On Wednesday, the White House released a statement:

Today, Texas law SB8 went into effect. This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century.

The Texas law will significantly impair women’s access to the health care they need, particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes. And, outrageously, it deputizes private citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who they believe has helped another person get an abortion, which might even include family members, health care workers, front desk staff at a health care clinic, or strangers with no connection to the individual.

My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade nearly five decades ago and will protect and defend that right.

The law went into effect because the Supreme Court took no action to prevent it from going into effect. You can thank the extreme deviousness of the anti-choice movement for that because they designed SB8 carefully to prevent injunctive relief. Ordinarily, a law that likely violates the Constitution will be put on hold until it can be litigated before the Court, but in this case there’s no governmental enforcement mechanism. The state of Texas doesn’t play an active role here, so there’s nothing they can be prevented from doing. Instead, the law empowers ordinary citizens to take abortion providers and facilitators to court and win a $10,000 judgment if they can prove that an abortion took place after six weeks of pregnancy.

Most obviously, this creates tremendous financial liability for anyone who provides abortion services in Texas, and those services will certainly cease in reaction. Clinics will close their doors, and may not reopen even if later court rulings overturn the law. In this way, reproductive choice ended in Texas today, and it will not fully return even in an optimistic scenario.

Texas is a risky place for the Republicans to begin this campaign. It might be the next domino to fall to the Democrats, following Arizona and Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, so the GOP can ill afford to alienate millions of women who until this morning were more concerned about the Democrats’ so-called secularism and political correctness than any direct threat to their rights or the rights of their daughters.

Without Texas in the red column, the Republicans aren’t even competitive on the national political stage, and now they’ve really energized the opposition while creating a horde of new enemies.

But political comeuppance is no substitute for constitutional rights and reproductive freedom. This is one of the darkest days in the country’s recent history. The Taliban didn’t just capture Kabul–the American version just captured Austin.