Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF) filed an amicus brief in support of Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) Supreme Court case Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. In the case, ADF is fighting on behalf of the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to refuse to subsidize Planned Parenthood, a private organization known to fund abortions.
Federalism reserves certain powers to states. The Medicaid Act gives states the power to distribute federal funding at their discretion. But when South Carolina chose not to subsidize Planned Parenthood–a private organization–with taxpayer money, a federal court determined that the state must do so anyway. Now, ADF has appealed the case on behalf of the state to the Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear the case.
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In its amicus brief, SLF urges the Supreme Court to reconsider its Spending Clause precedent. Under that precedent, courts have allowed Congress to attach strings to all sorts of federal funding, forcing states to comply with its policies and removing any sort of discretionary authority from states to spend money as they see fit. SLF explains that the precedent doesn’t stem from a legitimate source; Congress does not have an unlimited spending power in the Constitution but a very narrow one.
In addition to urging the Court to interpret the Spending Clause narrowly, SLF explains that based on the language in the Medicaid Act, Congress actually meant to give states broad authority to distribute Medicaid funding according to their preferences. For these reasons, South Carolina cannot be forced by a federal court to subsidize Planned Parenthood when it does not wish to do so.