The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the Trump administration’s expansion of ObamaCare birth control exemptions for employers, marking the third time in about a \u2026<\/b>
\nThe Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the Trump administration’s expansion of ObamaCare birth control exemptions for employers, marking the third time in about a week that the court has issued decisions broadening religious rights.
Two of the three cases were decided Wednesday by a 7-2 margin. Those majorities included two liberal justices \u2014 one of whom was nominated by former President Obama \u2014 as well as the court\u2019s ideological center, Chief Justice John Roberts, suggesting religious protections enjoy durable support on the bench.
\u201cThe majority of justices on the Supreme Court have increasingly treated religious liberty rights as of greater importance and weight than other fundamental constitutional and civil rights,\u201d said Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University. \u201cWhen they are asked to adjudicate conflicts between religious liberty and other fundamental rights, they have consistently ruled that religious liberty supersedes other rights.\u201d
The White House and many conservatives, especially Christians, were buoyed by the recent decisions that further solidified legal protections for the nation\u2019s faith-based communities, especially after the court dealt a series of blows to Republican causes this term.
\u201cAs the Supreme Court has previously stated, protecting the ability of people to worship and live according to the dictates of their conscience is part of \u2018the best of our traditions,\u2019\u201d White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Wednesday. \u201cThe Court\u2019s decision today carries forward that noble tradition.\u201d
But critics, who say the trend reflects the conservative court\u2019s excessive regard for religious interests, fear Wednesday\u2019s rulings will leave countless women without affordable contraception while further eroding the separation of church and state.
In a blistering dissent from the ObamaCare majority ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the Trump administration\u2019s far-reaching exemptions clash with Congress\u2019s intent under the 2010 Affordable Care Act to subsidize female employees\u2019 contraception.
\u201cToday, for the first time, the Court casts totally aside countervailing rights and interests in its zeal to secure religious rights to the nth degree,\u201d Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The ObamaCare contraception ruling came just minutes after the justices issued a ruling that expanded a First Amendment doctrine that insulates religious employers from discrimination suits brought by workers. It also came a week after the court ruled that religious schools cannot be excluded from state-backed private school scholarship programs.
Among the trio of recent decisions, perhaps the most politically potent was the court\u2019s 7-2 ruling to give certain employers more leeway to opt-out of paying for birth control, as is generally required under ObamaCare.
\u201cThe Supreme Court’s decision to enable the Trump Administration\u2019s brutal assault on women\u2019s health, financial security and independence is a fundamental misreading of the statute,\u201d Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. \u201cThe Affordable Care Act was explicitly designed to prevent discrimination against women and to ensure that women have access to preventive care, including contraception.\u201d
In the Obama era, religious nonprofits could claim an exemption from contraceptive coverage. But legal challenges arose in response to the Trump administration\u2019s move to expand eligibility to companies that voiced religious or moral objections.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, which comprised his fellow conservative justices, as well as two of its more liberal justices, Obama appointee Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer. But the two more liberal justices made clear their vote in the case \u2014 Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania \u2014 was not centered on religious liberty.
\u201cKagan and Breyer insisted that exemptions to the contraception mandate must stand only because the Executive Branch has broad power to create the exemptions, not because they agreed that the Little Sisters had a right to be exempt from the law,\u201d said Franke, who serves as faculty director of Columbia University\u2019s Law, Rights, and Religion Project and who joined an amicus brief opposing the expanded exemptions for religious employers.
But Kagan and Breyer expressed no such reservations when they joined the conservative wing to expand religious rights in a decision issued earlier Wednesday morning.
In that case, the court ruled that a pair of Los Angeles-area Catholic schools are immune from discrimination suits brought by two former teachers in a decision that expands the scope of protections for religious employers.
The 7-2 opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, broadens the so-called ministerial exception, a First Amendment doctrine that prohibits lawsuits by employees who are considered ministers due to the religious nature of their work.
Sotomayor, in dissent, said the majority decision \u00ab\u00a0has no basis in law and strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protections.\u00a0\u00bb
The pair of decisions Wednesday came about a week after the Supreme Court issued another ruling that favored religious rights. That case concerned a Montana private school scholarship program that excluded religious schools from receiving aid.
The court said that making scholarships off-limits to parochial schools ran afoul of First Amendment protections for the free exercise of religion, which prohibits the government from treating religious and secular groups differently.
Roberts joined his fellow conservative justices to form a 5-4 majority in that case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.
But two of the court\u2019s more conservative justices \u2014 Thomas and Neil Gorsuch \u2014 made clear they would have gone even further than the majority to advance religious rights at the state level.
In a concurring opinion, Thomas argued that the court\u2019s current treatment of the First Amendment\u2019s Establishment Clause, which functions as a sort of counterweight to the free exercise clause, unduly interferes with states\u2019 ability to support religious activities.
\u201cSo long as this hostility remains, fostered by our distorted understanding of the Establishment Clause, free exercise rights will continue to suffer,\u201d Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, wrote.
In another fiery dissent, Sotomayor accused the majority of using Montana\u2019s defunct scholarship program to supply an overly broad reading of the free exercise clause in a decision she called \u201cperverse.\u201d
Franke, of Columbia University, said the majority decision in Espinoza reflected an interpretative approach that has been advanced by religious conservatives over the past two decades.
\u201cThis position seeks to frame a state’s efforts to maintain a wall of separation between public and religious entities as a form of discrimination against religious entities,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n