Title comes from this Bloomberg writeup by Mary Anne Pazanowski that probably is paywalled, but as you can tell, their reporter’s read was pretty negative:

A panel of Ninth Circuit judges on Wednesday appeared unlikely to give the Satanic Temple another shot at suing Idaho over measures that bar it from providing abortion care to members in the state.

Questions of the group’s standing to sue—personal, associational, organizational, or otherwise—dominated the oral arguments, with Judge M. Margaret McKeown asking attorneys for both sides to clarify how the Satanic Temple can proceed when it hasn’t named any member who lives in Idaho, is pregnant, and wants to end the pregnancy.

It can’t, state’s attorney Alan Hurst told the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

But W. James Mac Naughton, a private practitioner in Newton, N.J., representing the Satanic Temple, said there’s a “statistical probability” that such a person exists. In his analysis, at least three people in Idaho currently are being harmed by laws that prevent the Satanic Temple from setting up a clinic or mailing abortion-inducing pills into the state, he said.

Without a name, however, there’s no way to show the Satanic Temple’s claimed harm is anything more that pure speculation, Hurst said.

Judge John B. Owens didn’t have any substantive questions for the attorneys, while Judge Ronald M. Gould stayed silent.

The whole oral argument also is available online on YouTube and via PACER for anyone who’d like to listen to it for themselves.

So yeah, The Satanic Temple did a really bad job with both this and the nearly identical abortion-ban lawsuit in Indiana. We’ve written about this before briefly in our 2023 legal wrap-up of TST’s cases and in detail for Indiana. This was not a surprise. We basically called this exact course of events back when they filed their original complaints.

In both cases, TST did not establish “standing“, which is a fundamental aspect of any litigation, and that meant nothing else they did mattered. Monique Merrill and Courthouse News Service did a pretty good write-up of it, and it is not paywalled.

“This case is about coerced motherhood and money,” James Mac Naughton, an attorney representing the Satanic Temple, told the court.

But before Mac Naughton got too far into his argument, U.S. Circuit Judge Mary McKeown questioned him about the Temple’s standing.

“Maybe you can explain to me what have you alleged that give you the predicates of associational standing?” the Bill Clinton appointee asked. 

Now, if TST had been able to find a member in Idaho that became pregnant and was forced by Idaho laws to remain involuntarily pregnant, they still would have had a tough case to litigate based on their arguments. Actually, back in January 2024, in dismissing the case for lack of standing, the federal district court judge David C. Nye went on to say, “In this case, however, to provide additional support for dismissal, the Court will briefly address the merits of TST’s causes of action and Defendants’ arguments in support of dismissal,” and then addressed all TST’s arguments (“Takings claims”, “Involuntary Servitude”, Equal Protection”, and “State law Claims”) on the merits.

Judge Nye finished:

TST avers this case is straightforward. But it is not. Its arguments, while interesting, are convoluted and do not lead to the desired result. And the fact that it now, belatedly, wants to reframe one of its causes of action illustrates the novelty of its arguments.

The original version of the Idaho case that TST laid out — again, almost literally copy-and-pasted from what they did in Indiana — didn’t have anyone in particular it was representing, so the case couldn’t get to any deeper arguments for that judge. But that’s not some unfair trick; that’s the standards of basic litigation.

Two things make it really hard for TST to succeed that they can blame themselves for:

1. the frequent schisms mean very few people actually stay around long enough to be used as Plaintiffs for a suit and establish that standing. Organizers Rowan Astra and Hauns Olo had already left to form “Satanic Idaho” in 2022, and TST’s replacement chapter voted to leave again in 2024 as part of the larger “Memegate Schism” that year. You can make headlines and file lawsuits, sure, but you can’t actually accomplish much when your membership is just an email newsletter list and groupies who like watching movies with some guy.
2. W. James MacNaughton is a business lawyer from New York/New Jersey who TST co-owner Cevin Soling (“Malcolm Jarry”) was already using, not a reproductive rights lawyer from Idaho. Back in 2015, they ran into something similar with their “Mary Doe” plaintiff in Missouri. One case got dismissed because they didn’t know she still needed to be pregnant when they filed it, and the other was litigated up to the Missouri State Supreme Court but failed unanimously with a split concurrence. Point being, Mary Doe got fed up with Lucien Greaves and wanted to back out of the case. Similar thing killed the Chicago invocation lawsuit last year, and you can’t blame unfair judges on that.

That Courthouse News Service article also touched on how basically unserious TST’s New Mexico clinic is as far being relevant to either Indiana or Idaho abortions given that they said they only mailed abortion pills to people with New Mexico addresses.

There are already plenty of abortion clinics operating in New Mexico that just need more funding, and anyone in Idaho or Indiana would just drive to a closer state, if that’s what they needed. Yep, we went into more detail about all of that, too.

What John Oliver gets wrong about The Satanic Temple and abortion rights

Ultimately, it’s a little surprising TST told its people ahead of time to watch oral arguments for this because it wasn’t a surprise it would go this way.