Last updated on 2026-10-06
Attorney General Marty Jackley batted .500 for South Dakota this week in the one-party state’s war on the First Amendment.
On Thursday, Jackley secured an unusual en banc rehearing of his defense of 2025 House Bill 1184, the Legislature’s attempt to ignore prior case law and move the deadline for submitting initiative petitions up three months from mild May to frigid February. The Attorney General’s office muffed that argument in summer 2025 before the federal District Court and again this year on appeal on a 2–1 decision from an Eighth Circuit panel.
Seizing on the dissent from that panel, Jackley appealed to the Eighth Circuit for an en banc hearing—i.e., a rehearing of the appeal by all eleven Eighth Circuit judges. A petition for a rehearing is a really long shot: federal appellate courts grant less than 1% of such petitions. But Marty rolled the Yahtzee this time: the Eighth Circuit said, sure, Marty, try again. The full Eighth Circuit roster will hear oral arguments from Jackley and from democracy-defending plaintiff Rick Weiland and his ballot question org Dakotans for Health in January 2027 in St. Louis.
In granting Jackley’s en banc petition, the Eighth Circuit also vacated the three-judge appellate panel’s August ruling. However, the order to vacate and rehear does not appear to stay the original district court injunction of the February deadline, meaning the Secretary of State still may not enforce the February deadline. But whether or not that injunction is stayed, with Jackley and the Eighth Circuit keeping the appeal alive, anyone planning and initiative for the 2028 general election still doesn’t know if the deadline for turning in signed petitions will be the first Tuesday in February of 2028, the deadline suggested by past court rulings of first Tuesday in May, or some other date that may bubble up out of the rehearing of the state’s appeal.
A.G. Jackley didn’t fare as well at the Eighth Circuit on his anti-abortion-speech bender. This summer, the District Court tossed 2026 House Bill 1274, the Legislature’s attempt to quash any talk about the abortion services that the state of South Dakota now denies to hundreds of thousands of women. The state appealed that decision, and Jackley asked the Eighth Circuit to stay the lower court’s injunction against the abortion-speech ban while the appeal is pending. But Thursday (yup, same day as his en banc win), the Eighth Circuit rejected that request… meaning, for the moment, Jackley still can’t put Nancy Turbak Berry in jail for wearing her sweatshirt informing women about access to mifepristone.
Both appeals will outlast Jackley’s tenure as Attorney General. Marty is suggesting he’s game for arguing the petition-deadline case for the state after he leaves office, and he’d likely be even more fired up to carry the anti-abortion banner before the Eighth Circuit next year, but hey, Lance Russell! In case Marty wins his bid for U.S. House and is too busy next year protecting Trump from impeachment, you’d better be reading up on those two cases for when you take charge of the A.G.’s office in January… and checking your own gut on just how hard you, a good constitutional conservative, want to argue for curtailing South Dakotans’ First-Amendment rights.
No one has anything to say here so I’ll slip this in
Cory Are you sure you didn’t use some S.I. on the above post?
Paragraph three shows tell-tale signs of such
No need to respond
Good campaign slogan for Marty: Jackley the Jackal. It could be more specific. The black backed jackal, the side striped jackal, or the golden jackal for whatever audience he’s trying to attract. A jackal for Trump
Jackoffley certainly is proving his hate for his constituents’ First Amendment rights. Why would anyone vote the that clown.
abortions are for wimps
real women go the distance
in South Dakota, pregnant women shovel snow, mow lawns and bale hay
it’s getting old, all the complaining from the deadbeats who don’t want to pay child support.
That’s the only reason some men worry about women’s access to abortion, they just don’t want to pay child support.
Real men step up.
1. Abortion is health care and a pregnant woman is the patient.
2. Ectopic pregnancies kill women.
3. Rich women have full reproductive rights while women at the lower income margins suffer chilling effects on those rights. Women in Texas, Wyoming and South Dakota who can afford it simply jump on a plane and fly to Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Denver or elsewhere for their procedures. Imagine a woman on the Standing Rock or Pine Ridge doing that.
4. In South Dakota local control is Republican control and the demented legislature’s repeated attempts to restrict access to medical care are not only mean-spirited, they’re discriminatory anti-choice extremism.
5. “Pro-life” is simply code for white people breeding. Republicans drive the abolition of women’s rights because they’re wedded to the Great Replacement Hypothesis. But, African-Americans terminate pregnancies at about the same per capita rate as white people do but don’t take their jobs. Latinas, however, have fewer abortions per capita so the extreme white wing laments it’s hemorrhaging jobs to Latinos.
6. No foetus in the United States has any civil rights. Republicans preach civil rights for human blastocysts but deny the protections of the First, Fourth and Ninth Amendments to people who enjoy cannabis.
7. Republican politicians drive their anti-woman crusade to raise campaign dollars so ending reproductive rights in red states is Balkanizing women’s health care.
8. A blastocyst is no more an unborn child than it is an unborn grandparent. Foetal development is undefined in US Constitutional law so if someone calls it a baby that’s an opinion and not a legal definition.
9. There is no foetal heartbeat until at least ten weeks into a pregnancy. What an ultrasound “hears” at six weeks are cells beginning to build a cardiac system entirely dependent on amniotic fluid produced by a person with actual civil rights!
10. States that ban women from or punish women for tapping or going out of state for their medications or procedures is government overreach and are violating the Commerce Clause enumerated in the United States Constitution.
11. One fifth of all pregnancies end in miscarriage or as some would call God working in mysterious ways but when a person with a free will chooses to terminate a pregnancy the creator doesn’t condone that decision? How does that work?
12. Medical necessity and reproductive freedoms are inalienable rights regardless of the religiosity of the few, only 1% of abortions occur in the third trimester and are performed for medical reasons such as foetal anomalies or maternal life endangerment.
13. If Republicans really want to end women’s health care decisions state governments should outlaw obesity and encourage businesses like airlines and taxi services to charge more for obese people. Food stores would have scales at tills that add surcharges according to body mass index, businesses with buffets would have scales, too and anyone with a BMI over 23 will pay an additional $1.00 for every whole number above that. Gas stations would have scales that determine price per gallon according to BMI unless you have documentation in your debit/credit card updated by your physician that you’re on a weight reduction regimen and Mr. Trump’s health guru, Mr. Kennedy, apparently concurs.
14. It’s all related: a medical industry oligopoly, gender dysphoria, polluted waterways, subsidized agriculture, absence of medical insurance, cancer and an Earth hating legislature on the dole. But, applaud the nutball Republican efforts diverting attention from the party’s culture of corruption where murders and their covers up are commonplace by clogging the legislative session with christianic religionist argle-bargle.
“Abortions are for wimps”
Yeah, that weak ass woman with pre-eclampsia! How dare she refuse to die like a tough person?
Thanks for another brain dead take, Algebra!
Algebra is symbolic, using abortion as a contortion. You know his arithmetic is off to. He’s just a variable boy.