On Tuesday, far right Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk will begin hearing arguments in a case brought by conservative plaintiffs that could shut down Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas and across the country.
Texas and an anonymous plaintiff affiliated with extremist anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress filed a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood over $17 million in Medicaid payments that the group collected over several years as the state attempted to kick Planned Parenthood off its Medicaid program.
The state is suing to recoup the payments – which Planned Parenthood received after a judge granted an injunction that allowed the group to continue receiving them – as well as fees for every claim that the plaintiffs argue was made falsely, the accrued interest, and attorney fees.
In all, the state is suing for a whopping $1.8 billion — enough to bankrupt the three Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas several times over, according to The Texas Tribune. This is almost as much as Planned Parenthood, its political arm, and its affiliates made in revenue in the last fiscal year overall, with $1.9 billion in revenue, and is more than the organization had in expenses all year.
“The stakes of this baseless case could not be higher — this is an active effort to shut down Planned Parenthood health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Ms. Magazine earlier this month. “Affordable, high-quality sexual and reproductive healthcare is already under threat, and these politically-motivated allegations could upend care for millions of patients in Texas and potentially across the country.”
The case, Doe v. Planned Parenthood, is the latest in Texas’s longtime quest to shut down Planned Parenthood across the state by removing its funding — even though Planned Parenthood, like other providers across the state, no longer provides abortions due to Texas’s abortion ban.
Over a decade ago, Texas lawmakers removed Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, a Medicaid program that helps low-income women access contraception. This had devastating effects on contraception access.
When courts said that Texas wasn’t allowed to remove Planned Parenthood from the program, the state rallied behind a bogus and heavily doctored video by Center for Medical Progress activists purporting to expose Planned Parenthood for selling fetal tissue — claims that were debunked time and again as a baseless attack against the organization and abortion rights, but that became a major sticking point for anti-abortion activists nonetheless. (David Daleiden and other Center for Medical Progress activists were later found guilty of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act charges in relation to its attacks on Planned Parenthood.)
Riding off the controversy created by the video, the state filed more lawsuits in its attempts to remove Planned Parenthood from Medicaid. The state was eventually successful in 2021, when the far right U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas is allowed to remove Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program.
Doe v. Planned Parenthood case was filed in Amarillo, Texas, in order to be heard by Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump-appointed district judge with a conservative Christian background who ruled earlier this year to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, essentially banning the pill nationwide.
Kacsmaryk is notorious for his brash approach and extreme right wing lean — so much so that activists specifically file cases in his district in order to have their cases heard by him — and the mifepristone ruling was no exception. Legal experts pointed out that the mifepristone ruling read more like an anti-abortion screed than a legitimate legal opinion, with a mountain of errors and whole sections that appear to be just paraphrases of the talking points of the activists who brought the case.
The state’s case against Planned Parenthood is similarly without merit, as some writers and experts have said.
“No sensible judge would hold that a litigant can be bankrupted because it acted consistently with a federal court order while that order was in effect,” wrote Vox writer Ian Millhiser on Doe in May. “But this case is being heard by Matthew Kacsmaryk, who’s spent his brief time on the bench acting as a rubber stamp for virtually any conservative litigant who comes to him seeking a court order.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 340 new monthly donors in the next 5 days.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy