I cannot say for sure when Bill Moyers first developed such a clear eyed-view of the path we were heading down, but I can say that by the time I first started working for him in 2012, as America was clawing its way out of the recession that trailed the 2008 financial crisis, it was already solidly in place.
Continue reading “Bill Moyers Saw What Was Coming”Big News: Tillis Retiring
Classic Trump-era chain of events. North Carolina Sen. Tom Tillis said he’d vote against the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump announced he’d choose one of the Tillis’ primary opponents to support. Only hours later, Tillis announced he’s retiring. This is pretty big news for the midterms. Tillis retiring almost certainly makes a North Carolina Senate pick up more likely for Democrats, especially if former governor Roy Cooper runs, which now seems increasingly likely though still not certain.
Continue reading “Big News: Tillis Retiring”Another Perspective on NYC Politics, Zionism, Jews and Everything Else
I’m sharing a post a friend of mine, Victoria Cook, wrote on Facebook about the New York City mayor’s election and Jews and Israel. That whole thing. It’s not a TPM Reader email but I’m posting it in the same vein. This is her piece, not mine. So, in the nature of things, I wouldn’t write everything in the same way or agree with every individual point. But, for me. she wrote with great subtlety about how some Jews experience this bundle of issues. She also captured something that is quite salient to me, which is that this conversation often gets clogged up on the very binary question of whether some thing or some person is antisemitic. Obviously, some people really want it to land there or insist that it not land there for their own reasons. But on these issues, for me and I guess for Victoria too, that’s often kind of beside the point.
In any case, some of this is very internal to the Jewish experience and a specific variant of Jewish experience. And TPM isn’t a site about Judaism. So if you’ve already heard enough on this topic, I get it. But, as always, I share what is interesting to me in the hope and expectation some readers may find it interesting as well. For me this helped illuminate some of my own thoughts and feelings about this that I hadn’t been able to tease apart on my own.
Continue reading “Another Perspective on NYC Politics, Zionism, Jews and Everything Else”$40 Million
A TPM Reader pointed out to me that the “Big Beautiful Bill” budgets fully $40 million dollars through what’s left of the National Endowment for the Humanities to the President “for the procurement of statues” for the President’s “Garden of Heroes.”
The Political World’s Five-Alarm Mamdani Meltdown
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
We have a stage five political freakout on our hands.
In the four days since Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani became the Democratic Party’s nominee in the New York City mayoral election, a lot of people have completely lost it. The reactions have ranged from predictable to deeply disturbing Islamophobia.
Some of the reaction to Mamdani stems from the fact the 33-year-old relatively junior lawmaker entered the race as an upstart before defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which puts him firmly on the left wing of the city and state Democratic Party spectrum. That helps explain why congressional leadership didn’t rush to embrace Mamdani and why the powerful real estate industry — which has enjoyed developer-friendly “City of Yes” policies backed by the current mayor, Eric Adams, and other Democrats — entered into what the Wall Street Journal described as “hysteria.”
Progressives are notably more critical of the Israeli government than establishment Democrats and Mamdani has a history of pro-Palestine activism. These policy differences have helped contribute to what veteran strategist Lis Smith dubbed a “full-on freakout” about Mamdani from the Democratic establishment. And, while Jewish voters are increasingly divided on Israel’s War in Gaza (and around 20 percent were supportive of Mamdani) the Republican Jewish Coalition declared “Evacuate NYC immediately” as the votes were coming in.
Other reactions included the billionaire Bill Ackman, who made a last-ditch attempt to find a candidate to save him before realizing that the rules mean there’s no room for a new dark horse on the ballot. Ackman ultimately decided to back Adams, who, after scandals, legal trouble, and a save from President Trump, is running as an independent in November’s general election. Another Influential Rich Person in New York City politics, hedge funder Dan Loeb, seemed to use a 1980’s movie reference to suggest the five boroughs have become a crime-filled hellscape where he will be forced to fight for his life. Others on the center, in business, and on the right seem set to throw their hats in with Cuomo, who has indicated he is going to keep hope alive and run it back as an independent.
Outside the city, Trump turned to — where else — Truth Social to blast Mamdani as a “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” As is her custom, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) went the even-more-apoplectic route with a seemingly AI-generated rendition of the Statue of Liberty covered in a mourning shroud.
Some of the meltdown seemed more about the fact Mamdani could become New York’s first Muslim mayor than any of his policies. Following his victory, Mamdani faced what the Guardian called a “barrage” from some who baselessly painted him as a terrorist threat. The most unhinged and purely racist attack of them all came from Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), a right-wing lawmaker whose own colorful history has included ethical questions, parading with faux Confederate soldiers, and calling for Trump to have a third term. On Thursday, Ogles fired off a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for Mamdani to be denaturalized and “DEPORTED.”
The DOJ confirmed receipt of the letter to TPM but declined to comment further. Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Ogles’ letter relied on Mamdani’s past critiques of Israeli policy to brand the mayoral candidate “an antisemitic, socialist, communist.” Mamdani has previously emphasized that he abhors antisemitism. Opting for a megaphone rather than a dog whistle, Ogles also called Mamdani “little muhammad” in his X post about the letter. It’s impossible to read that as anything other than an attempt to denigrate Mamdani’s religion. Ogles did not respond to a request for comment.
While Mamdani weathered these attacks, even some staunchly pro-Israel Democrats came to his defense. However, others, notably Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), tested the wheels on the bandwagon and took the opportunity to echo the idea Mamdani was a bridge too far.
There are now over four months to go until the general election, which is going to be a four- to five-way race. Mamdani is the obvious favorite, but it is clearly going to be quite chaotic.
Perhaps in some ways Dan Loeb and the other hysterics are right. New York is becoming a (political) warzone. Fight for your lives.
— Hunter Walker
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- The Supreme Court kept its tradition of ending its term with a series of blockbuster, and, in some cases, disastrous cases. The same nine justices will be back next year.
- Signs may be surfacing of a DOGE-linked disruption in DC’s economy.
- Has the Senate parliamentarian become too woke?
See You Next Year, Sam Alito
The Supreme Court ended this term the same way it ended last term: with another consequential ceding of power from the judicial branch to the executive branch.
In a 6-3 decision Friday authored by Amy Coney Barrett, the court ruled that national injunctions, of the sort that are currently holding many of Trump’s most lawless policies at bay, need to be more closely tailored to providing relief to the plaintiffs in a given suit. Judges cannot just shut down a policy nationwide, the conservative majority ruled. They must suspend it only for those involved in the case before them. (It is perhaps notable that this ruling comes now, and not when conservative lower-court judges used national injunctions to sideline policies throughout the Biden administration.)
The upshot of this decision is that the executive branch will have yet more room to behave in illegal ways, unchecked. And the decision acknowledged as much: “Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Barrett wrote. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
In this way, Friday’s decision was similar to 2024’s disastrous immunity decision, exempting the president almost entirely from criminal prosecution. As in the immunity decision, the justices punted the underlying issue to lower courts to figure out the details of how to apply their ruling. Last year, that underlying issue was Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution for trying to steal the 2020 election; this year, it was his attempt to end birthright citizenship. Both decisions suggested that it would be years before the Supreme Court would actually address the case on the merits.
This consequential non-ruling on birthright citizenship was not the only momentous decision to come down Friday. In another case, Justice Sam Alito wrote for the majority that parents can challenge “LGBTQ+-inclusive” texts in schools, and let their children opt out of lessons to which they object. Another ruling allowed porn sites to be effectively banned in Texas.
Notably, the Supreme Court term ended with no retirements, meaning the two oldest — and two most consistently pro-Trump — justices, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, will be back again in October. Martha-Ann Alito, recorded last year by a hidden-camera-wielding activist, expressed her hope that her husband might soon step away from the “nonsense” of being among the most powerful people in the world so that she can fly her niche right-wing flag collection during Pride month without blowback. (“I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month […] I said, ‘When you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up.’”) Now she’ll have to wait until, at least, June 2026.
— John Light
DOGE Doldrums
There are signs the economic fallout from DOGE’s mass cuts to the federal government workforce are already beginning to take a toll on the D.C.-area economy, and maybe even beyond.
Home buying and selling, historically the key to accessing the American dream and building wealth, is showing signs of a slowdown. A Bright MLS survey found 40% of realtors in the DMV area report having deals impacted by the federal government’s workforce reductions, ideated by President Donald Trump and carried out by the richest man in the world who, per Trump, also “lost his mind” — Elon Musk.
All the while, new economic data continues to signal a weakening jobs market and stalled consumer spending. A Thursday Labor Department data drop showed the number of people claiming unemployment benefits reached its highest total since November 2021 while data from the Department of Commerce found consumer spending declined slightly in May.
Real estate experts said a better look at the potential hit on the housing market may come in the fall.
As with Trump’s tariffs’ impact on inflation, the effects of the yet-to-be-finalized, deeply unpopular reconciliation package, and any economic fallout from the U.S. bombing Iran, we’ll just have to wait and see.
— Layla A. Jones
Words of Wisdom
“The WOKE Senate Parliamentarian, who was appointed by Harry Reid and advised Al Gore, just STRUCK DOWN a provision BANNING illegals from stealing Medicaid from American citizens … THE SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN SHOULD BE FIRED ASAP.”
That’s Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) or, as he likes to call himself (and encourages reporters to call him), Coach Tuberville, reacting to Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough’s decision to strike several Medicaid and health-related provisions out of the reconciliation bill, finding them to be non-compliant with the Byrd Rule.
As you can tell he is particularly mad in this instance because MacDonough nixed the provision that would cut federal funds to states that allow undocumented immigrants to get Medicaid.
This, of course, has been a major talking point for congressional Republicans as they have been bending over backwards to convince everyone that they are not cutting Medicaid except for the “waste, fraud and abuse.” The reality is undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for traditional Medicaid or Medicare benefits. Some states opt to provide health coverage to certain immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, but those programs do not use federal Medicaid dollars and come out of state’s own funds.
Still, according to Tuberville and other far-right Republicans who tried to sneak in that provision into their so-called “big beautiful” bill, access to healthcare for human beings is apparently too “WOKE.”
— Emine Yücel
Three and One Half Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s Big, Big Win
Since I haven’t written about this here, I wanted to share a few thoughts about Zohran Mamdani’s big Democratic mayoral primary win in New York. If you’ve been saturated by coverage of this race, these won’t strike you as terribly original points. I’m just sharing my perspective.
First, I see three reasons why Mamdani won.
The first is the simple fact that Democratic voters are angry and dissatisfied with the incumbent Democratic political class. We see this everywhere. It’s much less about ideology than it is often portrayed. We live in an angry, distrustful, populist age. Since the greatest expression of this mood has come from the right, Democrats have often been in the uncomfortable position of leveraging against this tendency, holding the line for institutional continuity, preservation over destruction and many other situationally understandable impulses. But the twin effects of Trump’s comeback victory and the often fractured and feeble response to it by the Democratic leadership in Washington has washed all of that away.
Continue reading “Three and One Half Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s Big, Big Win”6-3 SCOTUS Curtails Courts’ Power to Check Illegal White House Actions
The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on Friday limited the ability of courts to block presidential actions that they deem illegal, with all three liberals dissenting.
Continue reading “6-3 SCOTUS Curtails Courts’ Power to Check Illegal White House Actions”The Heist Continues, Now with a Semi at the Loading Dock
From Politico …
On the federal employee pension plan: In order to pay for the megabill, Senate Republicans are considering substantially hiking “federal employees’ retirement contributions to 15.6 percent of their salary — compared with the 9.4 percent required in the initial version of the bill — while carving out an exemption for members of Congress and their staff,” POLITICO’s Lawrence Ukenye reports.
I think “substantially” manages to understate the hike here.
Trump Says He Gave Iran Permission to Bomb U.S. Base in Qatar and…Well, Mostly Crickets?
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Alarming Verbal Diarrhea From the President
When political scientist Seth Masket shared this story on Bluesky yesterday, I couldn’t believe it was real. The right-wing Washington Times reported that at a press conference at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump revealed that he had given Iran permission to bomb the U.S.’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in retaliation for the American bombing of their nuclear sites.
“They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”
I poked around for other major coverage of this extraordinary admission, and landed only on a transcript of the press conference. And yes, amid a characteristically meandering monologue, Trump actually said that he let a foreign adversary bomb an American military installation. But this story has pretty much come and gone with virtually no attention and certainly none of the outrage commensurate with what Trump said.
Let’s consider what Trump’s verbal diarrhea here could mean. Suppose he is (for once) telling the truth. Wouldn’t that represent the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief? (A high crime or misdemeanor, perhaps?) Is he saying he let Iran get its retaliation out of its system with what he called “a very weak response” to bring an end to hostilities? Perhaps Trump simply was rambling incoherently as he basked in his new “daddy” glow at NATO.
What would have happened if a Democratic president, particularly one named Joe Biden, had said he let a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation? As you consider that hypothetical, keep in mind that House Republicans are currently spending their precious oversight time investigating the former president’s mental acuity.
Flailing Administration Attacks Press for “Lies” About Iran Nuclear Intel
Trump loyalists are taking up his charge to attack any journalist who reported on intelligence contradicting Trump’s claim to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites in last weekend’s strikes. The tenor of this authoritarian campaign is that reporters are not permitted to contradict the president.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came out swinging against his former Fox News colleague, national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin, in an early morning press conference yesterday. In response to a question from Griffin about whether the Pentagon was certain that Tehran had not moved highly enriched uranium from the Fordow site prior to the American strike, Hegseth lashed out, “Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.”
Later in the day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went after CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, after Trump had demanded she be “thrown out like a dog.” Leavitt claimed Bertrand is “being used to push a fake narrative to try to undermine the President of the United States and more importantly the brave fighter pilots who conducted one of the most successful operations in United States history.” CNN issued a statement standing by Bertrand’s reporting.
Meanwhile Senate Democrats remain unconvinced of Trump’s obliteration claims following a classified intelligence briefing yesterday. Trump ally Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who also attended the briefing, struggled to save face for the president, telling reporters afterwards, “The real question is, have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon.” Graham went on to tread lightly around Trump’s feelings. “I don’t want people to think that the site wasn’t severely damaged or obliterated,” he said. “It was. But having said that, I don’t want people to think the problem is over, because it’s not.”
Republicans Incite Hostility at the Senate Parliamentarian
Following a pattern of dangerous social media attacks on perceived political enemies, some Senate Republicans have begun to assail Elizabeth MacDonough, the nonpartisan Senate Parliamentarian who has struck numerous provisions out of the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill. NBC reports:
“The WOKE Senate Parliamentarian, who was appointed by Harry Reid and advised Al Gore, just STRUCK DOWN a provision BANNING illegals from stealing Medicaid from American citizens,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., wrote on X. “This is a perfect example of why Americans hate THE SWAMP.”
“THE SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN SHOULD BE FIRED ASAP,” he said.
MacDonough was appointed by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., in 2012, and is well-respected by leaders on both sides of the aisle. But Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, also said MacDonough needs to go and called for term limits for parliamentarians.
“She’s been here since 2012; she has a lot of power,” Marshall told reporters. “I don’t think anyone should stay here that long and have power where she doesn’t answer to anybody.”
While other Senate Republicans seem less eager for such a fight, their failure to firmly and publicly tamp down these inflammatory statements in the current climate is disheartening, to say the least.
Trump Has Cut Funding for Political Violence and Terrorism Prevention
At Mother Jones, Mark Follman reports on the dangers of Trump’s dismantling of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), a Department of Homeland Security initiative tasked with developing evidence-based community programs to prevent political violence and terrorism. The administration has diverted resources from this and other programs to fund Trump’s brutal deportation agenda.
“We’re at real risk of normalizing political violence as a part of our democracy,” CP3’s former director William Braniff told Follman. “[W]hen these norms are accepted at a societal level and encouraged at a political level, they become entrenched and really difficult to reverse.”
The Trump Administration Continues to Turn Civil Rights Upside Down
The Republican goal of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion and “gender ideology” is aimed squarely at rolling back hard-won civil rights protections for people who aren’t white, straight, or cisgender. The Trump administration is carrying out this agenda, in part, through investigations and pressure campaigns against educational institutions, threatening to cut their federal funding.
Yesterday, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services announced it is investigating the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League over trans girls playing sports, part of what it says is a “larger initiative to defend women and restore biological truth to the Federal government.”
In another arena, the New York Times reports the Justice Department is pressuring the University of Virginia to fire its president, James Ryan, “over what the department says is the school’s disregard for civil rights law over its diversity practices.” In other words, the Department of Justice, which historically has enforced civil rights laws protecting against race discrimination, is now strong-arming educational institutions it claims have discriminated against white people.
The Tough-on-Crime President Wants More Guns on the Street
The Washington Post reports this morning that staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are setting up shop at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with a “goal of revising or eliminating dozens of rules and gun restrictions by July 4.” DOGE might want to run roughshod over it, but there’s a legal process for amending or ending federal regulations. You can count on litigation over any such efforts, not to mention public outcry.
Put a Pin in This
According to the Associated Press, in a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought committed to restoring funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting if the Senate votes down a House-passed “rescissions” package to make billions of dollars in DOGE-led cuts permanent.
Actually, Big Balls Never Left
Earlier this week I linked to a piece in Wired, reporting that Edward Coristine, the 19 year-old Department of Government Efficiency staffer also known as Big Balls, no longer worked for the federal government. The New York Times had matched Wired’s reporting, and then, yesterday, issued a correction. Coristine, who before joining DOGE had been fired from a job at a data security firm for leaking company information, is now a “special employee” at the Social Security Administration.
GOP’s New Red Scare Is About Muslims, Particularly Zohran Mamdani
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking her to “denaturalize” and deport New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, falsely claiming he failed to disclose material support for terrorism prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.
Religious Freedom Is Only for Trump’s Supporters
The House Homeland Security Committee has launched an investigation into hundreds of religious organizations and even entire denominations, claiming they were “involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.” Ominously, the letter the committee is sending religious organizations includes questions about their federal government funding through grants or contracts, their provision of services to immigrants, and whether they have ever sued the government.
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SCOTUS Allows States To Defund Planned Parenthood Without Recourse From Those Who Rely On It
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Having the freedom to choose your own health care provider is something many Americans take for granted. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled on June 25, 2025, in a 6-3 decision that people who rely on Medicaid for their health insurance don’t have that right.
The case, Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, is focused on a technical legal issue: whether people covered by Medicaid have the right to sue state officials for preventing them from choosing their health care provider. In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that they don’t because the Medicaid statute did not “clearly and unambiguously” give individuals that right.
As law professors who teach courses about health and poverty law as well as reproductive justice, we think this ruling could restrict access to health care for the more than 78 million Americans who get their health insurance coverage through the Medicaid program.
Excluding Planned Parenthood
The case started with a predicament for South Carolina resident Julie Edwards, who is enrolled in Medicaid. After Edwards struggled to get contraceptive services, she was able to receive care from a Planned Parenthood South Atlantic clinic in Columbia, South Carolina.
Planned Parenthood, an array of nonprofits with roots that date back more than a century, is among the nation’s top providers of reproductive services. It operates two clinics in South Carolina, where patients can get physical exams, cancer screenings, contraception and other services. It also provides same-day appointments and keeps long hours.
In July 2018, however, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order that barred Medicaid reimbursement for health care providers in the state that offer abortion care.
That meant Planned Parenthood, a longtime target of conservatives’ ire, would no longer be reimbursed for any type of care for Medicaid patients, preventing Edwards from transferring all her gynecological care to that office as she had hoped to do.
Planned Parenthood and Edwards sued South Carolina. They argued that the state was violating the federal Medicare and Medicaid Act, which Congress passed in 1965, by not letting Edwards obtain care from the provider of her choice.
A ‘free-choice-of-provider’ requirement
Medicaid, which mainly covers low-income people, their children and people with disabilities, operates as a partnership between the federal government and the states. Congress passed the law that led to its creation based on its power under the Constitution’s spending clause, which allows Congress to subject federal funds to certain requirements.
Two years later, due to concerns that states were restricting which providers Medicaid recipients could choose, Congress added a “free-choice-of-provider” requirement to the program. It states that people enrolled in Medicaid “may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required.”
While the Medicaid statute does not, by itself, allow people enrolled in that program to enforce this free-choice clause, the question at the core of this case was whether another federal statute, known as Section 1983, did give them a right to sue.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that Section 1983 protects an individual’s ability to sue when their rights under a federal statute have been violated. In fact, in 2023, it found such a right under the Medicaid Nursing Home Reform Act. The court held that Section 1983 confers the right to sue when a statute’s provisions “unambiguously confer individual federal rights.”
In Medina, however, the court found that there was no right to sue. Instead, the court emphasized that “the typical remedy” is for the federal government to cut off Medicaid funds to a state if a state is not complying with the Medicaid statute.
The ruling overturned lower-court decisions in favor of Edwards. It also expressly rejected the Supreme Court’s earlier rulings, which the majority criticized as taking a more “expansive view of its power to imply private causes of action to enforce federal laws.”
Restricting Medicaid funds
This dispute is just one chapter in the long fight over access to abortion in the U.S. In addition to the question of whether it should be legal, proponents and opponents of abortion rights have battled over whether the government should pay for it – even if that funding happens indirectly.
Through a federal law known as the Hyde Amendment, Medicaid cannot reimburse health care providers for the cost of abortions, with a few exceptions: when a patient’s life is at risk, or her pregnancy is due to rape or incest. Some states do cover abortion when their laws allow it, without using any federal funds.
As a result, Planned Parenthood rarely gets any federal Medicaid funds for abortions.
McMaster explained that he removed “abortion clinics,” including Planned Parenthood, from the South Carolina Medicaid program because he didn’t want state funds to indirectly subsidize abortions.
After the Supreme Court ruled on this case, McMaster said he had taken “a stand to protect the sanctity of life and defend South Carolina’s authority and values – and today, we are finally victorious.”
But only about 4% of Planned Parenthood’s services nationwide were related to abortion, as of 2022. Its most common service is testing for sexually transmitted diseases. Across the nation, Planned Parenthood provides health care to more than 2 million patients per year, most of whom have low incomes.
Consequences beyond South Carolina
This ruling’s consequences are not limited to Medicaid access in South Carolina.
It may make it harder for individuals to use Section 1983 to bring claims under any federal statute. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote in her dissent, the court “continues the project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws.”
Enacted in 1871, the civil rights law has been invoked to challenge violations of rights by state officials against individuals. Jackson wrote that the court now limits the ability to use Section 1983 to vindicate personal rights only if the statutes use the correct “magic words.”
The dissent also criticized the majority decision as likely “to result in tangible harm to real people.” Not only will it potentially deprive “Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,” Jackson wrote, but it could also “strip those 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.’”
The decision could also have far-reaching consequences. Arkansas, Missouri and Texas have already barred Planned Parenthood from getting reimbursed by Medicaid for any kind of health care. More states could follow suit.
In addition, given Planned Parenthood’s role in providing contraceptive care, disqualifying it from Medicaid could restrict access to health care and increase the already-high unintended pregnancy rate in America.
States could also try to exclude providers based on other characteristics, such as whether their employees belong to unions or if they provide their patients with gender-affirming care, further restricting patients’ choices.
With this ruling, the court is allowing a patchwork of state exclusions of Planned Parenthood and other medical providers from the Medicaid program that could soon resemble the patchwork already seen with abortion access.
Portions of this article first appeared in another article published on April 2, 2025. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
