Jeffrey Toobin has an article in The New Yorker (no, not the one about how Justice Thomas is incompetent because he is overweight) that expresses the view that the challenge to the contraceptives mandate in Hobby Lobby is really just part of a larger effort to deprive poor people of needed medical care. Here’s his evidence:

The political nature of the case was an open secret during the argument at the Court. Sotomayor told Paul Clement, the lawyer for Hobby Lobby, who was a solicitor general under George W. Bush, “You picked great plaintiffs.” (Customarily, of course, it is the plaintiffs who pick the lawyers.) Elena Kagan pointed out to Clement that he was really attacking the entire law. “Isn’t that just a way of saying that you think that this isn’t a good statute, because it asks one person to subsidize another person?” she asked. “But Congress has made a judgment and Congress has given a statutory entitlement and that entitlement is to women and includes contraceptive coverage. And when the employer says, no, I don’t want to give that, that woman is quite directly, quite tangibly harmed.”

It comes as news to me that what Hobby Lobby objects to is the concept of a legislative subsidy, rather than a government regulation–and not a statute–that decides how the subsidy will be financed. And I’m sure Hobby Lobby will be surprised to learn that it doesn’t care about poor people–say, the poorer of its own employees for whom it provides health plans–health plans that some have urged it simply to abandon if it feels so strongly about its religious objections.

And here is a line from Peter Berger’s latest column: “I am not overly fond of The New Yorker magazine with its incongruous mix of politically correct articles and advertisements for outrageously expensive goods.”