County Clerk

The county clerk in a sleepy town finds himself on the frontlines of a national fight over abortion care. When a New York doctor prescribes abortion meds to a Texas woman, a state's rights fight erupts. Ulster County Clerk Taylor Bruck is front and center when he invokes the "shield law" to prevent Texas AG Ken Paxton from filing a case against the doctor. Produced by Anna Sussman and Zoe Ferrigno. Original score by Dirk Schwarzhoff. Season 16 - Episode 43 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:19Glynn Washington?

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• 2:29Glynn Washington?

  Snappers, you know that snap judgment is not the news. But our next piece, it does begin with a news story. A news story about a doctor in the state of New York providing abortion pills to a woman in Texas.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So after Roe was overturned, there was a realization that you could send abortion pills in the mail to any state, including states with bans.

• 2:56Glynn Washington?

  This story was about abortion rights in different states. It had massive implications for America.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so which state's laws are going to wind up on top here? This is a question about states' rights, right?

• 3:10Glynn Washington?

  What happened next was Texas decided to sue the doctor in New York State for sending the abortion medicine to Texas. And here's where it gets interesting. There is this one local administrator, a county clerk, who found himself right in the middle of this huge national story. And so we thought, what's up with that guy? Snap's Anna Sussman was like, that's my home county. So we sent Anna to hunt him down. Snap judgment.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  OK, I'm pulling up at the county hall. I think the last time I was here was to get my learner's permit on my 16th birthday.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Hi there. I'm looking for the county clerk's office.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Second floor.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  After a few wrong doors, I find Taylor Brock, a very young and smiley county clerk with curly hair and a big wooden desk piled with folders and letters.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  I like files. I like files. I especially like indexes. And I really like the tactile aspect of documents. I like the way that the paper has evolved over time. When you go back and look at our records from the 1650s versus the 1770s versus the 1850s. My name's Taylor Brock. I'm the acting Ulster County Clerk. In New York State, every county needs to have a clerk. We're really the keepers of the records.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  When I was a little kid, my great-granduncle was the county clerk. He's actually the second-longest-serving Ulster County clerk in history. He was the county clerk for about 45 years. I always admired him and the work that he did, and especially just through his reputation. Everyone in the community really admired what he did. Everyone liked him, had good things to say. That's one positive about county clerks, since we don't engage in lawmaking. You tend to not make too many enemies.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Okay, let's go to the day we're gonna talk about.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  I drove into work, no coffee, no donut, no nothing. It was a totally normal day. I took my lunch break, and when I came back from lunch, our judgment clerk came in and said, "Hey, Taylor, we just received this interesting judgment. I don't know if you want to take a look at it." And I knew immediately what it was about.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  The judgment was from the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office against a doctor named Dr. Carpenter in New Paltz, which is in Taylor's County. But New York had enacted a S.H.I.E.L.D. law just for this reason: to protect doctors like Dr. Carpenter who provide abortion care out of state.

• 6:06Speaker 06

  Welcome back to Morning Joe. A new law gives doctors in New York State legal protections to now serve women in other states where abortion is banned.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Protection, or New York, rather, protects abortion access and has a S.H.I.E.L.D. law protecting providers from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions. So we have a...

• 6:28Speaker 03

  How did you find out about the New York State S.H.I.E.L.D. law?

• 6:32Speaker 05

  I first learned about the New York State S.H.I.E.L.D. law through a newspaper article when they were deliberating passing it, but I never saw myself being involved. It said that "No government employee shall comply in any proceeding, civil or criminal, in a case related to healthcare services rendered via telehealth that are legal in New York State." The law is pretty clear. It says that you shall not comply with this.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  The Texas Attorney General's office was just asking Taylor's office to file this judgment against Dr. Carpenter for $113,000 and let the courts handle it.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  You know, I've only been in this job a few months.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  There was a lot of questions, very fast, and I felt a lot of things at once.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  You know, maybe a little frustrated that another state was suing a constituent of mine. Then it was almost like fear, like, what do we do about this?

• 7:49Speaker 05

  We immediately started making phone calls to try to figure out what we should do legally with this.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  We called the Attorney General's office, told them what happened, and they were like, "You do whatever you feel is necessary."

• 8:09Speaker 03

  I am shocked that the Attorney General's office said, "Taylor, it's up to you."

• 8:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's, the county clerks are in an interesting position where we're not judges. Like, we just filed the papers. So it was, yeah, really bizarre. We didn't know what was going to happen or what we were going to do.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  The Texas Attorney General's office was calling, like, almost every day for updates. They were like, "Do you have it? Are you doing something with it? Like, what's going on?"

• 8:47Speaker 03

  He said he technically had 30 days to respond, but felt the pressure from these daily calls. So he was on the phone and in Zoom rooms, trying to ask people all around the state what the consequences might be either way.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  The Attorney General's office said, "If you don't file it, what we expect Texas to do is to sue me, likely to sue me in my capacity as clerk. And there's also the potential that they sue me individually for, like, obstruction of justice or something."

• 9:20Speaker 05

  And they gave me a heads up, like, "If you play in this realm, you're going to make people mad, kind of nationwide, so just be prepared for that."

• 9:33Speaker 05

  And it was another one of those things where like, how do you prepare for that? I don't know how to prepare for that. Prepare mentally, okay, but what do I trap my house like Home Alone? Like, how do I realistically prepare for this?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Did you talk to your wife?

• 9:52Speaker 05

  Yes. We were walking the dog and I was like, something came up and it's gonna be a big deal. She was eight and a half months pregnant at the time, too. I was like, we have a daughter coming, like, we are gonna receive death threats with this, probably. And she was basically like, you know, what are we scared of? Like, let's go.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  You are like being used as a sacrificial lamb in a test case.

• 10:20Speaker 05

  Knowingly. Like, we went into this knowing that we were the test case. So it was either we do this, or we really throw our constituent under the bus and push it off to the next time that happens, and I wasn't comfortable doing that at all.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Where is your great uncle buried, if anywhere?

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Kingston.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  I'm imagining a scene where we go, we go there and tell your great uncle what you did.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  He might yell at me.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  I imagine he would have said, "Don't get involved. Go ahead and file it. Shut your mouth and let everything play out."

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Was that option tempting to you?

• 11:06Speaker 05

  It was, but it's still, I couldn't get past the fact that by doing that, I seemed to be breaking the S.H.I.E.L.D. law. And I wasn't comfortable with that at all.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  It was well before the 30 days, but he decided to do it and get it over with.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  It was me and my chief deputy and our judgment clerk. Our judgment clerk is typically the one that accepts or rejects, but I made sure to do this one myself because I didn't want to implicate her in any way. I felt there was a chance whoever hit that button is actually gonna be litigated against as well. It actually says on the transmittal that's sent, "Who hit the button?" When I clicked the button, I didn't feel relief necessarily. That's when it became real.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  A minute, maybe two minutes after we rejected it, my direct line rang. The Texas Attorney General's office called us and they said, "We just received this rejection. Why was it rejected?" And we told them, "It's right on the sheet that we sent, but it's based on the S.H.I.E.L.D. law. We're not to comply with out-of-state proceedings." And they said, "How do we remedy it?" And we said, "You can't. You don't remedy it. You can't file this in New York." And they were just kind of silent, which surprised me because I expected they were expecting us to do that.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And the New York clerk says, "Hold up. No, we are not even accepting this court document from you."

• 12:51Speaker 07

  The Ulster County clerk says he will not file a summary judgment against a New Paltz, New York doctor being sued in Texas for prescribing abortion medication via telehealth.

• 13:01Speaker 08

  We had a little surprise to hear that a local clerk would know about this law and also be able to like unilaterally stand up to a judgment like this.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  We rejected it on a Wednesday, I believe. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, did not sleep well. Saturday, I slept for like 17 hours. Like it, everything just stopped at once.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Have you received death threats?

• 13:29Speaker 05

  I think I've received four realistic threats. One email that said, you know, "If I catch you in person, I don't care. I'll catch an assault charge and like you're gonna get it." But many of them seemed like bots. One of them had their Facebook banner was the Russian flag.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Do you worry that you now, following this event, this decision, might not be as beloved as Great Uncle Al?

• 14:04Speaker 05

  I do. I do worry that a bit.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  It's been months since Taylor pressed that reject button. But it didn't go away for him.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Given the severity of the different potential outcomes that can be a little harrowing, thinking like, oh, you know, we might just get a court order that says we have to file this, or, oh, you know, you might end up in jail.

• 14:33Speaker 05

  Little things concern me when I'm watching baseball and they show the Houston Astros score. Anytime I think of Texas, when a Texas license plate drives past me, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's still in the waiting. I got invited to go to Texas Roadhouse recently and was like, oh, yeah, I don't know if I'll be able to go to that state this time next year. Anytime Texas is brought up, it all comes right back.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  We're at a stalemate right now, just waiting to see what happens, waiting for them to get back to us.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  So, reading the news stresses me out more than it generally did. I'll put it that way.

• 15:28Glynn Washington?

  Thank you to Taylor Bruck for sharing your world with us. Now, Anna did receive a text from Taylor, saying that he had received another letter from Ken Paxton's office, giving him one more chance to change his mind.

• 15:43Glynn Washington?

  He did not, in fact, change his mind.

• 15:47Glynn Washington?

  The original score for this piece is by Dirk Swartzoff. It was produced by Anna Sussman and Zoe Ferrigno.

• 16:03Glynn Washington?

  Oh, you made it. And if you missed even a moment, no. The Snap Judgment Storytelling Podcast awaits your ears each and every week. Your reviews on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Amazon Music make Snap Snap. Snap Judgment's secret fortress of solitude is hidden within the bowels of KQED in San Francisco. No Snap Studios content can be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Snap. The union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO Local 51.

• 16:45Glynn Washington?

  Snap is brought to you by the team that knows to eat everything in their plate. That is Nancy Lopez, Pat Massey Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Gorio, John Facile, Shayna Shealy, Taylor DeCott, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge, David Exame, Regina Berriaco. And this is not the news. No way is this the news. But this is PRX.