LONDON — Boris Johnson paid a heartfelt tribute to “Elizabeth the Great,” as a host of former prime ministers mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Johnson — who left office this week — said in a statement that it was the “saddest day” for the U.K. because the queen’s “bright and shining light” had “finally gone out.”
Queen Elizabeth II died in her holiday home in Balmoral, Scotland on Thursday at the age of 96 and after more than 70 years on the throne. She is succeeded by her eldest son Charles, who now becomes King Charles III.
Johnson saw the queen just two days before, when he resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Liz Truss, who gave her own tribute to the queen on the rain-soaked steps of Downing Street Thursday night.
He said that in the hearts of all Britons “there is an ache at the passing of our queen, a deep and personal sense of loss — far more intense, perhaps, than we expected.”
“She seemed so timeless and so wonderful that I am afraid we had come to believe, like children, that she would just go on and on,” Johnson said.
And he added: “As is so natural with human beings, it is only when we face the reality of our loss that we truly understand what has gone. It is only really now that we grasp how much she meant for us, how much she did for us, how much she loved us.”
The queen, Johnson said, “selflessly and calmly” embodied the “continuity and unity of our country.”
“This is our country’s saddest day because she had a unique and simple power to make us happy,” he said. “That is why we loved her. That is why we grieve for Elizabeth the Great, the longest serving and in many ways the finest monarch in our history.”
Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May said the queen had devoted herself “unreservedly to a life of service,” and was “respected and admired not only by her own people but far beyond our family of nations.”
The former Conservative leader added: “As our longest reigning monarch, Her Majesty witnessed tremendous change, moving adroitly with the times but always providing stability and reassurance. She was our constant throughout this great Elizabethan era.”
Fellow Tory David Cameron, in office between 2010 and 2016, said: “No matter how prepared one could be for this day, there are no words that can adequately express the sense of loss our nation will feel.” The queen, he said, had “been the constant in all our lives over the past 70 years. As our longest-serving monarch. her remarkable reign has lasted, for most people, our entire lives — we know nothing else.”
John Major, Conservative prime minister for much of the 1990s, told BBC News: “It’s very hard to take it in that that radiant smile, which lights up a room and lights up a country, is just not going to be … there anymore.” There would, he predicted, be “many tears shed tonight and over the next few days for her majesty the queen.”
Tributes came in too from the surviving Labour prime ministers who served the queen during her seven-decade reign.
Gordon Brown, the U.K.’s leader from 2007 to 2010, said that the “United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and the entire world are joined together in mourning this evening.” Elizabeth II, he said, had “served this country to the last.”
Tony Blair, who served for 13 years as British prime minister, said: “We have lost not just our monarch but the matriarch of our nation, the figure who more than any other brought our country together, kept us in touch with our better nature, personified everything which makes us proud to be British. “
<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/YmTBMcONk9zZSdhpVPI8M3n9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="Supreme Court hears dispute over South Carolina’s bid to defund Planned Parenthood" title="Supreme Court hears dispute over South Carolina’s bid to defund Planned Parenthood"> <img width="150" height="150" src="https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SCPlannedParenthood-150x150.jpg" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail wp-post-image" alt="Supreme Court hears dispute over South Carolina’s bid to defund Planned Parenthood" title="Supreme Court hears dispute over South Carolina’s bid to defund Planned Parenthood" style="float:right;" decoding="async" srcset="https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SCPlannedParenthood-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SCPlannedParenthood-570x570.jpg 570w, https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SCPlannedParenthood-500x500.jpg 500w, https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SCPlannedParenthood-1000x1000.jpg 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /><p><a class="a2a_button_facebook" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotusblog.com%2F2025%2F04%2Fsupreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood%2F&linkname=Supreme%20Court%20hears%20dispute%20over%20South%20Carolina%E2%80%99s%20bid%20to%20defund%20Planned%20Parenthood" title="Facebook" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_linkedin" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotusblog.com%2F2025%2F04%2Fsupreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood%2F&linkname=Supreme%20Court%20hears%20dispute%20over%20South%20Carolina%E2%80%99s%20bid%20to%20defund%20Planned%20Parenthood" title="LinkedIn" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_twitter" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotusblog.com%2F2025%2F04%2Fsupreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood%2F&linkname=Supreme%20Court%20hears%20dispute%20over%20South%20Carolina%E2%80%99s%20bid%20to%20defund%20Planned%20Parenthood" title="Twitter" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_email" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotusblog.com%2F2025%2F04%2Fsupreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood%2F&linkname=Supreme%20Court%20hears%20dispute%20over%20South%20Carolina%E2%80%99s%20bid%20to%20defund%20Planned%20Parenthood" title="Email" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_printfriendly" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/printfriendly?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotusblog.com%2F2025%2F04%2Fsupreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood%2F&linkname=Supreme%20Court%20hears%20dispute%20over%20South%20Carolina%E2%80%99s%20bid%20to%20defund%20Planned%20Parenthood" title="PrintFriendly" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_no_icon addtoany_share_save addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scotusblog.com%2F2025%2F04%2Fsupreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood%2F&title=Supreme%20Court%20hears%20dispute%20over%20South%20Carolina%E2%80%99s%20bid%20to%20defund%20Planned%20Parenthood" data-a2a-url="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/supreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood/" data-a2a-title="Supreme Court hears dispute over South Carolina’s bid to defund Planned Parenthood">Share</a></p><p>The Supreme Court on Wednesday was divided over whether Planned Parenthood has a legal right under federal civil rights laws to challenge the order by South Carolina’s governor barring abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, from participating in Medicaid.</p>
<p>During more than 90 minutes of oral arguments, the justices struggled to determine whether the Medicaid law on which Planned Parenthood relies must use specific words to signal that Congress intended to create a private right to enforce it – and, if so, what those words might be.</p>
<p>For 60 years, the Medicaid program has provided medical care to more than 72 million Americans of limited financial means. Congress enacted the law pursuant to its power under the Constitution’s spending clause, which allows it to attach conditions to the federal funds that it gives to states.<span id="more-319446"></span></p>
<p>In 2018, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster ordered the state’s Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit abortion clinics from participating in the Medicaid program. Federal law generally bars the use of Medicaid funds for abortions. Planned Parenthood provides other medical services, such as gynecological and reproductive care but also screenings for cancer, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. But because money is fungible, McMaster reasoned, any Medicaid funds that go to clinics where abortion is provided would effectively subsidize “abortion and the denial of the right to life.”</p>
<p>Julie Edwards, a Medicaid patient in South Carolina who suffers from diabetes and has used Planned Parenthood for birth control, went to federal court in South Carolina along with Planned Parenthood. They contended that McMaster’s order violated a provision of the Medicaid Act that allows any patient who is eligible for Medicaid to seek health care from any “qualified” provider.</p>
<p>The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed with Planned Parenthood and Edwards that the Medicaid Act creates individual rights that can be enforced under federal civil rights laws, and it barred the state from excluding Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program.</p>
<p>John Bursch, a lawyer for the conservative advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, represented the state. He told the justices that for laws enacted pursuant to Congress’s spending clause power, “clear rights-creating language is critical to creating private rights. Congress did not use” such language in the “any qualified provider” provision, he stressed. Indeed, he noted, Congress “knows how to clearly confer a private right to choose a provider” when it wants to do so, as it did in the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act.</p>
<p>Justice Clarence Thomas asked Bursch whether the word “right” is “absolutely necessary in order to determine whether or not a right has been created” under the “any qualified provider” provision.</p>
<p>Bursch answered that “if Congress wants to be clear, ‘right’ is the best word, but we would take its functional equivalent” – for example, “entitlement” or “privilege.”</p>
<p>Thomas’s question kicked off a debate that continued on and off throughout the morning’s argument: Does a federal law only create a privately enforceable right if it uses specific – or as some justices put it, “magic” – words?</p>
<p>Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Bursch, “You’re not quite calling it a magic word, but you’re coming very close.”</p>
<p>Bursch countered that what states need is a “clear statement” about their obligations under the Medicaid Act.</p>
<p>But Sotomayor was unconvinced. “It seems a little bit odd,” she suggested, “to think that a problem that motivated Congress to pass this provision was that states were limiting the choices people had.” In light of that history, she posited, it “seems hard to understand that states didn’t understand that they had to give individuals the right to choose a provider.”</p>
<p>Justice Amy Coney Barrett echoed Sotomayor’s concern about the purpose of the “any qualified provider” provision. If I want to go see the provider of my choice, she said, but the state has disqualified him from participating in Medicaid, “You’re depriving me of my ability … to see the provider of my choice. And nobody’s disputing that” the physician “can provide the services in a competent way that I want to have.”</p>
<p>Justice Brett Kavanaugh was more supportive of the idea that laws should have to use specific words to create privately enforceable rights. The Supreme Court, he observed, “has failed to give guidance … that lower courts can follow, that states, providers, and beneficiaries can follow.” What words, he asked Bursch, would create such rights, “rather than having something like ‘or its functional equivalent,’ would could” lead to “another decade of litigation”?</p>
<p>Bursch suggested that the words “rights,” “entitlement,” “privileges,” and “immunities” would fit the bill. “If you don’t limit it to those few words,” he told the justices, “then all of a sudden, the floodgates are open.”</p>
<p>Representing the federal government, Kyle Hawkins told the justices that their cases “emphasized that rights-creating statutes are atypical. But” the “any qualified provider” provision, he stressed, “is a run-of-the-mill spending clause statute, and holding otherwise would invite line-drawing problems.”</p>
<p>Sotomayor pressed Hawkins, observing that the federal government for two decades had contended that the “any qualified provider” provision could be privately enforced through federal civil rights laws. Although the government now contends that it had changed its position after the court’s decision in <em><a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/health-and-hospital-corporation-of-marion-county-indiana-v-talevski/">Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Ind. v. Talevski</a></em>, holding that nursing-home residents could use federal civil rights laws to enforce two provisions of the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act, Sotomayor suggested that in <em>Talevski</em> the court had simply “reiterated” its analysis in an earlier decision. “Did you need a hit over the head,” she asked, “meaning did you need for us to say it a second time before you understood it?”</p>
<p>Kagan contended that imposing a “magic words” requirement would be “kind of changing the rules midstream.” Congress, she emphasized, enacted the Medicaid Act a long time ago. “And if we come in now and say you have to use one of these three words,” she noted, it might be useful for future laws, “but it’s not a fair way to interpret statutes that Congress passed many years ago.”</p>
<p>Unlike Bursch, Hawkins declined to suggest specific words that would create a privately enforceable right. He agreed that words like “right,” “entitlement,” “privilege,” and “immunity” “would count,” but he suggested that “a helpful way to think about it” is that “we’re looking for words that have a real rights-creating pedigree in our nation’s history and legal traditions.”</p>
<p>But that answer did not necessarily please Kavanaugh, who told him that Kagan had “raised good points about how, once you open it up like that, there are going to be line-drawing problems. You’re not going to solve the issue that you came here to solve.”</p>
<p>Nicole Saharsky, who represented Planned Parenthood, told the justices that there is no dispute that South Carolina violated the Medicaid Act when it denied Julie Edwards “her choice of a qualified and willing provider.” “The only question,” she said, “is whether she can do something about it, to sue under” federal civil rights laws.</p>
<p>The “any qualified provider” provision, Saharsky maintained, “uses mandatory, individual-centric, rights-creating language. The only thing it doesn’t do,” she said, “is use the word ‘right.’ And this Court has repeatedly said that magic words aren’t required.”</p>
<p>The justices raised other concerns as well. Barrett questioned whether allowing the 4th Circuit’s ruling to stand would “open the floodgates of people bringing” similar suits, “or is this kind of a pretty unusual circumstance?”</p>
<p>Hawkins answers that it was “hard to say it’s unusual,” adding that the “any qualified provider” provision was “the most litigated provision” in the statute.</p>
<p>Saharsky pushed back against any idea that a ruling in her clients’ favor would lead to more lawsuits, noting that the 6th Circuit had issued a decision similar to the 4th Circuit’s “more than 20 years ago. If the flood of lawsuits was supposed to happen, we would expect to see it.”</p>
<p>Moreover, she added, there is no real benefit to Medicaid patients from bringing lawsuits to challenge the denial of their provider of choice. Money damages are not available, she noted. “These aren’t people getting rich,” she said. “They’re just trying to get healthcare here.”</p>
<p>Kavanaugh voiced what he characterized as a “broader separation-of-powers concern” – the idea that “Congress creates rights of action and remedies, not the Court.” For more than two decades, Kavanaugh told Saharsky, the Supreme Court had “really tightened up” on creating causes of action, “and said essentially that far and no further.”</p>
<p>Saharsky countered that this dispute involves “an express cause of action” under the federal civil rights laws, so there is no need for the court to create one. And she conceded that there “is a high bar to find that Congress put in place an individually-enforceable right. What we’re saying is that this provision meets the bar.”</p>
<p>Justice Samuel Alito was similarly skeptical, describing it as “quite extraordinary” for the court to find that a law enacted pursuant to Congress’s spending clause power creates a privately enforceable right of action. And if a federal civil rights lawsuit can follow “whenever Congress uses the word ‘individual,’” he told Saharsky, “then all sorts of provisions could give rise to” liability. “Congress,” he said a few minutes later, “may well have had in mind” that the state needs to provide Medicaid beneficiaries with the ability to choose their own qualified health-care providers, “but not that this is something that allows an individual to sue in court.”</p>
<p>In his rebuttal, Bursch argued that “the fact that the 12 of us can have such a robust conversation about whether this statute is mandatory or not, whether it’s rights-creating or not, demonstrates that the rights-creating language is ambiguous, not clear and explicit. And if there is any ambiguity in this context,” he concluded, “the state has to win because it’s not being put on notice of when it might be sued.”</p>
<p>A decision is expected by summer.</p>
<p><em>This article was <a href="https://amylhowe.com/2025/04/02/supreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood/">originally published at Howe on the Court</a>. </em></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/supreme-court-hears-dispute-over-south-carolinas-bid-to-defund-planned-parenthood/">Supreme Court hears dispute over South Carolina’s bid to defund Planned Parenthood</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.</p>
<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/VEyN_OtLc1IyOB_7XoZZG3n9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The morning read for Tuesday, May 27" title="The morning read for Tuesday, May 27"> <p>I hope you had a meaningful Memorial Day weekend. </p> <p>Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-announces-new-probes-into-dobbs-supreme-court-leak-white-house-cocaine-2025-05-26/">FBI announces new probes into Dobbs Supreme Court leak, White House cocaine incident </a>(Raphael Satter, Reuters) </li> <li><a href="https://www.newsweek.com/majority-americans-believe-president-must-obey-court-rulings-new-poll-2077102">Majority of Americans Believe President Must Obey Court Rulings: New Poll</a> (Adeola Adeosun, Newsweek) </li> <li><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/venezuelans-tps-fear-deported-supreme-court-ruling-rcna208716">These Venezuelans are in the U.S. legally, but a Supreme Court order on TPS is upending their lives</a> (Nicole Acevedo, NBC News) </li> <li><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/opinion/supreme-court-trump-power.html">Why Is This Supreme Court Handing Trump More and More Power?</a> (Kate Shaw, The New York Times)</li> <li><a href="https://davidlat.substack.com/p/supreme-court-scotus-clerk-hiring-october-term-2025-ot-2026">SCOTUS Clerk Hiring Watch: OT 2025 And Beyond</a> (David Lat, Original Jurisdiction) </li>
</ul> <p></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-morning-read-for-tuesday-may-27/">The morning read for Tuesday, May 27</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.</p>
Poland took a step towards easing abortion rules today, after a parliamentary commission recommended decriminalizing the practice within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The…
