Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Missouri Federal District Court Enjoins HHS Mandate

The momentum in the HHS mandate cases seems to be moving against the federal government.  The more time that goes by, the weaker the standing and ripeness objections become, and the more likely that courts will begin to turn their attention to the merits.  The legal argument for the mandate seems to be flagging even in those cases where it seemed (at least to me) that the government’s case was comparatively stronger.

On Thursday, the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri issued a preliminary injunction against the government from enforcing the mandate against a private company, American Pulverizer Co., whose owners are Evangelical Christians who believe that the use of contraception is contrary to their religious beliefs.  Plaintiffs’ companies employ about 150 people, and the current plans cover contraceptive services (perhaps a notable feature of the plans, in my opinion, insofar as the “substantial burden” prong of the RFRA standard is concerned, though the court did not discuss it in reaching its decision).  But plaintiffs wish to change the plans to exclude contraceptive coverage.

As in the O’Brien case referenced by the court (and in which the Eighth Circuit essentially granted the claimant’s motion for preliminary injunction pending appeal), the plaintiffs do not qualify for any exemption or safe harbor from enforcement — they are not religious employers under the terms of the ACA, the don’t qualify for the safe harbor available to non-profits, and they don’t qualify for grandfathered status.  That means the regulation would be enforced against them at the beginning of the new year.

In granting the preliminary injunction against the government, the court essentially punted on the question of whether a corporation can exercise religion, ruling that because the issue demands further “deliberate investigation,” an injunction was warranted.  And it further held that indirect impositions on religious beliefs can constitute substantial burdens.  Finally, the court held that the government could not satisfy its burden to demonstrate that it is advancing a compelling state interest in imposing the mandate, in light of the numerous exceptions contained in the law: “these exemptions undermine any compelling interest in applying the preventative coverage mandate to Plaintiffs.”

The case is American Pulverizer Co. et al. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, No. 12-3459-CV-S-RED (W.D. Mo. Dec. 20, 2012).

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Ripeness and the Passage of Time

Here’s a little thought about the effect of the passage of time on adjudication. The temporal dynamic I have in mind is the difference between being too late and being too early.  Being too late is best conceptualized in either/or terms.  If you file on time, you’re “in” and your law suit can move forward; if you file too late, your action is time-barred or falls outside an applicable statute of limitations, and you are “out.”  The issue of time is clean, hard-edged, and certain.  Acceptable and unacceptable are clearly designated.  The metaphors are of bells tolling, after which there is silence, or of nicely demarcated spatial boundaries.  Any exceptions are just that: exceptions to the rule, rather than judgments about the interpretation of the rule.

But a different conception of time best describes the condition of being too early.  Like a fruit, you want your action to be ripe.  The metaphor is one of maturity, and it is inevitably subject to graduated and individuated assessment.  The goal is to strike at a middle-point, at a moment between the time when the banana is cucumber-ish (unripe) and when it is a slimy, brown, putrid thing (overripe, or perhaps moot).  Likewise, the manipulation of time in the context of the metaphor of maturation looks distinctive.  The riper the action becomes — a function in part of the incremental passage of time — the more work the party resisting its ripeness must do to persuade the court that the time is not yet ripe to hear it.  With each day, the banana becomes more golden, and its characterization as unripe becomes more challenging.  And that is when the rhetoric of immaturity can assume an important function.

Take the HHS mandate litigation.  My own view is that these issues of time were in part responsible for the Eastern District of New York’s rejection of the standing and ripeness challenge by the federal government, where previous courts, adjudicating the claims at previous moments in time, had found otherwise.  Time had done, and may continue to do, its maturing work.

Yesterday, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit handed down a short order holding in abeyance Wheaton College’s complaint against HHS as, at present, unripe.  The court dutifully noted the representation of the government in the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking of the forthcoming accommodation/change/emendation/difference.  But the court also said that at oral argument, “the government went further . . . . [I]t represented to the court that it will never enforce [the existing rule] in its present form against the appellants or those similarly situated . . . . We take the government at its word and will hold it to it.”  The first italics is in the original; the second is mine.

A couple of thoughts.  First, it is interesting to see that as time progresses, and the case moves toward maturity, the government must work harder, and extend itself further, to persuade a court that the case has not hit sufficient maturation just yet.  So the government made the calculation that for the sake of gaining more time, it needed to promise “never” to enforce the existing rule against the claimants, a statement that, it would appear from the court’s language, it had not made before and had a psychological effect on the court’s judgments about maturity. Second, the precise language used by the court to describe the oral representation of the government is interesting.  In order to stave off review but to keep things sufficiently vague to give itself maximal freedom, the government represented that it will not enforce the existing rule “in its present form.”  But that simply restates the promise that it plans to amend the rule.  So one wonders exactly what of substance the oral representation adds to the government’s previous position.  Perhaps nothing.  It may instead be that the key function of the oral representation is rhetorical.  It sounds like a change of position, though really it isn’t.  But the effect of the representation is to make the banana look greener and less golden than it is.  It is the kind of rhetoric that can make a difference when the question is whether you are too early, but not too late.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time

There are many reasons why America seems to be moving inexorably toward legalizing same-sex marriage. The Sexual Revolution that has swept American society since the 1960s is probably the main explanation. There’s plenty of evidence that Americans, especially Americans below a certain age, accept the Sexual Revolution’s basic premise that sex is a harmless pleasure without much moral content, at least when it does not involve coercion or, sometimes, adultery. Divorce, once seen as a traumatic, though perhaps necessary, last resort for very troubled marriages is no longer regarded as an exceptional event. People speak without irony of “starter marriages;” fewer and fewer people marry at all. And these cultural changes are not limited to the Secular Left. An Evangelical pundit got in trouble recently because, he said, he didn’t realize that being engaged to one woman while simultaneously being married to another was frowned upon in Christian circles.

Given their views about sexuality and marriage, SSM seems to many Americans a non-issue. But there is something else at work, too. Much of the success of the campaign for SSM has to do with supporters’ adoption of the language of civil rights. In our national discourse, the phrase “civil rights issue of our time” immediately suggests SSM; last week’s NYT editorial is a good example. As a rhetorical device – and I don’t mean to suggest that SSM advocates are being insincere – this is a brilliant strategy. In American politics, a group that can successfully appropriate the language of civil rights is bound to win.

That’s why I was struck recently when I saw that Rick Warren, perhaps the most influential Evangelical pastor in America today, has adopted this language on behalf of conservative Christians. In an interview about the ACA’s Contraception Mandate, Warren called religious liberty “the civil rights issue of the next decade.” He was echoing, among others, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has also emphasized the civil rights aspect of resistance to the mandate. This is a very shrewd rhetorical move – and, again, I don’t mean to suggest anyone is being insincere. If religious conservatives are going to prevail on issues like the Contraception Mandate, they can’t hope to persuade people on the merits of traditional sexual morality, much of which the American public now finds incomprehensible. They will have to persuade people that they represent the advance of civil rights.

Posted on by nelsontebbe

Sunday Forum at Grace Church

For any readers who are local and free on Sunday morning: I will be giving an informal talk at Grace Church in the Village.  Here is the church’s description:

“Do religious organizations have special constitutional protection from government regulation? Professor Tebbe will explain and lead discussion on recent Supreme Court rulings on employment discrimination and challenges to the Affordable Care Act.”

http://gracechurchnyc.org/2012/12/03/dec-9-the-sunday-forum-10-am-the-church-and-state-series-continues/

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

An Important HHS Mandate Decision: Standing & Ripeness Satisfied

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York has denied in part and granted in part the federal government’s Rule 12(b)(1) motion to dismiss the complaint of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Catholic Health Care Systems, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre and Catholic Charities, and Catholic Health Services of Long Island (CHSLI).  The case is important on the issues of standing and ripeness.  The plaintiffs operate self-insured health plans which they believe do not qualify for grandfathered status, though they all do qualify for the safe harbor (meaning that no enforcement would occur against them until January 1, 2014).  The decision is complicated and has several moving parts.  Here’s the scoop, after the jump.

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Gedicks on the Affordable Care Act’s Contraception Coverage Mandate

Frederick Mark Gedicks (BYU – J. Reuben Clark Law School) has posted With Religious Liberty for All: A Defense of the Affordable Care Act’s Contraception Coverage Mandate. The abstract follows.

 The “contraception mandate” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 poses a straightforward question for religious liberty jurisprudence: Must government excuse a believer from complying with a religiously burdensome law, when doing so would violate the liberty of others by imposing on them the costs and consequences of religious beliefs that they do not share? To ask this question is to answer it: One’s religious liberty does not include the right to interfere with the liberty of others, and thus religious liberty may not be used by a religious employer to force employees to pay the costs of anti-contraception beliefs that they do not share.

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Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Another Mandate Lawsuit Dismissed on Ripeness Grounds

The United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania has dismissed without prejudice the complaint of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and Catholic Cemeteries against the federal government related to the contraception mandate.  The Diocese of Pittsburgh operates several schools and other charitable institutions, and it self-insures its employees; some of its health plans were grandfathered in by the regulations, some were not.

The court held that the temporary safe harbor provision (which expires on January 1, 2014) and the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking filed by the federal government on March 21, 2012, which suggests that the government may be amenable to an emendation of the (now final) rule, both indicate that the case is unripe.  As my constitutional law students studying for their Tuesday examination will surely know, ripeness turns on the questions of “fitness” of the issue for adjudication and hardship to the parties of denying review.  The court held that even though the current law is final and has been formally promulgated, the noises made by the government about changing the regulations — in combination with the temporary safe harbor and the presumption that the government is acting in good faith — mean that the case is unripe.  The reasoning more or less follows the pattern set in the Belmont Abbey case (see prior posting).  For good measure, the court held that plaintiffs here had failed to allege standing as, in the court’s view, the injury alleged was too speculative.

The case is Zubik v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 5932977 (W.D. Pa. Nov. 27, 2012).

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

District Court Rules Against For-Profit Plaintiff in Contraception Mandate Litigation

The United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma has denied a preliminary injunction to a for-profit company which had sued the Department of Health and Human Services on the grounds that the contraception mandate violated its religious liberty.  Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. is a closely held corporation whose business is arts and crafts — operating over 500 stores in 41 states and with over 13,000 employees.  The company, the court says, is “secular,” but also operated by the owners “according to their Christian faith.”  This is confusing.

At any rate, the court denied the PI both as to the Free Exercise Clause claim and the RFRA claim.  On the particular issue of whether a corporation can exercise religion (see CLR Forum posts here (Professor Colombo’s paper) and here), the court had this to say:

General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the
actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors. Religious exercise is, by its nature, one of those “purely personal” matters referenced in [Nat’l Bank of Boston v.] Bellotti  which is not the province of a general business corporation.  (18)

This is a bizarre and unnecessarily maximalist statement.  It is not needed to reach the result in the case.  It also seems untrue: it is perfectly natural to say that a corporate body can exercise religion.  I take it that at least one of the reasons that even the government itself carved out an exception in the mandate for houses of worship was that it recognized that corporate bodies can and do exercise religious freedom.  To the extent that the court is drawing a line between for-profit and not for-profit “businesses,” one might have wished for a bit more discussion about what it is exactly about the for-profit context that makes it conceptually impossible for such businesses to exercise religion.  The interesting question, I had thought, about the issue of for-profit corporations was not whether it is impossible conceptually for corporations to exercise religion full stop.  Surely it is.  The interesting question is also clearly not whether religious exercise is “a purely personal matter”; it isn’t, and in any case, one wonders why the court is qualified to opine on that sort of issue.  The interesting question, I thought, has to do with how we can know, when a corporation is very large and diffuse, or is owned by many people with different religious beliefs, what the corporation’s religious beliefs are.

The case is Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius.  Lawyers for the plaintiff have said that they will appeal.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Federal District Court in DC Grants Preliminary Injunction Against Enforcement of Contraception Mandate

Another victory for plaintiffs challenging the ACA’s Contraception Mandate: on Friday, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary injunction to Tyndale House, a publishing company that had challenged the mandate under RFRA.

The court ruled that Tyndale House, a small, closely-held firm with a pervasively Christian corporate culture, had standing to bring a RFRA claim on two alternative theories, either as the alter-ego of its owners or as a third-party representative of the primary owner, the Tyndale Foundation. On the merits, Tyndale House had shown its RFRA claim was very likely to succeed. The mandate substantially burdened the firm’s exercise of religion by forcing it to cover contraceptives that violated its religious beliefs or face “enormous” financial penalties. The government, for its part, had failed to show a compelling interest to justify this burden. Although public health and women’s equal access to healthcare were both, broadly speaking, compelling interests, the government had not shown why those interests required this plaintiff to cover the contraceptives in question. The  court stressed that Tyndale House had objected only to certain contraceptives, not all, and that the government had already exempted many other firms from the mandate.The court briefly discussed the “irreparable harm,” “balance of the equities,” and “public interest” tests, and ruled in favor of Tyndale House on each.

So far, there have been four district court decisions on the legality of the mandate as it applies to for-profit companies: three have granted plaintiffs preliminary injunctions, one has not. Friday’s case is Tyndale House Publishers v. Sebelius (D.D.C., Nov. 16, 2012).

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 3 Comments

The Catholic Vote and the Contraception Mandate

Here’s an interesting piece of data from Tuesday’s exit polls: President Obama won the Catholic vote. The margin was narrow — 50%-48%, which more or less mirrors the President’s popular-vote victory — but, still, he won. Now, you might say, this isn’t surprising. Catholics have traditionally leaned Democratic, and President Obama’s campaign stressed social justice concerns that resonate with Catholic teaching. One should remember, though, that the Obama Administration imposed the contraception mandate, and that Catholic bishops made the mandate a salient issue. Requiring Catholic institutions to provide contraceptives and abortifacients to employees, the bishops said, seriously threatens Catholics’ religious freedom. Apparently, the majority of Catholic voters disagreed. Or thought that the threat to religious freedom, if it existed, was not as important as other issues, like increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and leaving entitlement programs untouched. Perhaps Latino Catholics voted “ethnicity” rather than “religion.” Who knows? The point is, the majority of Catholic voters apparently did not accept the bishops’ understanding of the importance of the issue.

Leaving aside whether voters who disregard their bishops’ views on the contraception mandate are erring as Catholics – a question on which I’m not qualified to state an opinion — I wonder what implications this vote has for the future of the mandate. Legally, the lawsuits under RFRA will go forward, and I think they have a fair shot at success. But the atmosphere may have changed. It won’t show up expressly in judicial opinions, of course, but I wonder whether judges who support the mandate won’t feel more emboldened to find that the mandate doesn’t “substantially burden” Catholic institutions.  And I wonder whether the Obama Administration won’t feel more comfortable taking a hard line on whatever “accommodation” they are preparing for the final regulations, due before August 2013. The courts may or may not follow the election returns, but politicians surely do.