Posted on by geraldrussello

Another Mandate Defeat Teed up for the Supreme Court

Another defeat for the government. The Becket Fund is reporting that the Eighth Circuit, in two decisions released last week, affirmed a lower court’s grant of a preliminary injunction in favor of Dordt College and Cornerstone University, both religious nonprofits, among other entities, against enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, as well as the so-called “accommodation,” which permits religious entities not to comply with the direct provision of contraceptive coverage by signing a certification (the “Form 700”) that is then sent to a third-party administrator. That administrator then notifies the objecting party’s insurer, who then is supposed to arrange for coverage. This accommodation has its own problems, most clearly that many religious organizations do not feel comfortable appointing a third-party to do something which they themselves find objectionable.

The decision found that “by coercing Dordt and Cornerstone to participate in the contraceptive mandate and accommodation process under threat of severe monetary penalty, the government has substantially burdened Dordt and Cornerstone’s exercise of religion.” Because of that substantial burden, the government was required to show that the ACA mandate and accommodation served compelling government interests and did so through means least restrictive of the constitutional protection of free exercise. Relying on a similar, recent case, the appellate panel determined that the government had not used the least restrictive means, but did not rule on whether the government was furthering a compelling interest.

Significantly, the Court did not question Dordt and Cornerstone’s “sincere religious beliefs” that opposed them to the mandate and accommodation. This is in contrast to the case we looked at last week, where the dissenters argued that was precisely what the panel did in rejecting similar claims.

A number of religious non-profit petitions are now waiting Supreme Court review, though it is unclear whether the differing Circuit opinions are going to move the Supreme Court to take a case so soon after Hobby Lobby. However, the fault lines of the decisions are clear. It seems difficult to believe that the government would prevail on whether the ACA mandate and accommodation is the least restrictive means of achieving its interests, whatever the Court’s view of what those interests are. It is worth noting that those interests are not without challenge, including by federal appellate courts, as in a 2013 opinion by Judge Janice Brown, although they were assumed for the purposes of argument only in Hobby Lobby. Yet the stubborn, unknown fact on which the decision may hinge is not strictly a legal one: can the Justices understand that the accommodation itself can burden religious freedom, even if the government does not think it does? That in turn will require them to decide whether the challengers’ beliefs are sincere and given their place in the “scribal” hierarchy, that conclusion may be too much to expect.

Posted on by geraldrussello

Scribes and Holidays

Thanks to Marc and Mark for asking me to blog with them for the next few weeks. As I am just a law-and-religion amateur, being able to exchange thoughts with scholars of their caliber is a real honor.

To get things started, I haven’t seen much about this dissent a couple of weeks ago by a group of five Tenth Circuit judges from a denial of an en banc hearing in cases involving the contraceptive mandate as applied to non-profits.  The tenth Circuit, sua sponte, considered whether to rehear the cases en banc; the plaintiffs, who were challenging the mandate, had lost before the initial panel. The full court denied rehearing en banc , but five judges were sufficiently disturbed to write a strongly-worded dissent. The core of their argument is as follows:

Put another way, the panel majority may be saying that it is the court’s prerogative to determine whether requiring the plaintiffs to execute the documents substantially burdens their core religious belief, regardless of whether the plaintiffs have a “derivative” religious belief that executing the documents is sinful. This is a dangerous approach to religious liberty. Could we really tolerate letting courts examine the reasoning behind a religious practice or belief and decide what is core and what is derivative?

This is the real danger, I think. You have what John McGinnis calls a “scribal” caste without much (as Mark rightly notes) personal connection to traditional religious thought or concepts determining what is “really” important to the religion of the litigants.  It is no surprise that in such cases, the judges favor the state, because how serious could religious people actually be about matters the scribes see as unimportant?

A second, non-legal topic. My wife and I have three grade-school children, and for the first time this year, I heard multiple conversations over the summer about the multitude of school holidays that need to be accommodated into the schedule. Not just Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Christmas and Easter, but also Eid and the Lunar New Year are now recognized in the New York public schools; the Hindu festival Diwali is also being considered. So on the one hand, legal scribes reject accommodation for beliefs not considered “core,” yet other arms of the state are increasingly conceding the centrality of expression of religious beliefs in a very public way. Since as a general matter, I believe culture eventually prevails over formal legal doctrine, this kind of contrast is something to watch.