In a 6-3 ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that states can remove Planned Parenthood funding from their Medicaid programs. The split went exactly as we've come to expect, with six conservative justices ruling in favor and three liberal justices dissenting. (Oddly, the Associated Press refers to it as a "divided" ruling, as if we haven't come to expect the conservative-liberal divide that we see in most cases.)
The AP report drips with bias:
A divided Supreme Court allowed states to cut off Medicaid money to Planned Parenthood in a ruling handed down Thursday amid a wider Republican-backed push to defund the country’s biggest abortion provider.
The case centers on funding for other health care services Planned Parenthood provides in South Carolina, but the ruling could have broader implications for Medicaid patients.
The AP's Lindsay Whitehurst leans heavily on the old left-wing saw that Planned Parenthood is about more than just abortions, writing, "Public health care money generally can’t be used to pay for abortions. Medicaid patients go to Planned Parenthood for things like contraception, cancer screenings and pregnancy testing, in part because it can be tough to find a doctor who takes the publicly funded insurance, the organization has said."
In April, SCOTUSblog's Amy Howe wrote:
South Carolina – represented by the conservative advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom – appealed to the Supreme Court last June, asking the justices to decide whether Edwards and Planned Parenthood have a legal right to sue to enforce the Medicaid Act. The justices agreed in December to weigh in.
In its brief at the Supreme Court, South Carolina argues that under the Supreme Court’s cases, because the Medicaid law was enacted pursuant to Congress’s spending clause power, it “must unambiguously confer individual federal rights.” The Supreme Court, it says, has made clear that this is a stringent test. The law must use words that explicitly create the right that a plaintiff seeks to enforce, and it must confer the right “directly on a class of persons that includes the plaintiff in the case.”
The ruling comes at a pivotal time for conservatives, as pro-life groups and many Republicans are pushing for the federal government to defund Planned Parenthood. Taking away Medicaid funding in some states may be one more domino to fall in that effort.
This is a developing story, and we'll have more information as it becomes available.
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