Ben Cline seems pleased with himself that, as he posted to Twitter on Wednesday, “not a single taxpayer dollar is going to Planned Parenthood” thanks to the Big Ugly Bill that he voted for last week.
That Big Ugly Bill, incidentally, also cuts a trillion dollars from Medicaid, whose rolls include 37 million children, and $300 billion from SNAP, which has 16 million kids on its rolls.
As long as they’re born, that’s all that matters.
Quality of life after they’re in the world: whatever.
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Cline actually took to Twitter here not to crow about cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, which serves more than 2 million people a year – in addition to birth control information and services, the nonprofit does cancer screenings and STI testing and treatment.
Seems our MAGA congressman is bent out of shape over a federal judge issuing an injunction temporarily blocking the Planned Parenthood cuts.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued her ruling on Monday, directing Health and Human Services to “take all steps necessary to ensure that Medicaid funding continues to be disbursed in the customary manner and timeframes” to Planned Parenthood.
The provision in the Big Ugly isn’t about abortion, because federal law already bans the use of federal tax dollars for abortion.
The Big Ugly is now trying to ban state Medicaid funding to healthcare groups “primarily engaged” in family planning services, reproductive health and related medical care, including abortions, for one year.
Planned Parenthood contends that the provision in the Big Ugly violates its equal protection rights and retaliates against its protected speech, alleging in its suit that the language in the bill is “a naked attempt to leverage the government’s spending power to attack and penalize Planned Parenthood and impermissibly single it out for unfavorable treatment.”
Cline, on Twitter, characterized the injunction as the “kind of judicial overreach” that “voters overwhelmingly rejected last November.”
“I’m confident this judge’s misguided ruling will be overturned by the courts as well,” Cline concluded, and he’s probably right.
Because our Supreme Court is, obviously, no longer an umpire calling balls and strikes, but rather, is a pro wrestling referee working off a script, getting things to the predetermined result.
For the next couple of years, anyway.
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Chris Graham
