Robert F Kennedy Jr. is a lifelong Democrat who carried all of their baggage, at least until recently. He parted ways on vaccine mandates and a range of public health concerns that got him the sort of harassment reserved for folks like Donald Trump. Trump embraced his commitment to public health and put him where he belonged, running DHHS, but this latest proclamation from his office surprised me.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a scathing legal memo July 14, condemning a federal judge’s decision to temporarily block the Trump administration’s one-year ban on taxpayer dollars going to Planned Parenthood.
“Simply put, Planned Parenthood has no right to taxpayer money, and this Court should not invent such a right,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in the memo. “The Court should uphold Congress’s lawful exercise of its authority to decide to whom it will entrust taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.”
Planned Parenthood found a friendly judge and sued. The judge decided that Planned Parenthood is likely to succeed on its merits, which are that the one-year defunding in the One Big Beautiful law violates its First Amendment Rights.
Do Planned Parenthood or US District Judge Indira Talwani read Court opinions or decisions? NPR already tried this, and they are actually pretending to be in the speech business.
“The government is not obligated to fund “speech” whereby”There is no requirement that the government fund anything enumerated in the Bill of Rights, such that not funding them is a violation of those rights. It’s settled law, or at least opinion.”
For the time being, the misguided restraining order remains in effect, but we can add this to the growing list of issues the High Court needs to address more forcefully with its downstream judges. A way to convince them to stop all these frivolous suits lacking in standing. Whatever case Planned Parenthood thinks it has, there are no First Amendment legs here to stand on.
Perhaps the Court needs to defrock or disbar a few – if it has the authority to do so – to send a message. Everyone deserves their day in court, but judges need to stop wasting our time. Absent that, legislatures are typically responsible for oversight, not that we’d expect them to do anything. The New Hampshire legislature, for example, can vacate the judiciary, but it’d never do so, no matter how bad the court system is.
As for RFKJ, he may still support abortion. I’m not sure of his current stance, but he’s right about the funding. No one has the right to someone else’s money, even when it is laundered through the government.
Imagine if this sort of thing caught on?
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