As judicial smackdowns go, I have to confess this one is fairly mild in terms of its tone, but the fact that it comes compliments of three Biden-appointed judges should tell you something: Late Friday afternoon, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the preliminary injunctions issued in July by Massachusetts District Court Judge Indira Talwani that enjoined the Trump administration from enforcing the One Big Beautiful Bill provision that withholds Medicaid funding from certain abortion providers, namely Planned Parenthood (Section 71113).
You may recall when Talwani issued her orders, a lot of eyebrows were raised — keep in mind, this wasn’t in relation to an executive order or executive action, but rather a law passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the president. Now, obviously, statutes regularly do get challenged and reviewed by courts, but this involved the power of the purse and a court’s seeming determination that Congress doesn’t have the ultimate say in what it funds or doesn’t fund. Can a federal judge really do that?
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Well, it turns out, a federal appeals court thinks not.
The three-judge panel (again, all Biden appointees…sitting in Boston, Massachusetts, mind you) issued a 41-page decision Friday afternoon vacating the two preliminary injunction orders issued by Talwani in July.
There have been a number of procedural twists and turns in this one, and for those interested in diving into them, the decision does a really nice job of laying out the chronology and the issues. But in a nutshell, the appellate court found that the district court got it wrong in concluding that the plaintiff organizations are likely to succeed on their claims that the provision is a “bill of attainder” (prohibited by the Constitution), that it infringed on their First Amendment rights, and that it violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Some key points made by the 1st Circuit in its decision:
For all these reasons, Section 71113 does not impose punishment on Appellees. It instead uses Congress’s taxing and spending power to put Appellees to a difficult choice: give up federal Medicaid funds and continue to provide abortion services or continue receiving such funds by abandoning the provision of abortion services. That the law imposes a difficult choice on the recipient of federal funds does not demonstrate that Congress is punishing the recipient for past action — an intrinsic element of a bill of attainder. Appellees therefore likely will not prevail on the merits of their bill of attainder claim.
…
The “Constitution presumes that, absent some reason to infer antipathy, even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic process and that judicial intervention is generally unwarranted no matter how unwisely we may think the apolitical branch has acted.” Beach Commc’ns, 508 U.S. at 314 (quoting Vance v. Bradley, 440 U.S. 93, 97 (1979)). Guided by this presumption and given the highly deferential nature of our review, Section 71113 likely survives rational basis review. There are plausible reasons for treating “prohibited entit[ies]”differently from other abortion providers, particularly where Congress viewed these entities as the most significant recipients of Medicaid funds. Preventing these entities from receiving funds if they continue providing abortion services furthers Congress’s interest in reducing abortions. Plaintiffs, therefore, are unlikely to succeed in showing that Section 71113 violates equal protection.
Now, is this the final word in this case? No. The plaintiff organizations could seek en banc rehearing and/or appeal this decision. And it’s not the final decision on the merits — just as to whether the preliminary injunctive relief granted by the district court was appropriate. But it’s a solid win for the administration — and really for Congress — and a solid example of the judicial branch remembering how the Constitution and separation of powers are actually supposed to work.
Editor’s Note: Unelected federal judges are hijacking President Trump’s agenda and insulting the will of the people
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