The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, however, upheld the law, ruling that it was rationally related to protecting health and that, even if it wasn’t, economic protectionism is a legitimate state interest. The Supreme Court declined to take the case last month, so the circuit courts’ split on the economic-protectionism question remains unresolved. But the lower court’s dual holding illustrates that even if the Supreme Court ultimately does rule that economic protectionism is not a legitimate state interest, the anti-cartel crusade will still have a big problem with rational-basis review: Legislators after all don’t announce they are protecting cronies from competitors; they say they are protecting health and safety.

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Conservative support for the anti-protectionist effort has been tremendous. George Will decried this “politically connected faction bending public power for its private benefit” to punish consumers. Senator Mike Lee of Utah penned an op-ed explaining the larger problem of occupational licensing, which burdens consumers with $200 billion in extra costs each year without improving the quality of services. And Ted Cruz was an early leader in the fight against state-created market cartels, too, first taking on a dental board more than a decade ago during his tenure as policy planning director at the Federal Trade Commission.

So what happens when many of these conservative supporters of economic liberty are also anti-abortion and these two principles are in tension? Too often it seems like conservatives don’t connect the two—at their own peril. Conservatives are free to keep challenging the right to an abortion if that’s their goal, but obscuring the path to accessing one on the basis of fabricated health assertions delegitimizes their claims to economic liberty. That’s why proponents of economic liberty should be very concerned about how abortion clinics fare at the Supreme Court (Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt) in their challenge to the licensing regime that Texas put in place to distort the market for abortion services on the pretext of protecting health. Unlike the split over economic protectionism, it is black-letter law that blocking women from obtaining pre-viability abortions is not a legitimate state interest. So if the Court upholds anti-competitive regulations on the basis of bogus health claims when a fundamental right—which gets a higher standard of review—is at issue, the libertarian campaign to open the markets in interior design and eyebrow threading is definitely doomed.

But I don’t think the Court is going to uphold Texas’s anti-competitive regulations—they are a flagrant attack on the Court’s abortion precedent. The Court is likely to strike down the law on the grounds that it is an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to access abortion—because a woman seeking an abortion in Texas will have to travel hundreds of miles, go out of state, or have the procedure later than she wants. But striking down the law without also clearly rejecting the lower court’s rational-basis analysis, in which it held that courts cannot even look at evidence that a law lacks medical validity, will leave a bad precedent in place for those fighting the market cartels.