Sorry, back to the Supreme Court. (There's a lot of this today.)
This decision is from yesterday.
Later in the post I discuss Ketanji Brown-Jackson's objection to having to actually read the law when "interpreting" the law.
States previously had the power to forbid Medicaid dollars from being used by Planned Parenthood for abortions. Supposedly -- we all know this is a lie, because money is fungible.
Now the Supreme Court says that states may cut Planned Parenthood off completely.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed South Carolina to bar Planned Parenthood's access to federal Medicaid funding for non-abortion services. The decision allows states to ban the organization from getting Medicaid reimbursements for cancer screenings and other care not related to abortion.
LOL, sure, Planned Parenthood is known for its cancer care services.
At issue was a provision of the federal Medicaid law that guarantees Medicaid patients the ability to choose their doctors, or in the words of the statute, they are entitled to "any qualified and willing provider." South Carolina, however, maintained that it could disqualify Medicaid providers for "any reason that state law allows." Or as Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, put it, "Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize abortion providers who are in direct opposition to their beliefs."
On Thursday, the Supreme Court -- by a 6-3 vote along ideological lines -- agreed.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court majority, said that regardless of the words in the statute, the law does not "clearly and unambiguously" provide individuals the right to sue to enforce the "any qualified provider" measure, as Congress didn't specifically authorize such suits.
"Though it is rare enough for any statute to confer an enforceable right, spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely to do so," he wrote. And he wrote that allowing someone to sue over one aspect of Medicaid plan requirements could also open the door to a flood of lawsuits over other requirements.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the dissenting liberal justices, described the case as a civil rights issue, saying citizens have the right to sue over deprivation of rights.
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The court's decision comes at an important time for Planned Parenthood, which is facing financial difficulties nationwide -- NPR reports that Planned Parenthood has closed at least 34 clinics since last year. And in Congress there is pending federal legislation that, if passed, would eliminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
Related: The Genius Ketanji Brown Jackson attacks her colleagues for being "textualists" -- that is, they make their rulings based on the actual text of the Constitution and the text of laws -- rather than just free-ballin' it and claiming the law means whatever she wants it to mean this morning.
ABC "News" think that this stance makes The Genius look good.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson unloaded on her Supreme Court colleagues Friday in a series of sharp dissents, castigating what she called a "pure textualism" approach to interpreting laws, which she said had become a pretext for securing their desired outcomes, and implying the conservative justices have strayed from their oath by showing favoritism to "moneyed interests."
The attack on the court's conservative majority by the junior justice and member of the liberal wing is notably pointed and aggressive but stopped short of getting personal.
She's accusing them of twisting the law on behalf of "moneyed interests." How much more personal can she get?
She's Jasmine Ratchet in a robe.
Can't wait until Alito or Thomas gets similarly "short of personal" with her, and her qualifications to sit on the Court.
It laid bare the stark divisions on the court and pent-up frustration in the minority over what Jackson described as inconsistent and unfair application of precedent by those in power.
Jackson took particular aim at Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion in a case brought by a retired Florida firefighter with Parkinson's disease who had tried to sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act after her former employer, the City of Sanford, canceled extended health insurance coverage for retirees who left the force before serving 25 years because of a disability.
Gorsuch wrote that the landmark law only protects "qualified individuals" and that retirees don't count. The ADA defines the qualified class as those who "can perform the essential functions of the employment position that such individual holds or desires."
"This court has long recognized that the textual limitations upon a law's scope must be understood as no less a part of its purpose than its substantive authorizations," Gorsuch concluded in his opinion in Stanley v. City of Sanford. It was joined by all the court's conservatives and liberal Justice Elena Kagan.
Jackson fired back, accusing her colleagues of reaching a "stingy outcome" and willfully ignoring the "clear design of the ADA to render a ruling that plainly counteracts what Congress meant to -- and did -- accomplish" with the law. She said they had "run in a series of textualist circles" and that the majority "closes its eyes to context, enactment history and the legislature's goals."
"I cannot abide that narrow-minded approach," she wrote.
I forgot to mention in the previous post: Barret insulted Jackson by stating that Jackson doesn't know the difference between a judgment and an opinion.
A judgment is the basic "this side wins, this side loses" part of a ruling. You have to pay this guy $50,000. You have to stop building housing complexes on an old Indian burial site.
The opinion announces the rule underlying that judgment, and announces the rule-going-forward in all similar cases.
Coney made the point that lowly district court justices can only render judgments for the parties before it -- but then their opinions assert an anti-constitutional unlimited jurisdiction across the entire country. And Coney accuses Jackson of not being able to tell a judgment from an opinion. This distinction may be lost on a layman who doesn't understand the legalese of the law, like Ketanji Brown Jackson, but it is extremely important to actual jurists who weren't absent the day they taught law in law school.
Coney says that Jackson ignorantly believes that a mere opinion about cases well outside of a lowly district judge's jurisdiction have the full force of law.
The whole article -- by ABC "News" -- is about the ignorant Ketanji's constant dunking on her colleagues for believing that the text of the law matters when interpreting the law. ABC "News" thinks she's a brave, tough-talking hero, like other progressive Moron-Heroes like Donkey-Chompers and Jasmine Ratchet.
So just so you know -- liberals pick and choose from a thousand different outside factors they can use to challenge, undermine, and twist the actual language of the law. They will claim, for example, that if someone proposed an amendment to a law which was rejected by legislators, that amendment should still be consulted to determine "legislative intent." They claim that everything can be used to "interpret" the text of a law except for the actual text of the law.
They're big fans of citing legislative and judicial decisions in foreign countries as evidence of a supposed "consensus" among "world authorities."
Of course, they only pick and choose these extraneous sources according to how they advance the progressive/communist cause. They never will cite legislative history to advance a conservative interpretation.
Congress passing a law is only one step in the legislative process, radicals believe. The second step is stuffing into that law a whole wish list of leftwing priorities, stuff Congress could have put into the law but didn't, or even stuff that was proposed to be added to the law but was affirmatively rejected.
It doesn't matter. Leftwing judges think they have plenary power to say a law means whatever they wish it to mean. The actual law is just a starting point for their Judicial Jazz Odysseys.
Note that racist race-hustler and DEI hire Jamelle Bouie thinks that Ketanji can take shots at her white colleagues all day long, but the moment they point out that she seems perfectly ignorant of the law, it's "racialized disrespect."
By the way, "Jamelle" is a made-up name, but it's even worse, because the -elle ending is a feminine ending. At least if you're going to make up names, try to have a basic understanding of how language works. The male form of this made-up name would be "Jamel."