I’m going to go ahead and preface this piece by reminding everyone that I stood up for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the debacle that became of his confirmation hearings.
He had his childhood brought up and had to face the full fury of the hypocritical, “woke” left, who have suddenly deemed dumb kid antics as proof that someone will grow to be a monster.
He was accused of being a drunk and a violent rapist, even though his main accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford couldn’t remember a thing about what happened, except that he was involved.
Others came forward, and in short order, they all were proven to be liars with political agendas.
The agenda was to stop President Trump from appointing another SCOTUS judge, and if they had to lie and feign outrage over teen drinking and rowdiness, then so be it.
Kavanaugh would not have been my choice to fill an empty Supreme Court seat. There were far more conservative judges to choose from.
And no, I didn’t care who nominated him. My concern was that he was being railroaded with lies. His life, and that of his family was being disrupted, and it wasn’t fair. It was partisan hackery at its worst.
Now that it’s over, and he is seated into his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, however, we can look and see his work, and make a determination as to if Donald Trump delivered a win for conservatives here.
He did not.
All the evangelicals who were exalting the name of Trump for appointing Brett Kavanaugh can go ahead and sit down, now.
On Monday, Kavanaugh joined with Chief Justice John Roberts, along with the four liberal jurists, to reject attempts by several states that wished to kick abortion providers off of their Medicaid programs.
This would have been a biggie for the pro-life crowd, and they sided with the left.
To be fair, Roberts has been disappointing us for a while, but Kavanaugh was supposed to be different, wasn’t he?
Well, I didn’t figure he would be.
The case turned away was Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. It was one, out of a pair of petitions presented by Kansas and Louisiana.
Justice Neil Gorsuch (a halfway decent Trump pick – maybe because he was picked by someone else), joined with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in dissenting, with Justice Thomas, once again, delivering the commonsense and clarity that the courts reject with frequency, these days.
Thomas, suggesting the court was wary of taking a case with “Planned Parenthood” in the title, asserted the cases weren’t about abortion rights but whether individuals have a right to challenge a state’s decision to eliminate a Medicaid provider.
“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty,” Thomas wrote. “If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background.”
Go ahead. Call it cowardice. You wouldn’t be wrong.
This isn’t even the first time the court has refused to at least hear the cases. Others have been presented this year – after Kavanaugh was confirmed – and each time, they kick the can.
So having a “conservative majority” on the courts isn’t turning out to be the boon we were told it would be, is it?
And yes, Planned Parenthood is taking a victory lap.
“We are pleased that lower court rulings protecting patients remain in place,” said Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Leana Wen in a statement. “Every person has a fundamental right to health care, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they earn.”
They could get everything Planned Parenthood [allegedly] provides, minus the abortions, from a community health center. That’s the part that the infanticide crowd always brushes over.
The cases in Kansas and Louisiana, filed earlier this year, ask whether patients can sue states for excluding Planned Parenthood from state Medicaid funding.
In February, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Kansas was wrong to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding, writing that states can’t cut off funding for reasons “unrelated to the provider’s competence and the quality of the healthcare it provides.” Four other appeals courts have ruled that Medicaid patients have the right to access the provider of their choice.
However, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has held that states do have the right to terminate a provider’s Medicaid contract and that residents have no right to challenge that decision.
Are they not making abortion the issue, outright, or are they allowing it to hover in the darkened corners of the cases?
Just say you want to put more federal funds towards community health centers – which are available in pretty much every county in the nation (whereas Planned Parenthood targets poor and minority communities, in some insidious act of eugenics-as-healthcare scam) – as a means of streamlining already stretched budgets.
Call abortion an unnecessary service, as it relates to healthcare (because it has NOTHING TO DO WITH HEALTHCARE), and fiscal responsibility dictates those services not be publicly funded.
Planned Parenthood likes to push the notion that abortion isn’t their main gig, but the bulk of their financial health consists of ending any chance of a healthy life for unborn children.
Chew on that one, for a bit.
It was always folly to think seating a majority of Republican appointees to the Supreme Court would fix what is wrong with this nation, based on the very history of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that made abortion a blood-stained patch on our national tapestry.
In that case, a 7 to 2 majority – at a time when Republicans held the majority in the Supreme Court – decided that abortion was to be the law of the land.
Justice William Rehnquist was joined by Justice Byron White in dissenting.
The legal community, at that time, even considered it an extreme case of judicial activism.
What a transformation. Judicial activism now seems to be the norm.
If you want to see the scourge of abortion ended in this world, it’s going to take a change of heart in the people. It’s going to take men and women to become proactive and responsible in their life choices.
The Supreme Court is not our savior nor our master, so lower your expectations.