WASHINGTON, DC – The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take two cases involving Medicaid lawsuits, with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch expressing concern that some of their colleagues – likely meaning John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh – are “abdicating our judicial duty” because the cases involve Planned Parenthood, which many Americans equate with abortion rights.

Petitioners for Supreme Court review must secure four out of nine votes for the Court to issue a writ of certiorari (“cert”), the technical legal vehicle for taking most cases. In these two important Medicaid cases, the petitioners received only three. Justice Clarence Thomas took the unusual step of writinga dissent from the denials of cert, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

“One of this Court’s primary functions is to resolve important matters on which the courts of appeals are in conflict,” Thomas began, quoting Supreme Court rules. He noted that these cases “present a conflict on a federal question with significant implications: whether Medicaid recipients have a private right of action to challenge a State’s determination of ‘qualified; Medicaid providers under [federal civil rights laws.]”

“Five Circuits have held that Medicaid recipients have such a right, and one Circuit has held that they do not,” he observed, highlighting the “circuit split.”

Thomas continued:

This question is important and recurring. Around 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and the question presented directly affects their rights. If the majority of the courts of appeals are correct, then Medicaid patients could sue when, for example, a State removes their doctor as a Medicaid provider or inadequately reimburses their provider. Because of this Court’s inaction, patients in different States—even patients with the same providers—have different rights to challenge their State’s provider decisions.

“The question presented also affects the rights of the States,” he reasoned. “State officials are not even safe doing nothing, as the cause of action recognized by the majority rule may enable Medicaid recipients to challenge the failure to list particular providers, not just the removal of former providers.”

The three dissenting justices further noted that this disagreement over whether people can bring federal lawsuits on this issue implicates “fundamental questions about the appropriate framework for determining when a cause of action is available under §1983,” which is the primary federal civil rights law, making this “an important legal issue independently worthy of this Court’s attention.”

“The division in the lower courts stems, at least in part, from this Court’s own lack of clarity on the issue,” Thomas opined. He noted that lower courts refer to the Supreme Court’s shifting decisions as an “evolution in the law,” which is “a tactful way of saying that this Court made a mess of the issue.”

The longest-serving member of Supreme Court then changed gears, saying, “So what explains the Court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’”

“That makes the Court’s decision particularly troubling, as the question presented has nothing to do with abortion,” he added, likely referring to the fact that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the nation and typically brings lawsuits against all manner of abortion regulations.

“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty,” Thomas wrote.“If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background.

“We are not ‘to consult popularity,” he quoted from the Federalist Papers, “but instead to rely on ‘nothing . . . but the Constitution and the laws.’”

The petitions are Gee v. Planned Parenthood of Gulf Coast, No. 17-1492, and Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, No. 17-1340, in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.

Illegal immigration skyrocketed to the highest level in more than a decade for the month of November, as President Trump’s border wall remains unfunded by the Republican-controlled Congress.

Last month, illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border soared to levels that the country has not seen since Fiscal Year 2014, when more than 51,500 illegal aliens tried to cross the border in April 2015.

In November 2018, there were close to 52,000 border crossings on the southern border, alone, marking the highest level of illegal immigration in the month of November since 2006.

The continuing rise of illegal immigration at the southern border indicates that Fiscal Year 2019 will see the biggest boom of illegal immigration in more than a decade, according to Princeton Researcher Steven Kopits.

In total, Kopits projects that there will be more than 600,000 border crossings next year — a level of illegal immigration that the country has not seen since Fiscal Year 2008, when total southwest border apprehensions exceeded 705,000.

This puts illegal immigration under Trump on track to double what border crossings were in Fiscal Year 2017, when about 310,000 illegal aliens attempted to cross into the U.S. from the southern border.

Spiraling illegal immigration to the country is set behind a backdrop of a White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, that have yet to convince House and Senate Republicans — who only have control of Congress for about a month — to fund Trump’s central campaign promise: A southern border wall.

At the same time of the rising illegal immigration totals, the U.S. is continuing to admit more than a million legal immigrants every year to take American jobs. The mass immigration scheme is a boon to real estate developers, who thrive on the booming populations in major cities, and employers who benefit from a flooded labor market with stagnant U.S. wages and displaced American workers.

The country’s mass immigration policy also has massive rewards for Democrats, who are set to import between seven to eight million new foreign-born voters solely from the process known as “chain migration,” and overall, an additional 15 million new foreign-born voters.

Because that would require knowing something.

It’s a shame that President Donald Trump hasn’t given special counsel Robert Mueller one of his patented nicknames. It’s certainly rife with potential.

“Bumbling Bob.” “Ragged Rob.” “Meaningless Mueller.”

Or, how about “Multi-Million Mueller”? Because Mueller was just slapped with a $350 million lawsuit after pushing conservative author Jerome Corsi too far.

Corsi, a confidant of Trump ally Roger Stone, recently had the squeeze put on him as part of Mueller’s endless investigation into potential Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

But unlike some of the other people Mueller has targeted during the course of his investigation, Corsi is refusing to play ball.

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“They can put me in prison the rest of my life. I am not going to sign a lie,” Corsi told CNN.

JUST IN: Jerome Corsi, an associate of Roger Stone, says he is refusing to sign a plea deal offered by special counsel Robert Mueller https://t.co/INB3Za1uTd pic.twitter.com/JRMU3MTGTy

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 26, 2018

“They want me to say I willfully lied. I did not intentionally lie to the special counsel. I’m not going to agree that I lied. I did not,” Corsi said. “I will not lie to save my life. I’d rather sit in prison and rot for as long as these thugs want me to.”

Corsi went further, blasting his experience with Mueller’s investigation. He went so far as to compare it to “like being interrogated as a POW in the Korean War.”

The longtime author was pushed so far that he eventually decided to go on the offensive against Mueller.

Originally, Corsi went on a Hill.TV interview stating that he intended to file a criminal complaint against Mueller.

“We’re going to say to the Office of Professional Responsibility and the inspector general that the way these prosecutors on Mueller’s team behaved with me, and the deal they gave me, which was fraudulent, I believe demands a criminal investigation,” Corsi said.

Now, as The Hill is reporting, Corsi is hitting Mueller right in his wallet. In a document filed in the District Court for the District of Columbia, Corsi is filing a lawsuit and requesting an injunction as well as a whopping $350 million in damages.

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“Defendant Mueller and his prosecutorial and media staff, acting in their official capacity and personally, also illegally released grand jury information to harm Plaintiff Corsi by attempting to destroy his reputation and personal and professional well-being and livelihood, thus also attempting to drive him into bankruptcy,” part of the document reads.

As The Hill notes, Corsi is specifically alleging that Mueller and his team “intended to coerce, extort, threaten and/or blackmail him into submission and designed to remove the current president of the United States for political and other improper purposes.”

Considering how inanely drawn-out and unfair Mueller’s investigation seems to be, this lawsuit really couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

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When Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was finally confirmed to the court after an arduous and controversial Senate confirmation process, his ascension to the high bench was heralded as yet another huge victory for Constitutional conservatives in the era of President Donald Trump.

However, mere months after that purported “win” for conservatives, the much-heralded conservative judge just sided with the liberal justices on the Supreme Court to reject a petition requesting a hearing and ruling on cases involving states attempting to defund abortion-provider Planned Parenthood via state funding of Medicaid programs.

Townhall reported that the states of Kansas and Louisiana had attempted to defund Planned Parenthood through Medicaid in the aftermath of the series of undercover videos released in 2015 which revealed the abortion provider was allegedly engaged in an atrocious scheme to illegally traffic in the sale of aborted baby body parts for profit.

Those efforts were, of course, met with lawsuits from Planned Parenthood which claimed that the states had no right to pick and choose who would or would not be deemed a “qualified provider” eligible to receive Medicaid funds. Planned Parenthood’s lawsuits have largely prevailed at the lower court level — though there was some conflict in appeals court rulings — and those lower court rulings will now stand after the Supreme Court has declined to take up the case.

A request for the court to take up a case requires the agreement of no less than four of the nine justices. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch wanted to take up the case, but were outnumbered by the four liberal justices, who were joined by nominally conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Kavanaugh, who declined to hear the case.

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The majority of the justices also declined to offer any written opinion or reasoning behind the decision to deny cert to the Kansas and Louisiana cases against Planned Parenthood, and while such an opinion or stated reasoning is certainly not required in instances like this, it would certainly help Kavanaugh’s reputation among conservatives if he were to provide some sort of compelling logic or reason to his choice.

But while the majority didn’t provide an opinion on their decision to reject the cases, Thomas did provide a tersely-written four-page dissent from that decision that seemed to accuse the justices of wanting to avoid the controversial cases for political reasons.

Thomas noted that the cases weren’t even really about abortion, per se, even though they involved Planned Parenthood, but rather were focused on the question of whether states and individuals had a right to challenge the qualifications and eligibility of those who receive Medicaid funds in exchange for provided services.

After noting the conflict at the appeals court level over this question — which typically would lead to a hearing and decisive ruling on the matter by the Supreme Court — Thomas cited prior precedence that would support the court hearing the cases and chided his colleagues for allowing confusion on the matter to remain with the conflicting lower court rulings, even writing at one point, “We created this confusion. We should clear it up.”

Then Thomas got down to the crux of the seemingly inexplicable decision by his fellow justices, including Kavanaugh, and wrote, “What explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’ That makes the court’s decision particularly troubling, as the question presented has nothing to do with abortion.”

“It is true that these particular cases arose after several States alleged that Planned Parenthood affiliates had, among other things, engaged in ‘the illegal sale of fetal organs’ and ‘fraudulent billing practices,’ and thus removed Planned Parenthood as a state Medicaid provider,” he continued. “But these cases are not about abortion rights. They are about private rights of action under the Medicaid Act.”

“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty. If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background,” Thomas wrote.

He added that the “Framers” of the Constitution had specifically granted the justices “lifetime tenure” in order to make them independent of fleeting and ever-changing political whims, and quoted Alexander Hamilton from The Federalist No. 78 to write, “We are not ‘to consult popularity,’ but instead to rely on ‘nothing … but the Constitution and the laws.’”

Thomas concluded as the reason for his dissent, “We are responsible for the confusion among the lower courts, and it is our job to fix it.”

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To be absolutely clear, by no means are we, as conservatives, writing off Justice Kavanaugh as a lost cause or liberal in Republican clothing like Roberts and other Republican-appointed justices from the past have proven to be. Indeed, we still retain rather high hopes that Kavanaugh will ultimately turn out to be a staunch defender of the Constitution and laws as they are written, and hope that future decisions by him will be more in line with that ideal.

That said, his decision to join with the liberal justices in refusing to take up the cases surrounding the state efforts to defund Planned Parenthood through Medicaid — which, again, is more about individual and state’s rights and less about actual abortion — is a cause for concern, one we hope will eventually be classified as an odd outlier for the conservative originalist jurist going forward.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Is Hillary Clinton the agent of Russian collusion in the 2016 election? Well, if her campaign helped fund the Trump dossier, then yes, argues California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa.

In an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Friday, the House Oversight Committee chairman said that, since the dossier was a major part of obtaining a FISA warrant against Trump campaign employee Carter Page, the role of Russian agents in the document should be examined more closely.

Issa had been in on the closed-door testimony that former FBI Director James Comey gave on Capitol Hill last week before two House committees, much of which centered around how the warrant against Page was obtained.

Hannity began by asking Issa if he believed the bulk of the information that led to the FISA warrant came from the controversial dossier.

“That’s exactly right — that it not only came from the dossier, but as you know, Christopher Steele hasn’t been in Russia in 20 years,” he said. “So even the people, the unknown people responsible for it could easily, easily have in fact been agents of the Russian government, which would mean that Hillary Clinton is the one guilty of the so-called ‘collusion.’

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“That’s a great irony there,” Hannity said, stifling a laugh.

Comey’s testimony was remarkable for a number of reasons. CNN, somewhat predictably, called him “exasperated” over the proceedings and wondered why he was answering questions about Hillary Clinton’s email two years on.

However, the fact that Comey couldn’t seem to remember a lot seemed to take up most of the headlines.

“His memory was so bad I feared he might not remember how to get out of the room after the interview,” one lawmaker told The Hill’s John Solomon.

Another said, “It was like he suddenly developed dementia or Alzheimer’s, after conveniently remembering enough facts to sell his book.”

However, what he did remember about the dossier could have been the most damning part of his testimony.

“The towering ex-FBI boss confessed that the FBI had not corroborated much of the Steele dossier before it was submitted as evidence to a secret court to support a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in the final weeks of the election,” Solomon wrote.

“And Comey admitted much of the dossier remained uncorroborated more than six months later when he was fired by President Donald Trump.

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“I won’t waste too much time harping on the enormity of this confession. Everyday Americans now know that the FISA court process is an honor system and that the FBI may only submit evidence it has verified to the judges.”

But this wasn’t verified. It was paid opposition research, mostly conducted second- or third-hand, often with paid informants who made wild accusations.

And some of it, assumedly, came from members of Russia’s intelligence community. That’s what’s particularly dangerous here. For all of the talk of Russia offering campaign “synergy” with the Trump campaign, the only actually verifiable synergy probably came via the Trump dossier, which remains as uncorroborated as the day it was used in court to obtain a FISA warrant.

Meanwhile, even after all this, nothing has been found to indicate Trump colluded with the Kremlin.

Given that the DNC and Hillary campaign paid huge sums of money to compile the dossier, perhaps it’s time we started talking about their collusion with elements in Russian intelligence that had every reason, if they were connected in any way to the Kremlin, to destabilize the American political process.

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