From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, June 26.

Well, it was a decision day for the Supreme Court today. Tomorrow they tell us will be the last

Supreme Court decision day

of this term. Many major cases. One of them came down today. Some more will come down tomorrow.

What we received this morning was the court's ruling on Medina versus Planned Parenthood. And we're

going to talk about that now with Kate Shaw, law professor at Penn,

and co-host of the Legal Affairs podcast, Strict Scrutiny. Professor Shaw, welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Brief our listeners with some background. What is,

what was Medina versus Planned Parenthood? Sure. So this is a case involving a state

effort. This is South Carolina's effort to defund Planned Parenthood. So a number of states have tried to do that.

This was South Carolina's effort. And some individual plaintiffs and also providers sued the state

under a statute called 42 U.S.C. Section 1983. It's a federal statute that basically allows private individuals

to sue to enforce their constitutional or statutory rights. A hugely important reconstruction

statute that still gets used all the time. And so 1983 is the vehicle, but the specific statutory

argument they were making is based on the Medicaid statute, which says

that if you're a Medicaid recipient, and that's, of course, the state-federal kind of matching

scheme that provides health insurance to low-income individuals, so if you're a Medicaid recipient,

you are entitled to receive services from qualified providers. So that's in the federal statute.

And what these plaintiffs have argued is that

Planned Parenthood is a qualified provider. And so under the Medicaid statute, it was improper for the state to defund Planned Planned Parenthood, making it impossible for them to receive their care from these

defunded Planned Parenthood providers. So sorry if that sounds a little complicated, but basically

the gist is that the majority here said that these individuals do not have a right under Section

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