The Supreme Court this afternoon declined to hear a case involving public funding of groups that provide abortion procedures, such as Planned Parenthood. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the Court’s four activist justices in voting to deny cert, and the remaining three issued a blistering dissent, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Immediately after the decision was announced this morning, CNN published an article entitled “Supreme Court sides with Planned Parenthood in funding fight.” A Politico reporter, meanwhile, tweeted that “ROBERTS and KAVANAUGH [sic] joined with the court’s progressives to preserve Planned Parenthood’s public funding.”
Both of these assertions are inaccurate. The Supreme Court didn’t side with Planned Parenthood, nor did it preserve the abortion provider’s funding. It declined to hear the case at all, and the decision not to grant cert took no position on the merits of the case. Claiming that the decision in some way affirmed abortion funding is patently false.
What’s more, the case itself had to do with whether Medicaid recipients have standing to challenge states’ determination of which groups qualify as Medicaid providers. There is currently a circuit-court split on the question. The merits of any given state law on public funding of abortion isn’t at stake in the case at all.
Nonetheless, the CNN article claimed that “the case concerned whether [states] can block Medicaid funds from offices that provide such women with annual health screens, contraceptive coverage and cancer screening.” It didn’t. It concerned whether individuals have the standing to bring their own suit against a state’s determination of which providers qualify under Medicaid.
It’s almost as if journalists are willing to abandon the facts in order to convince readers that Planned Parenthood is under unjust attack — and that the Supreme Court has sided with the abortion corporation.
So what did Thomas say? Ramesh Ponnuru reports at National Review,
Clarence Thomas wrote, and Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch joined, an opinion saying that the Court should have taken the case. Thomas adds:
So what explains the Court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named “Planned Parenthood.” That makes the Court’s decision particularly troubling, as the question presented has nothing to do with abortion. It is true that these particular cases arose after several States alleged that Planned Parenthood affiliates had, among other things, engaged in “the illegal sale of fetal organs” and “fraudulent billing practices,” and thus removed Planned Parenthood as a state Medicaid provider. . . . But these cases are not about abortion rights. They are about private rights of action under the Medicaid Act. Resolving the question presented here would not even affect Planned Parenthood’s ability to challenge the States’ decisions; it concerns only the rights of individual Medicaid patients to bring their own suits.
Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty. If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background.
At Legal Insurrection, Mary Chastain explained,
Four Supreme Court justices need to agree in order for the court to accept the case. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch wanted to take up the case. This means that new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the liberals along with Chief Justice John Roberts.Read more here.
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