By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal appeals court cleared the way on Thursday for U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to implement a provision of his recently enacted tax and spending bill that would deprive Planned Parenthood and its members of Medicaid funding.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to put on hold a preliminary injunction issued in July by a lower-court judge who concluded the law likely violated the U.S. Constitution by targeting Planned Parenthood’s health centers specifically as punishment for providing abortions.
That provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by the Republican-led Congress denied certain tax-exempt organizations and their affiliates from receiving Medicaid funds if they continued to provide abortions.
Planned Parenthood and some of its affiliates sued to block the funding provision, arguing it would have “catastrophic” consequences for its nearly 600 health centers, putting nearly 200 of them in 24 states at risk of closure.
The U.S. Department of Justice told the 1st Circuit that in halting the provision, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani overrode the judgment of the democratically-elected branches of government that “taxpayer funds should not be used to subsidize certain entities that practice abortion – conduct that many Americans find morally abhorrent.”
It said Talwani, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, used “flimsy” reasoning to conclude the law constituted an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.”
A bill of attainder is a legislative act prohibited by the Constitution that seeks to inflict punishment on a person or group without a trial. The Supreme Court has only invalidated laws passed by Congress five times under that clause, the Justice Department said.
“Halting federal subsidies bears no resemblance to the punishments – including death, banishment, and imprisonment – previously understood as implicating the Clause,” the Trump administration argued.
Talwani also blocked the law’s implementation on the grounds that it burdened the right of some Planned Parenthood affiliates who do not provide abortions to associate with their parent organization in likely violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
But the administration said Congress has often enacted laws designed to prevent regulated entities from using their corporate structures to evade legal requirements, none of which have been understood to raise First Amendment concerns.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Bario and Nia Williams)
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