Source: http://www.christorchaos.com/?q=content/what-was-i-saying-about-dont-place-your-bets-brett
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 14:32:50+00:00

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What Was I Saying About Don't Place Your Bets on Brett?
Although this website is viewed by relatively few people, one of the reasons I continue to write commentaries on the farce of naturalism is to leave behind a permanent record of these analyses. So many Catholics get so agitated by the distractions offered by the false opposites of naturalism that they become “rooters,” if you will, for the supposed “good guys” against the “bad guys” without realizing, of course, that a belief that the pursuit of the common temporal good can be undertaken without regard for man’s eternal welfare always winds up badly for one’s country.
To wit, many Catholics breathed a collective sigh of relief after Brett Michael Kavanaugh was confirmed by a vote of 50-48 in the United States Senate on Saturday, October 6, 2018, the Feast of Saint Bruno. After all, there had been a gargantuan effort on the part of the partisans of the false opposite of the naturalist “left” to smear Judge Kavanaugh with baseless accusations while subjecting him to a demeaning line of questioning. Wasn’t there cause for celebration when the “bad guys” lost?
The “conservative” creature of Washington, District of Columbia, Brett Michael Kavanaugh, thus used a tortured line of sophistic reasoning to reach a conclusion about a matter that is beyond the power of human beings to decide. However, he is far from alone in this as the associate justice who wrote the Court’s decision in the case of Hobby Lobby, Samuel Alito, used the exact same legal “reasoning” in the combined cases of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Connestoga Wood Specialities v Burwell, June 30, 2014. . . .
Well, as I believed would be the case and wrote well before and then immediately after Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s confirmation to succeed the pro-abortion, pro-perversity Associate Justice Anthony MacLeod Kennedy, the newly-minted Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh is taking the lead of Opus Dei’s own John Glover Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United State of America, by showing himself to be a “moderate” when it comes to any case involving Planned Barrenhood, which goes by the official name of Planned Parenthood.
Well, it is was only yesterday, Monday, December 10, 2018, within the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Commemoration of Pope Saint Melchiades, that Kavanaugh and Roberts voted with Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to permit individual Medicaid recipients to sue state governments whose legislatures had sought to defund Planned Parenthood because of its illegal sale of the bodily organs of babies butchered in America’s abortuaries.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear two cases arising from efforts by states to bar Planned Parenthood clinics from the Medicaid program, drawing a rebuke from the court’s three most conservative justices and opening a window onto the court’s internal dynamics.
It takes four votes to add a case to the court’s docket, but the cases attracted only three — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch. Neither of the court’s other conservatives — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — proved willing to supply a fourth vote.
That split on the right side of the court is evidence that Chief Justice Roberts is trying to keep the court out of major controversies and that Justice Kavanaugh, who joined the court in October after a fierce confirmation battle, is, for now at least, following his lead.
In his dissent, Justice Thomas questioned his colleagues’ motives. They had voted to duck the cases, he wrote, for a bad reason.
But, he said, the cases are not about abortion rights, but only about whether individuals may sue to challenge decisions by states to withdraw funding from Planned Parenthood clinics.
Resolving the question presented here would not even affect Planned Parenthood’s ability to challenge the states’ decisions; it concerns only the rights of individual Medicaid patients to bring their own suits,” Justice Thomas wrote.
That issue warranted the court’s attention, Justice Thomas wrote.
Though the general legal question of who may challenge funding decisions has no particular political implications, recent cases have involved efforts by state officials opposed to abortion to cut off payments to Planned Parenthood clinics.
In letting stand two decisions allowing patients to challenge state funding determinations, the Supreme Court effectively sided with Planned Parenthood.
In the cases the justices turned away on Monday, from Kansas and Louisiana, appeals courts acknowledged that states have broad power to decide which health care providers may supply services for the program. But that power has limits, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, ruled in the case from Kansas, Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas, No. 17-1340.
“States may not terminate providers from their Medicaid program for any reason they see fit, especially when that reason is unrelated to the provider’s competence and the quality of the health care it provides,” Judge Gregory A. Phillips wrote for a divided three-judge panel.
Five of the six appeals courts that have considered the issue sided with the clinics. The exception is the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, which last year allowed Arkansas to withdraw Medicaid financing for Planned Parenthood. Disagreement among federal appeals courts often prompts Supreme Court review.
Lawyers for Kansas had urged the justices to resolve the dispute.
Planned Parenthood’s local affiliates responded that Congress had meant to allow suits from patients in addition to federal supervision. The groups added that there was no reason to fear a flood of litigation.
So what explains the Court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named “Planned Parenthood.” That makes the Court’s decision particularly troubling, as the question presented has nothing to do with abortion. It is true that these particular cases arose after several States alleged that Planned Parenthood affiliates had, among other things, engaged in “the illegal sale of fetal organs” and “fraudulent billing practices,” and thus removed Planned Parenthood as a state Medicaid provider. Andersen, 882 F. 3d, at 1239, n. 2 (Bacharach, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). But these cases are not about abortion rights. They are about private rights of action under the Medicaid Act. Resolving the question presented here would not even affect Planned Parenthood’s ability to challenge the States’ decisions; it concerns only the rights of individual Medicaid patients to bring their own suits.
Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty. If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background. The Framers gave us lifetime tenure to promote “that independent spirit in the judges which must be essential to the faithful performance” of the courts’ role as “bulwarks of a limited Constitution,” unaffected by fleeting “mischiefs.” The Federalist No. 78, pp. 469–470 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). We are not “to consult popularity,” but instead to rely on “nothing . . . but the Constitution and the laws.” Id., at 471.
Remember, five of the seven justices who voted to permit baby-killing up to and including the day of birth in the United States of America in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973, were appointed by Presidents Dwight David Eisenhower (Associate Justices William Brennan and Potter Stewart) and Richard Milhous Nixon (Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justices Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell) and that each of the five member majority in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. William Casey, June 29, 1992, had been appointed by Republican presidents (John Paul Stevens, an appointee of President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr./Leslie Lynch King, Jr. and Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony MacLeod Kennedy, appointees of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, and David Souter, an appointee of President George Herbert Walker Bush). This is yet again another cautionary tale for those who believe that Republican presidents will always give the country nominees who serve to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America to defend principles of true justice without bending to the political winds.
Sure, Clarence Thomas, an appointee of President George Herbert Walker Bush, and Samuel Alito, who was appointed by President George Walker Bush, and Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed by President Donald John Trump, were appointe by Republican presidents. What good in the natural order of things is it, however, to have supposedly "conservative" presidents who boast about not having the same sort of litmus test about baby-killing that Democrat presidents must pledge to use in order to secure their political party's presidential nomination? Once again, good readers, this should demonstrate that Democrats are more committed to the promotion, protection and institutionalization of evil than Republicans are in seeking to eradicate evil by using the limited tools that a secular, religiously indifferentist, Protestant and Judeo-Masonic land of pluralism affords them. Democrats are consistent in the promotion of evil. Their false opposites, the Republicans, are inconsistent in almost every way imaginable.
Well, as has been pointed out so endlessly on this site, this state of things is the logical result of what must happen to men and their nations in the absence of their due subordination to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law in all that pertains to the good of souls. Nope, I will never cease reminding you, good readers, that there can never be any true administration of justice nor any true pursuit of the common temporal good as long as men are indifferent—if not hostile to—the Social Reign of Christ the King as it must be exercised by His Catholic Church, she who has the duty to discharge her Indirect Powers of teaching and exhorting before interposing herself with civil leaders to prevent the enactment of laws injurious to the rights of God and the good of souls.
Viva La Virgen de Guadaulpe!
JUSTICE THOMAS, with whom JUSTICE ALITO and JUSTICE GORSUCH join, dissenting from the denial of certiorari.
One of this Court’s primary functions is to resolve “important matter[s]” on which the courts of appeals are “in conflict.” Sup. Ct. Rule 10(a); e.g., Thompson v. Keohane, 516 U. S. 99, 106 (1995). This case and Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kan. and Mid-Missouri, No. 17–1340, present a conflict on a federal question with significant implications: whether Medicaid recipients have a private right of action to challenge a State’s determination of “qualified” Medicaid providers under 42 U. S. C. §1396a(a)(23) and Rev. Stat. §1979, 42 U. S. C. §1983.
Five Circuits have held that Medicaid recipients have such a right, and one Circuit has held that they do not.* The last three Circuits to consider the question have themselves been divided.
This question is important and recurring. Around 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and the question presented directly affects their rights. If the majority of the courts of appeals are correct, then Medicaid patients could sue when, for example, a State removes their doctor as a Medicaid provider or inadequately reimburses their provider. E.g., Bader v. Wernert, 178 F. Supp. 3d 703 (ND Ind. 2016); Women’s Hospital Foundation v. Townsend, 2008 WL 2743284 (MD La., July 10, 2008). Because of this Court’s inaction, patients in different States—even patients with the same providers—have different rights to challenge their State’s provider decisions.
The question presented also affects the rights of the States, many of which are amici requesting our guidance. Under the current majority rule, a State faces the threat of a federal lawsuit—and its attendant costs and fees— whenever it changes providers of medical products or services for its Medicaid recipients. E.g., Harris v. Olszewski, 442 F. 3d 456 (CA6 2006). Not only are the lawsuits themselves a financial burden on the States, but the looming potential for complex litigation inevitably will dissuade state officials from making decisions that they believe to be in the public interest. State officials are not even safe doing nothing, as the cause of action recognized by the majority rule may enable Medicaid recipients to challenge the failure to list particular providers, not just the removal of former providers. E.g., Kapable Kids Learning Center, Inc. v. Arkansas Dept. of Human Servs., 420 F. Supp. 2d 956 (ED Ark. 2005); Martin v. Taft, 222 F. Supp. 2d 940 (SD Ohio 2002). Moreover, allowing patients to bring these claims directly in federal court reduces the ability of States to manage Medicaid, as the suits give Medicaid providers “an end run around the administrative exhaustion requirements in [the] state’s statutory scheme.” 876 F. 3d 699, 702 (CA5 2017) (Elrod, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc).
Finally, the disagreement over §1396a(a)(23) implicates fundamental questions about the appropriate framework for determining when a cause of action is available under §1983—an important legal issue independently worthy of this Court’s attention. The division in the lower courts stems, at least in part, from this Court’s own lack of clarity on the issue. As one court observed, the disagreement “can be explained in part by an evolution in the law,” Does v. Gillespie, 867 F. 3d 1034, 1043 (CA8 2017)—a tactful way of saying that this Court made a mess of the issue. We have acknowledged as much, explaining that language in our early opinions could be “read to suggest that something less than an unambiguously conferred right” can give rise to a cause of action under §1983, and that “[t]his confusion has led some courts” astray. Gonzaga Univ. v. Doe, 536 U. S. 273, 282–283 (2002). We have “[f]uel[ed] this uncertainty” by equivocating on whether the standards for implying private rights of action have any “bearing on the standards for discerning whether a statute creates rights enforceable by §1983.” Id., at 283. Courts are not even able to identify which of our decisions are “binding”; in Planned Parenthood of Kan. v. Andersen, 882 F. 3d 1205 (CA10 2018), the Court of Appeals applied a decision that this Court recently said had been “‘plainly repudiate[d].’” Id., at 1229, and n. 16 (quoting Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center, Inc., 575 U. S. ___, ___, n. (2015) (slip op., at 9, n.), in turn citing Wilder v. Virginia Hospital Assn., 496 U. S. 498 (1990)). One can hardly blame the Tenth Circuit for misunderstanding. We created this confusion. We should clear it up.

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