The Supreme Court’s conservatives just split on whether to hear a Planned Parenthood-related case. Four votes are required to grant a case, but just three of the conservative justices favored hearing it. They were peeved enough to dissent from their colleagues’ denial of certiorari. The split isn’t of tidal importance, but it’s almost certainly significant to some degree.
At immediate issue is whether Medicaid recipients have a right to challenge state-made determinations about qualified providers. If they do, Medicaid patients can challenge states over highly-politicized decisions to eliminate access to Planned Parenthood affiliates. Five federal appeals courts have ruled that patients do have that right; just one disagreed.
The oldest of these rulings, from 2006, concerns a state’s provision of pediatric screening; it has nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. That decision proves just why it is so critical that Medicaid patients be able to hold the state accountable for providing care as mandated by federal law. If they can’t, patients’ mechanisms for challenging access to and quality of care under Medicaid would be severely curtailed.
The four-page dissent from the court’s denial of certiorari—a not-so-usual phenomenon—was authored by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. They argue that the Supreme Court is shirking its responsibility to resolve circuit splits and “confusion among the lower courts.” Sure, states were motivated by anti-abortion animus revved via false claims of fetal organ sales, but this isn’t a case about abortion, Thomas writes indignantly. Planned Parenthood would still be welcome to challenge states’ determinations; it’s just a matter of whether individual Medicaid patients can do the same.
There are plenty of reasons Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh might’ve withheld their votes that have nothing to do with their ultimate willingness to hear the issue or their position. A pessimist could posit that the justices want to address some more fundamental issue surrounding reproductive rights, rather than this derivative issue. It could also be that the defectors don’t think a 5-1 circuit split requires Supreme Court intervention or that this case isn’t a good vehicle, to their minds, for addressing the issue.
A better-case scenario: Roberts and Kavanaugh don’t want to hear that case for public policy-related reasons. They’ll let individual circuits make the law for the states they cover. If that’s the case, it could bode well for a host of other deeply important issues queued for the court, as ACLU’s Joshua Block points out.
