The Supreme Court announced Monday that it would not hear two cases brought by states seeking to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding.
The court rejected appeals from Kansas and Louisiana, who sought to overturn federal appeals court rulings barring them from cutting off the medical provider's funding. The court's order announcing its decision not to hear the case does not list how each of the justices voted.
But Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision. He was joined by fellow conservatives Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito. It requires four justices to agree to take up a case. The court's decision would have been reversed had either Justice Brett Kavanaugh or Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to take up the case.
Kavanaugh's decision is particularly notable. Anti-abortion groups celebrated his confirmation in October and many assumed his ascension to the bench would solidify a conservative majority that would take on abortion rights. The cases the court declined to hear Monday did not directly concern the legality of abortion, though Planned Parenthood is a frequent target of lawmakers who oppose it. Thomas linked the cases to abortion directly in his dissent.
The cases stemmed from controversial videos released in 2015 by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress.
The videos purported to reveal that Planned Parenthood was trafficking tissue from aborted fetuses, though subsequent investigations from Congress later cleared the group. Planned Parenthood has said that the videos were heavily edited and misleading. Those videos prompted a number of governors, including former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, to block Medicaid funding for the group.
Congress has prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortion, though Planned Parenthood receives government funding, largely through Medicaid, for other services it provides, such as cancer screenings and birth control.
In February, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Kansas, reasoned that states cannot cut off a provider's funding for reasons "unrelated to the provider's competence and the quality of the health care it provides."
A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, reached a similar conclusion last year, and a later hearing by the full appeals court reached a 7-7 tie on the matter.
Following Monday's announcement from the Supreme Court, both circuits' restrictions on a state's ability to limit Medicaid funding will stand.
In his dissent, Thomas wrote that the question before the court "has nothing to do with abortion." He said he would have taken up the case in order to resolve a circuit split over whether Medicaid recipients have the right to challenge a state's determination of what makes a medical provider "qualified."
"Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty," he wrote.
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