Supreme Court Makes It Even Easier for Trump to Deport People
The Supreme Court just issued its worst ruling for women since Dobbs.
The court ruled that Medicaid recipients effectively do not have the right to choose their health care provider, granting states the ability to refuse to cover Medicaid expenses at Planned Parenthood sites.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, arguing that the law does not include the “rights-creating language” that would allow patients to sue states when their provider choice is restricted.
It’s the third time that South Carolina’s defunding case has reached the Supreme Court. The state initially moved to cut Planned Parenthood off of Medicaid funding in 2018. In 2020, the court rejected the state’s appeal. Three years later, the justices intervened in a lower court’s ruling, ordering it to reconsider the case after a relevant ruling had been issued by the nine-judge bench.
South Carolina has one of the most prohibitive abortion policies in the nation, restricting access after just six weeks, before most individuals know they’re pregnant and just one week before drug store pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy hormones in their earliest, and least reliable, window.
The court’s three progressive justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson arguing that the court was effectively unravelling a landmark Reconstruction-era civil rights law.
Section 1983 of the United States Code, enacted in 1871, enabled Americans to bring suits in federal court to enforce their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from depriving persons of due process and equal protection of the law.
The code has been utilized to fight against excessive force, racial profiling, wrongful convictions, and other instances in which officials violate an individual’s constitutional rights. But as of Thursday, the code may no longer apply to Americans’ ability to choose their healthcare provider.
In her dissenting opinion, Jackson wrote that the ruling “is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.”
“It will strip South Carolinians—and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country—of a deeply personal freedom: the ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable,” she said. “The Court today disregards Congress’s express desire to prevent that very outcome.”
This story has been updated.