As Erik Was Saying Earlier…
By I’m so old I remember when Mitch Daniels was the moderate, thinking-woman’s Republican who was going to end the culture wars.
This case also presents us with the classic “I’ll take your money, but I won’t plow your driveway” theory of “states’ rights”:
The law, which, among other things, bars Planned Parenthood from receiving any Medicaid funds, was immediately challenged in court by Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. A hearing in that case is scheduled for Monday. It also shocked nobody when, this week, the Obama administration told Indiana that if it defunded Planned Parenthood, it would be in violation of federal law (and would open the state up to unspecified future harms, possibly including the loss of $4 million that funds its Medicaid program). As Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Donald Berwick explained in a letter on Wednesday, Indiana can either rethink its new law, or violate the Medicaid statute. It can’t do both.
Daniels pretends to find this federal action surprising, claiming that he has no idea what Berwick’s letter even means. He purports to be shocked, shocked to learn that federal funds conditioned on state compliance with federal laws might be jeopardized when a state deliberately violates those laws. But Daniels had ample warning. This law was not subtle or even all that original. As this 2002 report from the Guttmacher Institute indicates, efforts to deny family planning funding to any agency that also provides abortions go way back: The “campaign—to ban both direct and ‘indirect’ government support for abortion—was conceived almost before the ink was fully dry on the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.” The report also makes clear such efforts have failed time and again in both state and federal courts.
Of course, the right of states to continue to receive federal money while violating the relevant federal law is in the Constitution. Somewhere in the back, along with the “America is a Christian nation” clause and the “you didn’t think we were serious about Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, did you?” amendment.