Linky
So which way do you think the court will lean? So far, I haven’t seen a very good case being made from their legal team.
It’s not completely impossible, but I doubt the Court will side with them. Hobby Lobby is not a church or any other kind of religious institution - it’s a for profit corporation. They’re not (or, at least, really, really shouldn’t be) allowed to inflict their religious beliefs on their employees.
I rather expect the Court would be likely to side with Hobby Lobby.
Why?
To be honest, it comes down to bare naked cynicism on my part. It’s understood that this Court, by its 5-member conservative majority, leans conservative on a whole range of matters. But wait, it’s worse: There have been enough very controversial cases, where the Court has taken the Conservative side, that a great many people have lost much or all confidence in this Court. They have totally blown off any pretense of honest unbiased judging in many cases, and have established a reputation for right-wing ideological judging.
They lost any claim for honest judging with their decision to take on Bush v Gore in 2000. Nevermind the outcome; they should never have taken that case in the first place. They claimed the need to avoid a constitutional crisis, should the Electoral College somehow fail to choose one candidate or the other. Never mind that they should have waited, but didn’t, until after such a failure occurs before taking a case on those grounds. And never mind that the Electoral College has failed in the past, and the Constitution explicitly has a provision for this case, and the election has gone to the House of Representatives, so there is precedent for it. The Court entirely lost its legitimacy there.
And likewise, the highly controversial Citizens United case. Depending on your point of views, that decision wasn’t just merely wrong, but was totally ideological.
So, at least from the point of view of a liberal/progressive/Democrat, this Court has a track record of right-wing ideological decisions, warranting a high level of cynicism.
So, I have a dim view of the Court’s willingness to “do the right thing”.
BUT: Is there a Federal Law banning this particular kind of discrimination? Is there a Constitutional Right banning this particular kind of discrimination? I’m not sure. The Court might side with Hobby Lobby, and there might actually not be such a right. It might really be something that Congress needs to address. A lot of social justice laws seem a lot more legitimate if they come from Congress or a Legislature instead of from a Court. But that ain’t about to happen with the current Congress, that’s fer sure.
Serious question.
If the court sides with Hobby Lobby, what would prevent a company owned and managed by a Jehovah Witness from refusing to pay for insurance coverage for blood transfusions and organ transplants?
I understand that contraception and transfusions aren’t equivalent, and the JW doesn’t advocate trying to ban the procedures for everyone, but the fact that it’s a core component of their belief system makes it eligable under the same arguments that Hobby Lobby is using.
Back in 1990, the Court ruled 5-4 that the Free Exercise clause does not require the sort of religious exemption at issue here. (Note: Scalia authored that opinion.) Congress decried this ruling and almost unanimously passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which permits a certain range of religious exemptions where something “substantially burdens” one’s religious beliefs, unless such an exemption violates a “compelling government interest.”
Such statutory exemptions for religious objections have a long history in US law. Generally, Congress cannot discriminate between religions, but the First Amendment permits it to discriminate in favor of religious believers in general. Although, as noted above, the 1A does not require it to do so.
Longer history here.
So, this was a matter of the Court limiting certain rights, and Congress deciding that social justice did indeed warrant statutory intervention. Just not quite in the way one might have thought. 
The SCOTUS hates women as much as Hobby Lobby does. (Also Google, but I digress.) I think Hobby Lobby wins and suddenly all kinds of businesses get religion. Women continue to be trodden, and this planet continues to suck.
Or a company owned by Christian Scientists from refusing to pay for any health insurance for employees.
Is there any law that requires a company owned by Christian Scientists (or anyone else for that matter) to pay for health insurance? I thought that if the company had more than a certain number of full-time employees they had a choice of paying a fine or providing health insurance that met certain standards. Any smaller companies did not have to provide insurance at all. And my understanding is that the fine is far less than what providing insurance would cost.
I think the Court will find a middle ground, a compromise, that will satisfy no one. They seem to have a knack of doing that and putting off a final decision in the hopes that the legislature will solve it for them or at least give them 10, 20 or 100 years to think about it.
Hobby Lobby takes the win based upon RFRA grounds. The court says that Congress could repeal that act if they so choose but until they do the court is bound to adjudicate using a strict scrutiny criteria.
They already have that option. Either by being too small, or if they do have enough employees for insurance to be mandatory, by paying a $2000 fine annually per eligible employee.
I’m wondering if Hobby Lobby will be petty enough to drop all insurance and just pay the fines if the decision goes against them.
I happen to disagree with Hobby Lobby on the issue of birth control. However, calling them petty for defending their (apparently) closely held religous beliefs is rather lame. Unless this is a ploy to pay less for insurance, and looking at Hobby Lobby’s history makes this unlikely, they aren’t being petty. They are defending their right to practice their religon, however wacky it is. As an athiest, I appreciate the freedom of religon thing, even if I believe religon is largely crap.
Slee
He isn’t Catholic. He isn’t against birth control itself. He thinks the “morning after pill” is an abortificant. That’s not a faith-only thing. It can be tested. And the best data we have show that said drugs prevent fertilization, not implantation. And, even then, they don’t work all that well.
I’m just not sure we need the precedent that freedom of religion means the ability to decide how you believe drugs work. And I do think it is a bit petty that he refuses to even consider the idea that the drug might not be an abortificant.
And I am a Christian, and, while I’m not pro-life now, I still wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing back when I was.
And that’s without getting into whether or not allowing your employers to buy something from you is actually “practicing your religion.”
Verrelli, arguing for the government position agreed with a hypothetical presented by Justice Alito of a circumstance in which a for-profit corporation could present a Free Exercise of religion 1st Amendment challenge. See page 78 of the transcript.
bolded for emphasis
The government’s lawyer agrees that for profit corporations can, in some circumstances, present Freedom of Religion claims.
Stick a fork in it. The administration’s argument is done.
I saw it noted that the Court is expected to issue their decision sometime around late June. It’s typical for decisions to take several months to come out, after the arguments.
Why does it generally take so long after a case is argued for the Court to issue a ruling?
The biggest cases are worked over repeatedly by the justices, perhaps in hope that the unfolding arguments will persuade a justice to switch sides in a close case. Indeed reasonable speculation has it that this is exactly what happened when the individual mandate was upheld.
The end of June is the traditional end to the court’s calendar. So that is viewed as the deadline to be sure they have released judgments for the cases they had seen during the year.
Really? THIS Court? The same court that upheld Obamacare, with Roberts casting the decisive vote? The same court that struck DOMA? (Note that there are different Justices involved now as opposed to the 2000 Court).
From what little I read on the arguments today, it sounds like Sotomayer, Kagen, and Ginsburg came out swinging, and Kennedy also seemed skeptical of Hobby Lobby’s position. I suspect that at least one more Justice will be persuaded, and Hobby Lobby will lose.
I disagree. I think it will be 5-4 Hobby Lobby’s way, but with a narrow ruling – something that limits the reach to closely-held S corps, where there is a clear uniform identity of ownership behind the corporate structure. They will leave undecided the wider question of what rights IBM or General Motors might have.
The four will be:
Sotomayor
Kagan
Ginsburg
Breyer
And the five will be:
Alito
Roberts
Kennedy
Thomas
Scalia
Scalia will write a concurring opinion in which he agrees with the result but would not limit it to any corporations, because of the plain language of 42 USC § 2000bb and 1 USC § 1, which Thomas will join.
This morning’s Indianapolis Star showed a picture of a protester dressed as a package of birth control pills. I wondered, “Where do you suppose she got the materials to make that costume?”
Ohh, my. 