Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

“Must the Little Sisters of the Poor Implement the HHS Mandate?”

That’s the title of a very good post by my friend and Center for Law and Religion Forum former guest Kevin Walsh.  Kevin was involved in formulating comments on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor with respect to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking as to the HHS Mandate.  Here are the succinct comments, which you should read in full, and here is a selection (footnotes omitted), which illustrates part of the difficulty faced by the Little Sisters, and perhaps by other self-insured eligible employers:

The fact that we have separately incorporated the homes in which we carry out our ministry to the elderly poor does not deprive our order’s religious exercise of its religious nature. Saint Jeanne Jugan, our foundress and the first Little Sister of the Poor, began her ministry by bringing an elderly and infirm woman into her own apartment and caring for her there. Since 1839, we have continued this tradition with our homes, which now operate in one of the most highly regulated segments of care providers. We have always done our best to comply with all government regulations that apply to our homes and with the highest standards of nonprofit financial stewardship. The Form 990 is an important tool for financial accountability in our religious charitable work, but it makes no sense to use the requirement to file it as a disqualifier for the religious employer exemption.

The Little Sisters of the Poor should receive a religious exemption based on what we believe and what we do rather than the corporate forms through which we carry out our ministry. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking observes that a church should not lose its exemption simply because it “maintains a soup kitchen that provides free meals to low-income individuals.” We agree. The same should hold true for our religious order. We should not be deprived of an exemption because we maintain homes to provide shelter and loving care to the elderly poor . . . .

Our homes provide coverage for their employees through the Christian Brothers Employee Benefits Trust. The Trust is a self-funded church plan that provides health and welfare benefits to employees of Catholic employers nationwide. As a church plan, the Trust provides benefits consistent with Catholic teachings and doctrines. The Trustees of the Christian Brothers Employee Benefits Trust have contracted with Christian Brothers Services as a third-party administrator to administer and manage the Trust. Christian Brothers Services is a nonprofit Catholic ministry that operates in accordance with Catholic teachings and doctrines.

Although our homes qualify as “eligible organizations,” the proposed accommodation in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking does not address the situation that they face under the HHS Mandate. The Notice identifies three alternative ways in which the third-party administrator of a self-insured plan might be made responsible for arranging the objectionable coverage. Each of these alternatives presupposes that the third-party administrator itself has no religious objection to arranging that coverage. But Christian Brothers Services, as another Catholic organization, shares our commitment to Catholic teaching and also objects to the HHS Mandate. Accordingly, the proposed accommodation does not offer us a path to compliance.

Posted on by JCPW

Rienzi on Religious Liberty for Money-Makers

Mark Rienzi (Catholic University of America – Columbus School of Law) has posted God and the Profits: Is There Religious Liberty for Money-Makers? The abstract follows.

Is there a religious way to pump gas, sell groceries, or advertise for a craft store? Litigation over the HHS contraceptive mandate has raised the question whether a for-profit business and its owner can engage in religious exercise under federal law. The federal government has argued, and some courts have found, that the activities of a profit-making business are ineligible for religious freedom protection.

This article offers a comprehensive look at the relationship between profit-making and religious liberty, arguing that the act of earning money does not preclude profit-making businesses and their owners from engaging in protected religious exercise.

Many religions impose, and at least some businesses follow, religious requirements for the conduct of profit-making businesses. Thus businesses can be observed to engage in actions that are obviously motivated by religious beliefs: from preparing food according to ancient Jewish religious laws, to seeking out loans that comply with Islamic legal requirements, to encouraging people to “know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” These actions easily qualify as exercises of religion.

It is widely accepted that religious freedom laws protect non-profit organizations. The argument for denying religious freedom in the for-profit context rests on a claimed categorical distinction between for-profit and non-profit entities. Yet a broad examination of how the law treats these entities in various contexts severely undermines the claimed categorical distinction. Viewed in this broader context, it is clear that denying religious liberty rights for profit-makers would actually require singling out religion for disfavored treatment in ways forbidden by the Free Exercise Clause and federal law.

Posted on by JCPW

Helfand on Implied Consent and the Contraception Mandate

Michael Helfand (Pepperdine University School of Law) has posted What is a ‘Church’?: Implied Consent and the Contraception Mandate. The abstract follows.

This Article considers the “religious employer” exception to the “contraception mandate” – that is, the “preventative care” requirements announced by Department of Health and Human Services pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This exception has triggered significant litigation with a variety of employers claiming that they have been excluding from the “religious employer” classification in violation of both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In considering these claims, this Article applies an “implied consent” framework to these cases, which grounds the authority of religious institutions in the presumed consent of their members. On such an account, consent can be assumed so long as members understood the unique religious objectives of the institution when they joined, thereby implicitly authorizing the institution to make rules related to accomplishing these uniquely religious objectives. Building on this implied consent framework, this Article argues that the First Amendment should protect institutions from the requirements of the contraception mandate so long as these institutions were both organized around a core religious mission and where that religious mission was open and obvious to employees. In such circumstances, courts should presume that employees recognized the unique religious objectives of their employer and thereby implicitly authorized their employer to make rules related to achieving these religious goals.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Predictably Unpredictable: Thoughts on the Free Exercise Clause

I want to talk to you about the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution.  This post is long.

My view of the Free Exercise Clause is one part of a larger approach to The Tragedy of Religious Freedomconstitutional adjudication involving the religion clauses.  For those who have been thirsting feverishly to know more about that approach, fear not: soon enough, I will flood the zone.  Suffice it for now to say that one of the most serious criticisms of my approach is that it is insufficiently predictable.  It is sometimes said, not without reason, that my approach is not rule-like enough, and that it is therefore damaging to rule of law values.

These are fair criticisms, and I do my best to address them.  I do this in part by taking a close look at the way in which a selection of district and intermediate appellate courts have applied that putatively most rule-like of all religion clause rules: neutral laws of general application do not violate the Free Exercise Clause.

What I find is: that rule is not nearly as inviolable as many who invoke it believe.  In fact, knowing when that rule will apply actually depends on having the sense of a host of context-dependent and issue-specific factors.  The trouble, as I have explained before, is the issue of general applicability.  Employment Division v. Smith carved out the unemployment compensation cases from its holding.  But, per this amicus brief, it is more accurate to think about this carve-out not as an “exception” but as a corollary to the rule itself, which creates a kind of graduated spectrum of general applicability. Laws which are not “generally applicable” are lifted out of the Smith “rule” and receive judicial balancing.  How do we know when a law is not “generally applicable”?

It falls to courts to determine what “generally applicable” means along the spectrum.  It cannot mean that the law has no exceptions, period; that would destroy the rule.  And yet “generally applicable” must mean something.  What it means is the subject of judicial interpretation–for now, very much in the common law style.  And that means that the Smith rule is much less predictable than its supporters suppose: “If the vice of pluralistic approaches is that they are predictable only to those who know how they will be applied, that is no less true of monistic approaches.”  Chapter 8, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom.  That is not enough, by itself, to convince you to adopt my approach.  For that, you need to buy the book!

Here is a brand new HHS Mandate case to show the predictable unpredictability of Smith, Geneva College et al. v. Sebelius, decided Wednesday by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.  The case is somewhat unusual inasmuch as the plaintiffs are both nonprofits and for-profits.  The nonprofits’ case was dismissed on standing grounds (only the Eastern District of New York, to my knowledge, has not followed this route for nonprofits).  As to the for-profits, after discussing the issue of a corporation’s exercise of religion and the RFRA claim, the court rested its decision to deny the motion to dismiss with respect to plaintiffs’ free exercise decision on an analysis of the issue of general applicability.  Here’s a substantial chunk of the decision, beginning around page 46:

There is little doubt that the mandate’s requirements are facially neutral in the sense that they are directed toward benefiting the public health, and are not explicitly targeted at any particular religious conduct. The court’s analysis, however, must extend beyond the face of the regulations in question. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has acknowledged that

the Free Exercise Clause’s mandate of neutrality toward religion prohibits government from ‘deciding that secular motivations are more important than religious motivations.’ . . . Accordingly, in situations where government officials exercise discretion in applying a facially neutral law, so that whether they enforce the law depends on their evaluation of the reasons underlying a violator’s conduct, they contravene the neutrality requirement if they exempt some secularly motivated conduct but not comparable religiously motivated conduct.

Tenafly Eruv Ass’n, Inc. v. Borough of Tenafly, 309 F.3d 144, 165-66 (3d Cir. 2002). The process of implementing the objected to requirements has been replete with examples of the government impermissibly exercising its discretion by exempting vast numbers of entities while refusing to extend the religious employer exemption to include entities like SHLC.

The primary example of the “categorical exemption” rejected in Fraternal Order of Police in the present case is the grandfathering provision in the ACA, which exempts as many as 191 million entities from the mandate’s requirements. The grandfathering exemption impacts secular employers to “at least the same degree”—and likely far more—than religious objections from entities like SHLC. Blackhawk, 381 F.3d at 209. The fact that the government saw fit to exempt so many entities and individuals from the mandate’s requirements renders their claim of general applicability dubious, at best. Elsewhere in their briefing, defendants respond that the number of grandfathered plans will continue to decrease as time goes on. Even if this comes to fruition (which is not a certainty), the secular exemption for employers with fewer than fifty full-time employees that choose not to provide any insurance coverage remains. 26 U.S.C. § 4980H(c)(2)(A). Taken together, these categorical exemptions for secular entities and individuals raise a concern that the mandate’s requirements are not generally applicable.

In addition to the secular exemptions, the government continues to engage in an impermissible “religious gerrymander” by extending exemptions to an increasing number of religiously-affiliated entities. Although the court of appeals in Blackhawk and Fraternal Order of Police was not faced with the situation where, as here, some religious conduct is exempted, the fact that defendants continue to carve out exemptions, see generally 78 FED. REG. 8,456, while subjecting SHLC and other similarly-situated close corporate entities to the mandate’s requirements, raises a suggestion of “discriminatory intent” against close corporate entities seeking to advance the religious beliefs of their owners. Fraternal Order of Police 170 F.3d at 362. On the present record, this court finds that the Hepler plaintiffs raised plausible claims that the sheer number of exemptions—both secular and religious—to the mandate’s requirements burdened their free exercise rights to an extent sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny. The court already analyzed the mandate’s requirements under the compelling government interest test in the RFRA context and found that they do not survive strict scrutiny; therefore, for the same reasons, the First Amendment claim is sufficient, and the motion to dismiss this claim must be denied.

Let’s set to the side, for the moment, the issue of the proper interpretation of “general applicability.”  This court interpreted in a certain way; other courts, as I show, interpret it differently.

The problem with the “general applicability” issue isn’t that one court may decide a case in a way you might like, and another court may decide a different case in a way you might not.  The real burn of it is that the very unpredictability that Smith aimed to eliminate has seeped right back in.  No matter how rule-like Smith tried to be, it could not squeeze out of constitutional adjudication what is and must be true about it (at least as to issues like these).  And if the response is that we can solve all of this by clarifying Smith and making it even more rule-like, my reply is: the more you squeeze, the more slips through.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Best Legal Argument For Protection of For-Profits Under RFRA

Several people have asked me about the issue of the protection of for-profit corporations in the ongoing HHS contraceptives mandate controversy.  Generally, skeptics of such protection are apt to jump immediately to policy arguments — for example, “doesn’t giving religious liberty protection to for-profits threaten the rule of law?”

Set those policy arguments, which are certainly worth taking seriously, aside for the moment.  Instead, focus strictly on the legal arguments under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  The very best legal argument that I have seen so far that RFRA does, indeed, protect for-profit corporations is set out in this amicus brief filed on behalf of several US Senators in the Hobby Lobby litigation, authored in part by Kevin Walsh (Richmond), and which I was fortunate to have an early look at.  Whatever policy concerns one might have, it seems to me that the Administration’s categorical exclusion of for-profits in its current proposed rule, and its reliance on certain definitions in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, just is not going to fly in the RFRA context.

Here is one important part of the brief (at 17-18):

In formulating RFRA, Congress heard testimony about the need for greater protection for the free exercise of religion by organizations as well as individuals . . . .  And Congress did not limit RFRA’s protections to individuals. Rather, Congress provided that “[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion,” 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1(a), employing a term that ordinarily encompasses “corporations, companies, associations, firms,  partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” 1 U.S.C. § 1.

Rather than reach the obviously incorrect conclusion that RFRA does not extend to corporations at all, the district court created an exception from RFRA’s coverage for “secular, for-profit corporations,” incorrectly concluding that such corporations “are not ‘persons’ for purposes of the RFRA.” Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, 870 F.Supp.2d 1278, 1288, 1291-92 (W.D. Okla. 2012). The district court reasoned that “[g]eneral business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion.” Id. at 1291. But the same can be said of corporations that unquestionably are “persons” under RFRA, such as hospitals, universities, and religious orders.

In attempting to justify their failure to respect religious objections to the HHS mandate asserted by for-profit corporations, Defendants have observed that Congress has sometimes distinguished between nonprofit religious organizations and for-profit secular organizations. 78 Fed. Reg. 8456, 8462 (Feb. 6, 2013) (discussing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). This demonstrates that Congress can distinguish between for-profit and nonprofit employers when it wishes to do so. But Congress made no such distinction in RFRA, which applies broadly and generally, subject only to displacement by later enactments that relax its reach in specific areas. Congress plainly wrote RFRA to include corporations, and neither RFRA nor the PPACA excludes for-profit corporations.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Me at the Catholic Lawyers Guild this Friday

I’ll be giving a short talk at the Catholic Lawyers Guild of New York this Friday, March 1, at the kind invitation of Robert Crotty.  Mass is at 7:45 AM, there is a little light breakfast thereafter, and then I’ll offer some thoughts about the HHS contraceptives mandate, after which we’ll talk together.

The location is the Church of Our Saviour, 59 Park Avenue (Park Avenue at 38th Street).  Please stop in and say hello.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

On Corporations, Their Purposes, and Their “Exercise of Religion” Under RFRA

Kevin Walsh (Richmond) has a superb post about the question whether for-profit corporations are “persons” who “exercise religion” pursuant to RFRA.  He makes his claims in the context of criticizing a recent panel decision of the Third Circuit.  You should read the whole thing, but here is a selection:

RFRA provides that “[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the government satisfies strict scrutiny. 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-1(a) (emphasis added). In the U.S. Code, “person” ordinarily encompasses “corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” 1 U.S.C. § 1. Nothing in RFRA excludes corporations generally. To the contrary, it is plain that corporations can assert claims under RFRA. The only Supreme Court case applying RFRA against the federal government involved a claim asserted by a corporation, O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal . . . .

When one analyzes the claim, it turns out that the argument is not really about the meaning of the word “person” (even though the conclusion of the argument purports to be a claim about the meaning of this word). Rather, the argument pivots on “exercise of religion.” In the words of the district court opinion adopted by the Third Circuit, “a for-profit, secular corporation cannot exercise religion.”

Again, the claim is not that corporations cannot engage in exercise of religion. After all, corporations can, and do, exercise religion. Consider, for example,Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. or Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The claim, rather, is limited to “secular, for-profit corporations.” But the claim rests on a mistake about “exercise of religion” under federal law and a mistake about corporate action.

For Kevin’s arguments about the meaning of “exercise of religion” under RFRA and about the purposes of corporate action, read the post.  I will add that on the former point, it is unquestionably the case that as a historical matter, refusals to behave in a certain way may be “exercises of religion”: two of the earliest religious exemption questions — the Quakers’ resistance to military conscription and the opposition in some religious communities to swearing oaths — take just this form.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Proposed Tweaks to the Existing HHS Contraception/Abortifacient Mandate Regulations

I’m somewhat delayed (but only by a day) in posting this item about the Obama Administration’s proposed new regulation on this issue.  Frankly, I waited  because (a) I have a hard time understanding some of the bureaucrateze; (b) after mulling it over a little last night, I’m still not exactly sure what the proposed tweaks actually change; and (c) these tweaks are only proposed (something the headline of the New York Times story on the subject today misrepresents).  The document is 80 pages, but for those looking to get a quick handle on it, I recommend focusing on roughly pp.18-31.  That’s where most of the action is.

Rick Garnett and Tom Berg have some reactions to what the proposal does at Mirror of Justice.  For summary purposes, their initial take, combined with some thoughts of my own, is that:

  1. The new regulation would not protect for-profit entities of whatever size.  This seems clearly a correct reading.  The proposed regulation says that “The Departments do not propose that the definition of eligible organization extend to for-profit secular employers. Religious accommodations in related areas of federal law, such as the exemption for religious organizations under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are available to nonprofit religious organizations but not to for-profit secular organizations. Accordingly, the Departments believe it would be appropriate to define eligible organization to include nonprofit religious organizations, but not to include for-profit secular organizations.”  (P.23)
  2. As to non-profits, the situation changes in the following ways.
    1. First, on the issue of who gets covered as a “religious employer,” the Administration would remove language that would have permitted it to inquire about the institution’s “inculcation of religious values” and about whether the entity serves “primarily” co-religionists.  Instead, there would be a reversion to IRS rules about who counts as a religious employer.  And if you read pages 19-20, you will see that this definition is limited to those institutions that are “churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations of churches, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”  Rick and Tom both believe that this definition would include “integrated” units of churches (for example, a soup kitchen or school actually operated by a church) but not independent faith-based non-profits (for example, Catholic Charities).  The proposal states that using this definition would effectively cure all excessive entanglement problems.  I am doubtful about this, but I do agree that some of the more egregious entanglement problems associated with the inquiries about “inculcation” and percentage of co-religionists would be cured.  The government notes that it “welcome[s] comments on this proposal, including whether it would unduly expand the universe of employer plans that would qualify for the exemption and whether additional or different language is needed to clarify the scope of the exemption.”
    2. For those that do not qualify for the exemption above but that meet various criteria (see page 22 for the four part requirement, and also page 48), pursuant to the “accommodation” mentioned by the Administration at earlier points, it now appears that non-profits will have their insurers pay, and there will be some sort of certification by the insurer that the non-profit has not borne the cost of the coverage.  It appears that this proposal would cover non-profit institutions like religiously affiliated universities, charities that do not qualify under 2(A), and so on.  The language is: “the health insurance issuer providing group coverage in connection with the plan would assume sole responsibility, independent of the eligible organization and its plan, for providing contraceptive coverage without cost sharing, premium, fee, or other charge to plan participants and beneficiaries.”  (23)
      1. How, one might wonder, does the government propose to require that the insurer not pass along the costs of this proposal to the insured?  This is what the government says: the insurer must provide coverage that “is not included in the group policy, certificate, or contract of insurance; such coverage [must not] not [be] reflected in the group health insurance premium; and … no fee or other charge in connection with such coverage [must be] imposed on the eligible organization or its plan.  The proposed rules would further direct the issuer receiving the copy of the selfcertification to provide contraceptive coverage under individual policies, certificates, or contracts of insurance (hereinafter referred to as individual health insurance policies) for plan participants and beneficiaries without cost sharing, premium, fee, or other charge.”  The government states that this means that the coverage is provided at “no cost” to the objecting institutions, but for reasons that have been discussed earlier, that is subject to question.  The proposal also includes the (to me) silly view — which the government has repeatedly advanced — that all of this will save the insurers money.  If that were true, one can be sure that the insurers would have provided this coverage for free long ago.
  3. Finally, it is not clear to me exactly what the proposal does with respect to self-insured entities.  The discussion begins at page 27, where the government states that it is “considering alternative approaches.”  There is some discussion about the role of “third-party administrators” in such plans, but I am afraid that I just do not know enough about the way in which self-insured entities manage their affairs to know what this would mean.  There is also language on this at page 67 which indicates that this issue has been “reserved.”  Once I get a better sense of this issue, I may post something else.

It’s probably worth saying that these are proposals only subject to notice and comment.  They aren’t the final rule.  But they obviously give a pretty good idea about what the Administration’s plan is likely to be.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

New York Times Story on the HHS Mandate Suits

Here’s a story published yesterday in the Times on the HHS Mandate law suits.  The story has several problems, among which are:

(1) It gives the impression that courts are, at this point, either dismissing these cases because they believe that “contraception is a vital health need and a compelling interest” or finding for the plaintiffs because “they [the plaintiffs] have been told that their beliefs appear to outweigh any state interest and that they may hold off complying with the law until their cases have been judged.”  The reality is that the large majority of these  suits have been dismissed without prejudice on standing or ripeness grounds, as we have noted again and again here at CLR Forum.  Standing does not appear at all in the story.

(2) Its focus on the Free Exercise Clause is odd.  It mentions the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but it focuses on the Free Exercise Clause and it mistakenly calls the O Centro case a free exercise case.  It was a RFRA case.  Here is some important language in that case:

The Government’s argument echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I’ll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions. But RFRA operates by mandating consideration, under the compelling interest test, of exceptions to “rule[s] of general applicability.”

The discussion of the Smith decision in the news story also gives the misimpression that Smith is an iron clad rule with no exceptions, but that is not true, as I have noted before.

(3) The story references the possibility that “[a] compromise for religious institutions may be worked out” and then proceeds to talk about the previously announced putative plan to shift the cost of contraception to insurers.  Standing alone — i.e., without an expansion of the category of religious employers and without dealing with the issue of self-insured plaintiffs — that compromise will work very little out for religious institutions.  But I guess we’ll see by roughly the end of the first quarter.

That said, the reporter is to be commended for getting a variety of perspectives on the issue.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Notre Dame HHS Mandate Lawsuit Dismissed on Standing and Ripeness Grounds

Well, it seems I was a bit…unripe in expressing the view that the HHS mandate suits seem not to be going the government’s way.  The United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana has dismissed the University of Notre Dame’s complaint against Health and Human Services on standing and ripeness grounds.  Notre Dame falls within the safe harbor provision and so the as yet unknown ‘Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking/putative proposed accommodation/vague promise of emendation of the current legal rule’ applies to it.  I quote the court’s language (along with its citations to those cases dealing with entities within and outside the safe harbor, many of which we have discussed before at CLR Forum) at length, as it may be helpful to readers to have it all in front of them:

This is one of dozens of similar suits filed across the nation, and courts have ruled on similar dismissal motions in several of those cases. Some of those rulings dealt with plaintiffs not in the safe harbor; as will be seen, those plaintiffs’ circumstances are too dissimilar to Notre Dame’s for those rulings to be helpful. See, e.g., Grote Indus., LLC v. Sebelius, No. 4:12cv00134-SEB-DML S.D. Ind. Dec. 27, 2012); Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, 870 F.Supp.2d 1278 (W.D.Okla. 2012), application for injunction denied 2012 WL 6698888 (U.S., Dec. 26, 2012) (Sotamayor, J.); Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 5817323 (D.D.C., Nov. 16, 2012); Legatus v. Sebelius 2012 WL 5359630 (E.D.Mich., Oct. 31, 2012); O’Brien v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2012 WL 4481208 E.D.Mo., Sept. 28, 2012); Newland v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 3069154 (D.Colo., July 27, 2012).

Of the rulings involving plaintiffs in the safe harbor, all but one have found the claims unripe and the plaintiffs to have lacked standing. Zubik v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 5932977 (W.D.Pa., Nov. 27, 2012); Catholic Diocese of Nashville v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 5879796 (M.D.Tenn., Nov. 21, 2012); Wheaton College v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 3637162 (D.D.C. 2012), appeal held in abeyance 2012 WL 6652505 (D.C.Cir. 2012); Belmont Abbey College v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 2914417 (D.D.C. 2012), appeal held in abeyance sub nom Wheaton College v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 6652505 (D.C.Cir. 2012); Nebraska ex rel. Bruning v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Svcs., 2012 WL 2913402 (D.Neb. 2012); contra, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 6042864 E.D.N.Y. ,2012).  None of those rulings bind this court, but the majority are persuasive. Notre Dame’s claims aren’t ripe, and they don’t have standing to bring them.

Both conclusions flow from the government’s creation of a safe harbor for certain employers (including Notre Dame) while it re-works the regulation. As a result, Notre Dame faces no penalty or restriction based on the existing regulatory requirement . . . .

Turning first to ripeness, the challenged regulatory requirement isn’t sufficiently final. Notre Dame is correct that regulation itself claims to be final, 45 C.F.R. § 147.130(a)(1)(iv), but events following the regulation’s adoption make clear that it isn’t final. The defendants have announced their intention to refashion the rule in an effort to address concerns such as those Notre Dame has raised and, by virtue of the safe harbor provision, have exempted Notre Dame from the rule for the time believed to be required for the re-fashioning. The government is entitled to a presumption of good faith in such promises . . . .

Our defendants have taken prompt and concrete action — the safe harbor provision — indicating that its [sic] rule is subject to reconsideration and modification.  Although Notre Dame is correct that an agency can’t “stave off judicial review of a challenged rule simply by initiating a new proposed rulemaking that would amend the rule in a significant way,” American Petroleum Institute v. EPA, 683 F.3d 382, 388 (D.C. Cir. 2012), none of the cases on which Notre Dame relies involve any parallel to the safe harbor provision that protects Notre Dame and others like it from the challenged rule.

Turning back to the question of standing, the challenged regulatory
requirement isn’t the cause of the injuries of which Notre Dame complains. Taking the defendants at their word concerning the intended reworking of the rule, this regulatory requirement won’t require Notre Dame to conduct itself in ways its Catholic mission forbids. This regulation’s replacement might do so, but no one can say because that future rule hasn’t been promulgated. It is enough to know that the present regulation is to be replaced by another, and the safe harbor is protecting Notre Dame from harm to its religious precepts until that replacement occurs.

Indeed, “no one can say” what the replacement rule might do because “no one can say” what the promised proposed rule is, or might be, or is contemplated to be.  But every banana ripens at some point.

The case is University of Notre Dame v. Sebelius, No. 3:12CV253RLM (N.D. Ind. Dec. 31, 2012).