blog 3.2- soctus 2020

1. Both Trinity Lutheran and Espinoza involve state constitutional provisions that prohibited those states from spending money to “aid” churches and other religious institutions — the first cases involved Missouri’s Constitution, while the more recent case emerges from Montana
2. Justice Elena Kagan noted during oral arguments in Trinity Lutheran, the Missouri constitutional provision at issue in that case might be read to prohibit the state from providing “police protection or fire protection” to churches. That is, if a church caught ablaze, the fire department would be required to let it burn.3. they argue, is “this means that the student may be forced to choose between attending a school that accords with her beliefs or receiving thousands of dollars in government benefits.” States, they claim, “cannot condition an individual’s receipt of public benefits on her ceasing religiously motivated conduct.”4. According to US Census data, states spend an average of $11,392 per year on each public school student.5. “Denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that can be justified only by a state interest ‘of the highest order,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court in Trinity Lutheran. 6.There’s little chance that a conservative Supreme Court that appears eager to expand the rights of religious conservatives is going to hold that cases like Espinoza are too hard to decide7. The core question in the Pennsylvania cases, however, is not whether the Constitution gives such religious objectors a right to deny contraceptive coverage to their employees.8. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Lee (1982), “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”9.  Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which held that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) allows many employers that object to birth control to offer health plans that do not include contraceptive coverage. In May 2017, Trump issued an executive order instructing his administration to “consider issuing amended regulations, consistent with applicable law, to address conscience-based objections to the preventive-care mandate.” A few months later, the administration pushed out new rules granting a broad exemption to employers with moral or religious objections to birth control. Among other things, these rules exempt both nonprofit employers and for-profit employers that are not publicly traded, if those employers object “based on its sincerely held moral convictions” to contraception.10. President Trump’s election, and the appointment of archconservative Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court’s vacant seat, seemed to ensure that conservatives would prevail as soon as a case like Zubik reached the justices again. As a general rule, proposed regulations must undergo a process known as “notice and comment,” where the text of the proposed rule is released to the public so that anyone with an interest in that regulation may comment on it. The Trump administration bypassed notice and comment, although it did put the rule through this process retroactively after it was already in effect.