Kavanaugh, Roberts join liberals to reject Planned Parenthood defunding appeals

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court signaled Monday it is not anxious to revisit the abortion controversy in the year ahead, disappointing conservative activists who were cheered by the appointment of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

After weeks of debate behind closed doors, a divided court turned down appeals backed by 13 conservative states that sought to defund Planned Parenthood.

The court’s action leaves in place federal court rulings in much of the country that prevent states from denying Medicaid funds to women who go to a Planned Parenthood clinic for health care, including medical screenings or birth control. It is already illegal in most cases to use federal money like Medicaid to pay for abortions, but some states wanted to go further, cutting off all Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization offers the procedure using alternative revenue sources.

In dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, accused their colleagues of allowing a “politically fraught issue” to justify “abdicating our judicial duty.”

The lower courts are divided on the Medicaid funding dispute, making the high court’s refusal to clarify the issue all the more surprising to some.

“We created the confusion. We should clear it up,” Thomas wrote in Gee v. Planned Parenthood. “So 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.’”

The brief order denying the appeals from Louisiana and Kansas suggests Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh were not willing to hear the cases.

The high court’s refusal to hear an appeal petition is not a ruling, and it will not prevent the justices from taking up the issue in the future or ruling against Planned Parenthood eventually.

Kavanaugh’s vote against hearing the case was noteworthy since it was his first abortion-related case, but it does not necessarily reflect how he would rule in future cases. Many legal experts predict Kavanaugh would vote to restrict or overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling.

For now, however, the chief justice may have preferred to avoid controversies that result in a 5-4 split along ideological lines, particularly in the wake of the fierce partisan fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Last month, Roberts objected to President Donald Trump’s criticism of an “Obama judge” and issued a statement saying, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

Even so, if the court had agreed to decide the Medicaid dispute, the justices would likely have split along the usual conservative versus liberal lines, with the five Bush or Trump appointees on one side and the Clinton and Obama appointees on the other side in dissent.

In their appeals, lawyers for Kansas and Louisiana pointed to a recent split among the U.S. appeals courts. Last year, the 8th Circuit Court in St. Louis, breaking with others, upheld Arkansas’ decision to cut off funding to Medicaid to Planned Parenthood clinics.

It takes four justices to hear a case, and these appeals were considered in a series of closed-door meetings since late September.