Pro-life states claim the feds are starving them by usurping Congress, asking the Supreme Court to intervene

As the second Trump administration prepares to take over the regulatory apparatus, blue states may hope that the Supreme Court will strike down the Biden administration’s demands on red states to protect them from the same treatment under President Trump.

More than twenty states, almost as many federal legislatures and dozens of conservative, pro-life and religious groups asked SCOTUS to reverse a ruling that refused to stop the Department of Health and Human Services from cutting off Title X family planning funds in Oklahoma because women had not provided information about abortion.

Like many other red states, Oklahoma further restricted abortion after SCOTUS stripped federal abortion rights and returned the issue to the states in the United States Dobbs pronunciation.

A split The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel saw no problem with HHS saying it was “unequivocal” that Title Dobbs.

At the very least, Oklahoma should accept the compromise HHS has offered, a “national dial-in number” that would give Oklahomans access to “neutral information,” including about abortion, if it wants Title X money.

The Denver-based appeals court reinterpreted a 20-year ban on HHS funding for agencies that discriminate against entities that deny abortion referrals, called Weldon Amendmentsaying that a call-in number with abortion information did not necessarily count as a “referral.”

Oklahoma has filed a petition with SCOTUS last month, arguing that the decision was divisive in the circuit and risked “substantial bureaucratic intrusion on state sovereignty, federalism, and the separation of powers, in direct conflict with a simple congressional mandate.” Friend-of-the-court notes stormed in this week.

The case raises major questions about when and what conditions can be attached to federal money and about the leeway federal agencies have to reinterpret Congress’ statutes, especially in light of SCOTUS ends its 40-year precedent on “Chevron reverence” this year.

A ruling for Oklahoma could also hamper the new administration. A former Trump administration official warned this fall, she helped write the Title IX regulation — which is still binding the Biden regulation is blocked – can be vulnerable because of Chevron‘s downfall.

It reflects a new battle over the same regulations requiring abortion-inclusive non-directive counseling. A lot of the same groups asked the full 6th Circuit to rehear the case filed by Tennessee after a panel approved the exclusion of Title X funds on the same basis.

That’s what the Republican attorneys general said even if the 6th Circuit upheld a kind of “zombie.” Chevron“, it would not authorize agencies to tie “thousands of regulations to billions of federal dollars.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and twenty colleagues argue in their brief against the 10th Circuit that it conflicted with the 4th, 5th, 9th, and 11th Circuits on whether “each This authority may impose conditions on expenditure clause legislation that Congress has not expressly provided.”

“This Court recognized more than thirty years ago that Congress has never unequivocally required states to provide abortion referrals in order to receive Title .

The Biden administration waved away the explicit ban on Title , an issue ‘that is rife’. political and moral significance,” the attorneys general said.

The problem is affecting 41 states with legal abortion restrictionsincluding Texas and a dozen other states that completely ban elective abortion, the letter said. It also notes that Congress has included the Weldon Amendment “as part of every HHS appropriations bill since 2004.”

The issue belongs entirely to lawmakers and voters, as made clear by abortion ballot initiatives this election in 11 states and the Texas Supreme Court is upholding its elective ban on state constitutional challenges, they said.

SCOTUS must decide whether Congress’ authority over funding terms “can be delegated to an agency,” the AGs said.

Senator James Lankdford and Representative Tom ColeOklahoma Republicans led their congressional delegation, joined by senators from Louisiana, Montana and Mississippi and nine members of the House of Representatives, in asking SCOTUS to take up Oklahoma’s case.

The FBI has recently contradicted itself on its interpretation of conscience protections, the letter argues, pointing to ongoing litigation over Idaho’s elective ban and outgoing HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, who testified that a state lost Title , could not get it back by offering the dial-in number.

Congress passed the Weldon Amendment “as a broad conscience protection to fill gaps in existing conscience laws, especially for health care facilities.” It protects “all objections” from references to abortion, regardless of the reason, and legal precedents interpret objections “from the perspective of the objector” – their sincerity, they said.

It was extremely specific with new conscience protections in the three decades before the Weldon Amendment, which opened the doors to “any other form of health care provision, organization, or plan” that Congress did not specifically name, applying to “all HHS credits’. “and prevents complications with abortion in any way,” the letter said.

Before the amendment, opponents were repeatedly forced to perform abortions, denied licenses and approvals for refusal and even banned from conditioning the sale of their property on non-abortion purposes, members said, citing examples from Alaska to New Jersey .

And since Congress did not define what “reference to abortion” means, it did not limit the amendment’s scope to “what Congress considers to be a reference to abortion,” meaning the 10th Circuit overstepped conscience jurisprudence by ” analyze whether belief is rational’. – Oklahoma’s position that the call-in number represents a reference to abortion, members said.

If left unchecked, federal agencies could undermine the Weldon Amendment by unilaterally reinterpreting terms like “elective,” overriding a genuine objection by claiming that a mother’s mental health means the abortion is medically necessary, the letter said.

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologistsjoined by Christian and Catholic medical groups, accused the 10th Circuit of misreading the Supreme Court’s rulings Runner Clear ruling that was quashed Chevron respect by refusing “the best reading of a statute,” rather than approving an agency’s “permissible” reading.

HHS tried to have its cake and eat it too, telling healthcare providers, “be able to may obtain some relief” to follow their conscience “but only after their rights have been violated,” making them complicit in “what they consider a gravely immoral proceeding,” the brief said.

The 10th Circuit improperly made the definition of an abortion referral dependent on the outcome of a woman calling the phone number that Oklahoma refused to provide, the groups said. “A health care provider does not have to wait to verify that the procedure has been completed to know that she has referred her patient to another health care provider,” the groups argue in their 25-page petition to the Supreme Court.

The majority of the two justices had to ignore HHS’s own description of the call-in number as a reference to abortion to call it “neutral,” the groups noted. “There is indeed a world of difference between telling a patient what an abortion is” and telling her “where to go to obtain one.”