Justices won’t hear states’ Planned Parenthood appeal

WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court declined Monday to review lower-court decisions that blocked state efforts to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood, a move that suggests a majority of the court may be steering clear of controversial issues — at least for now.

New Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not join the court’s three most conservative members in calling to accept the cases. Justice Clarence Thomas rebuked his colleagues for what he said was a dodge, attributing it to their aversion to taking up the issue of abortion that lurked in the case.

“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.”

Thomas’s dissent from the court’s decision to pass on the case revealed a split among the court’s five conservatives: Justices Samuel Alito Jr. and Neil Gorsuch signed on to the statement. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. did not.

It takes the votes of four justices to accept a case.

The action is another example in which Kavanaugh has laid low after his divisive confirmation hearings, after which he was narrowly approved in October on a largely partisan vote.

The contentious fight put the court in an uncomfortable political spotlight. Since then, the majority of justices have not exhibited a rush to tackle emergency requests from the Trump administration or take up controversial issues that have arisen from the lower courts.

The caveat is that justices know that there will be plenty of future opportunities — including in the very issue on which the court demurred Monday.

The cases, which the court has been pondering since September, have to do with whether individual Medicaid recipients who receive services from providers such as Planned Parenthood have a right to challenge a state’s decision to cut off funding to the providers.

Five regional courts of appeal have said they do, while one has said they do not. That is the kind of split that normally prompts the Supreme Court to act.

“What explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood,’ ” Thomas wrote.

Louisiana and Kansas, the two states at issue in the cases before the court, announced plans to terminate funding for Planned Parenthood through Medicaid after an antiabortion group released videos in 2015 it said showed Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood denied the allegations, saying the videos were heavily edited, misleading and discredited.