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Saying the matter was urgent and important, the brief also asked the court to consider adding the question of the law’s constitutionality to the docket of cases it plans to hear this year, bypassing the appeals court, which is scheduled to hear arguments on it in December. The Supreme Court is already scheduled to hear another major abortion case, involving a Mississippi law, in December.

“S.B. 8 is an affront to the United States’ sovereign interests in maintaining the supremacy of federal law and ensuring that the traditional mechanisms of judicial review endorsed by Congress and this court remain available to challenge unconstitutional state laws,” the Justice Department brief said.

In a bitterly divided decision last month in a different case, one brought by abortion providers regarding the same law, the Supreme Court let the law go into effect, effectively ending access to abortion for most Texas women. The majority said there were procedural obstacles that counseled against granting the providers’ request to block the law.

Late last month, the providers asked the court to take another look at the case and to put their request on an unusually fast track. Late Monday afternoon, after having taken no action on the request for almost a month, the court ordered officials in Texas to respond to the providers’ motion by noon on Thursday, the same deadline it had set for a response to the Justice Department’s application.

The Justice Department, in a brief filed by Brian H. Fletcher, the acting solicitor general, said the two cases were different. The federal government has interests and powers different from those of private litigants, he wrote, adding that it is not required to overcome the procedural hurdles at issue in the earlier ruling.