I am not igoring it but am doing some further digging. I like to be careful with legal arguments as they can be quite technical (it's just not that simple, to me).
Further reading:
Defunding Planned Parenthood Is Legal, but Don’t Expect the Courts to Act Like It
That article makes some fairly blatant errors, I would suspect deliberately. They are correct that the supremacy clause argument only applies when states attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, as opposed to the federal government. But then they launch into a rather unhinged discussion of an argument that Planned Parenthood might make against defunding at the federal level, ignoring the more obvious attainder case. To wit:
| But even then, Planned Parenthood would likely push forward with its legal challenge, falling back on the argument that defunding Planned Parenthood would impose an unconstitutional condition on its First Amendment right to promote abortion and associate with abortion providers. The unconstitutional-conditions doctrine “is premised on the notion that what a government cannot compel, it should not be able to coerce.” As a general matter, the doctrine prevents the federal government from placing draconian speech and association-related restrictions on the receipt of federal funds. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/422176/defund-planned-parenthood-legal-medicaid |
First of all, none of the Medicaid funding is related in any way to abortion. So the connection here is dubious at best, and I don't think that Planned Parenthood is likely to base a legal challenge on any such thing. And I'd bet that the amount of money that PP gets from the government to advocate for abortion is pretty close to zero.
But it becomes even more curious when you read what they base this opinion on:
| It is settled law that the government’s refusal to subsidize abortion does not impermissibly burden a woman’s right to obtain an abortion. If a ban on public funding for abortion does not directly violate the abortion right, then Indiana’s ban on other forms of public subsidy for abortion providers cannot be an unconstitutional condition that indirectly violates the right. |
This isn't even an opinion on the First Amendment or free speech at all. It's an amendment about government funding of abortion, which, as noted above, isn't happening in the first place, minus a few legally-permissible exceptions that aren't exclusive to PP.
The article continues with this:
| Given this precedent, a well-drafted law would cut off all Title X funding to any entity that promotes or provides referrals for abortion and would deny any and all Medicaid funds to providers who do the same. By functionally amending Medicaid while not affirmatively blocking access to abortions, the bill should survive legal scrutiny. |
That could be true, and legally, it may be possible to do that. But that simply isn't what the law that's been proposed does. The proposed law doesn't cut off funding to Title X recipients who perform abortions. It cuts off funds from Planned Parenthood, by name, and its affiliates.
The whole article is misdirection.