The Supreme Court has issued a flurry of opinions at the end of its term. Two cases, which seem to be unrelated, read together, give a real insight into the pro-business anti-individual rights that this Supreme Court is. One of them has to do with Planned Parenthood. The other one, e-cigarettes. My name is Dina Dahl with the Midas Touch Network.

Let's break this down. Now, both of the cases have to do with this initial question of whether or not

the party bringing the lawsuit is entitled to bring the lawsuit. Do they have a right to sue in court?

This is what you can call maybe a procedural question.

There's always procedural hurdles that any party to a lawsuit has to satisfy.

We have things like jurisdiction.

Did you bring the lawsuit in the right court, state court, federal court, which state, which county, let's say.

Then there's also the question of standing. There may actually have been a harm, but are you the

one that was harmed? Are you the one that has the right to bring this case? In this case,

both of the procedural questions have to do with a congressional act. The one with Planned

Parenthood has to do with a congressional act that was enacted after the Civil War, Section

1983. And it allowed individuals to sue the federal government when a federal government was

taking away its rights, its privileges, basically

because of what happened with the Civil War and the knowing, Congress knowing that it was going

to be hard for them to enact laws, they gave a redress, they gave people, individual people, the right to basically hold

the federal government to account. Because they knew the federal government maybe wasn't going

to do the right thing always. So they gave them a mechanism for how to protect it. The one with

the e-cigarette case has to do with an act that Congress also passed. It is called specifically having to do

with vaping. It was a family prevention vaping act and it was enacted in order to basically stop the

proliferation of vaping because a lot of it was geared toward teenagers. So in both cases, a congressional

act allowed for enforcement, let's say, of by parties to make sure that the federal

government was following the law. So what happened here? In the Planned Parenthood case,

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