writes in the Daily Whip that civil rights cases are particularly “susceptible to abusive claims of frivolity by defendants” because they often involve an argument for changing an existing law. So it could be that mandatory sanctions would discourage plaintiffs from making civil rights cases for fear of being penalized.

The Vote:

The bill passed the House by a partisan vote of 241–185 with 238 Republicans voting in favor and 180 Democrats voting against. It will move on to the Senate. H.R. 758 is the fourth incarnation of this legislation. It passed the House by a similar vote in the previous Congress but was never voted on in the Senate.

Planned Parenthood and abortion law:

Defunding Planned Parenthood

Congress ended its summer session earlier this year with a Republican attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. This was in response to a controversy over the organization harvesting and donating fetal tissue. It failed in the Senate when Republicans were unable to get reach the 60 votes required to overcome a Democratic filibuster. For more information see our previous report here.

Now the battle has begun again with another bill to defund Planned Parenthood passing through the House. The bill would stop federal funding to the organization for one year.

Federal funding for Planned Parenthood supports its reproductive health, maternal health, and child health services, but not abortions — existing law prohibits federal funds from being used for abortions. The organization’s abortion services are funded separately and would not be directly affected by this bill. The bill also does not address the organization’s practices regarding fetal tissue, which were made legal in 1993.

H.R. 3504 would require that a child born alive during an attempted abortion be given the same medical treatment as any other child born at that gestation time. It would impose criminal penalties of fines or imprisonment of up to five years on medical practitioners that fail to do this, as well as punish medical practitioners that intentionally kill or attempt to kill a born-alive child as having intentionally killed or attempted to kill a human being. Related is the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act enacted in 2002, which defined any fetus born alive after an attempted abortion at any age as a human child with all associated rights.

Only Democratic Representatives Lipinski, Cartwright, Cuellar, Peterson, and Langevin voted in favor.

The bill was passed by a vote of 248–177. All opposing votes came from Democrats.