Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.

A major abortion case likely headed to the Supreme Court may be creating a sense of déjà vu. Louisiana is one of several states trying to shut down telehealth abortion access nationwide. The stakes are high. Telehealth accounts for roughly 30 percent of all abortions. Its availability is the reason that red states have struggled to enforce criminal abortion bans. Louisiana argues that the Food and Drug Administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously in 2023 in allowing telehealth access to mifepristone, the first of two pills used in the typical medication-abortion protocol. The state also argues that current rules violate the Comstock Act, a 19th-century obscenity law that Louisiana characterizes as a de facto national abortion ban. The state is asking the 5th Circuit to immediately pause telehealth access to mifepristone as the case continues.

The strange thing is that Louisiana asked the 5th Circuit for the same thing last year. A different panel drawn from the judges of that court granted the state’s request and temporarily blocked telehealth access, but that order was slapped down by the Supreme Court, which last spring granted a request made by mifepristone’s manufacturers to leave access to the drug untouched. The court explained that the status quo on mifepristone would remain in place until the Supreme Court deals with a certiorari petition in the case or the 5th Circuit rules on Louisiana’s current appeal.

And in that appeal, Louisiana is asking the 5th Circuit for exactly what the Supreme Court said the state couldn’t have. Louisiana’s move seems to reflect a mixture of impatience and anxiety. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion plaintiffs have struggled........

© Slate