Decision welcome for families with kids in private schools
By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that allowed a Montana scholarship program that benefitted mostly private school kids to go forward.
The state scholarship program gave $150 tax credits to donors who gave to school scholarship programs. The Montana Department of Revenue wrote rules that prohibited private religious schools from participating in the program because the state constitution banned state aid to religious schools.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority.
Associated Press:
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion that said the state ruling violates the religious freedom of parents who want the scholarships to help pay for their children’s private education. “A state need not subsidize private education. But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious,” Roberts wrote.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayer seemed to invoke a strict constructionist view.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the high-court ruling “is perverse. Without any need or power to do so, the Court appears to require a State to reinstate a tax-credit program that the Constitution did not demand in the first place.”
If it’s not in the Constitution, it doesn’t need adjudicating? One would hope Sotomayer and the other liberals on the court would take that notion to heart.
Naturally, conservative activists are overjoyed at the decision.
Advocates for allowing state money to be used in private schooling said the court recognized in its decision that parents should not be penalized for sending their children to schools that are a better fit than the public schools.
