This Is the Real Impact of the Supreme Court's Planned Parenthood Decision. [View all]

Last edited Thu Jul 3, 2025, 01:15 PM - Edit history (1)

by Linda Greenhouse

'The Supreme Court’s generosity toward President Trump’s flagrant violations of constitutional norms has cast a shadow long enough to obscure nearly everything else about the court’s term that ended last week. While that’s understandable, there is one decision, issued during the crush of the final days, that shouldn’t be overlooked. Not only will its immediate impact be significant, but it also reveals something about the current majority’s pursuit of a long-term goal: ridding American law of the notion that if a right is violated, there must be a remedy.

. . .The decision is likely to require Planned Parenthood to reduce services or even close clinics in South Carolina — and in any other states that might choose to follow South Carolina’s lead.

But this case was not really about abortion, which South Carolina’s Medicaid plan doesn’t cover. Rather, the state sought to punish Planned Parenthood by withholding its eligibility for Medicaid reimbursement for the full range of other reproductive health services that its clinics provide, depriving the organization of a vital source of revenue. . .

The path to lawsuits of this kind is through one of the country’s oldest and most important civil rights laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, referred to in its modern codification as Section 1983. The law authorizes individuals to sue state officials for violations of constitutional rights and, as broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court in a 1980 case, for violations of statutory rights as well.

. . . For example, in a 1990 decision, Wilder v. Virginia Hospital Association, the court ruled that hospitals could use Section 1983 to sue the state for the “reasonable and adequate” reimbursement that the Medicaid law requires. Those whom a law “intended to benefit” were entitled to sue for the benefit, the court held. . .

. . . At the end of the term, instead of deciding an important voting rights case from Louisiana that it heard in March, the court issued a surprising and opaque order setting the case for reargument at some unspecified time, with unspecified new questions to possibly be added to the case. Given that the case was fully briefed and argued, what questions might those be? . . .

. . .Justices Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas went out of their way to raise the question in a voting rights case from Arizona four years ago, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled in 2023 that the statute does not directly provide for private lawsuits. In a follow-on ruling seven weeks ago, that court held that neither could Section 1983 be the vehicle for a Voting Rights Act lawsuit.

Given the Trump administration’s dismemberment of civil rights enforcement and its disinclination to recognize discrimination against anyone other than white people, the convergence is nearly perfect. No one could be blamed for actually killing the Voting Rights Act. A central achievement of the civil rights era would simply be a memory, a law with rights but without remedies, a project accomplished.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/opinion/planned-parenthood-supreme-court-decision.html