Appeals court sees little urgency in speeding up the challenge to the Texas abortion ban after a contentious hearing

(CNN)In a tense hearing Friday, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals signaled that — for now — it was likely to keep the Texas abortion case out of the hands of a federal judge who in the past had blocked the state’s six-week ban on abortion. The 5th Circuit panel is deciding what should come next in abortion clinics’ federal lawsuit challenging the ban after the Supreme Court kept the case alive in a decision handed down last month.”Maybe we should just sit on this until the end of June,” Judge Edith Jones said Friday, citing a separate challenge to Roe v. Wade already at the high court.

“By that time, it is very possible the hot potato will be in the seat of the Supreme Court,” she added.

The clinics say the case should be sent to US District Court Judge Robert Pitman, who blocked the law last October in a separate case brought by the Justice Department, only for that order to be frozen by the 5th Circuit.

The providers’ request got no apparent traction with two of the three judges on the appellate panel. The third judge — the panel’s sole Democratic appointee — had already said he would grant the request in a dissent that decried the “impermissible delay to the vindication of the constitutional rights of Texas women in federal court.”Instead, the appellate panel’s Republican-appointed majority seems poised to grant a request from Texas and the ban’s other legal defenders to send the case to the Texas Supreme Court. The defenders say that, before the federal lawsuit moves any further, the Texas Supreme Court needs to weigh in on state law questions that they say were left unresolved by the US Supreme Court’s decision last month.

Jones, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, appeared to agree. She warned that the federal courts are “all going to have egg on our faces” if the Texas State Supreme Court interpreted the state law in a way that was at odds with how the federal judges were approaching the case.She also floated the idea that the 5th Circuit could just sit on the case until the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in a separate abortion case it heard last month, where the conservative justices may make significant changes to the court precedent that protects abortion rights.Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan, an appointee of President Donald Trump, meanwhile questioned whether there was really any urgency in moving the federal lawsuit along, given the ways the US Supreme Court had already scaled back the clinics’ case.

Four months and counting that most abortions have been illegal in Texas

The legal issues before the 5th Circuit are extremely technical. But at stake is whether abortion providers will have any shot in the coming months to get an order that would at least partially block enforcement of the law.The clinics have already asked the Supreme Court to intervene yet again in the 5th Circuit’s handling of the case. So far, the justices have not taken any action on that request, which was filed Monday night.