How could the Supremes be expected to know how anyone will attempt to use any of their rulings? Will their rulings be used in other cases? Of course they will. Will the attempts be successful? Maybe. Lawyers can file motions. That’s what they get paid to do. The filing of a motion doesn’t mean the motion will actually accomplish anything.
*The motions, filed with a Washington, DC, district court on behalf of Ahmed Rabbani of Pakistan and Emad Hassan of Yemen, ask the court to bar military officials from preventing Gitmo inmates from participating in communal prayer during Ramadan.
…A spokesman for the Department of Defense told Al Jazeera America on Friday that the “Defense Department is aware of the filing,” and that the “government will respond through the legal system.”*
It seems that this motion still has an uphill legal battle if it isn’t squashed immediately.
By letting Hobby Lobby’s owners assert their personal religious rights over an entire corporation, the Supreme Court has poked a major hole in the veil. In other words, if a company is not truly separate from its owners, the owners could be made responsible for its debts and other burdens.
“If religious shareholders can do it, why can’t creditors and government regulators pierce the corporate veil in the other direction?” Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, asked in an email.
That’s a question raised by 44 other law professors, who filed a friends-of-the-court brief that implored the Court to reject Hobby Lobby’s argument and hold the veil in place. Here’s what they argued:
Allowing a corporation, through either shareholder vote or board resolution, to take on and assert the religious beliefs of its shareholders in order to avoid having to comply with a generally-applicable law with a secular purpose is fundamentally at odds with the entire concept of incorporation. Creating such an unprecedented and idiosyncratic tear in the corporate veil would also carry with it unintended consequences, many of which are not easily foreseen.
In his opinion for Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito’s insisted the decision should be narrowly applied to the peculiarities of the case. But as my colleague Pat Caldwell writes, the logic of the argument is likely to invite a tide of new lawsuits, all with their own unintended consequences.
Small wonder, then, that despite congressional Republicans defending the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for American business against the nanny state, the US Chamber of Commerce—the country’s main big business lobby—was quiet on the issue. Even more telling: Despite a record tide of friends-of-the-court briefs, not one Fortune 500 weighed in on the case. In fact, as David H. Gans at Slate pointed out in March, about the only sizeable business-friendly groups that did file briefs with the court were the US Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Both sided against Hobby Lobby.
The Court appears to be ready to take that chance.
The specific fear raised by the 44 law professors is not remotely likely. We already permit a corporation to assert the secular beliefs of its owners: the New York Times, every day, publishes an editorial page containing the views of the owners of the New York Times. No one has ever (so far as I can tell) argued that this somehow exposes the shareholders or officers to vicarious liability.
Fortune 500 companies would have no reason to take a side here, since the Court’s decision was limited to closely-held corporations. Are there any closely-held Fortune 500 corporations?
Dell and Enterprise Holdings are two examples. Here is a list of the biggest private companies in the US, which includes some on the Fortune 500, and many that have the revenue to be on the F500. The inclusion criteria for the F500 are unclear to me, so I’m not sure why companies like Cargill, with $136 billion in revenue are left off the list.
Is that the definition of “closely held”? I don’t know if Dell qualifies. Enterprise is owned by the Taylor family, but I don’t know how many people that is or how the stock is divvied up among them.
Bricker, do you hide in terror every night fearing the sun would never come up? Because you don’t have any proof that scientists aren’t just lying to you when they tell you about gravity and rotation, right?
The fact is, this request by a bunch of religious nutjobs is 100% based on the Hobby Lobby decision. It is not a coincidence it came after the ruling. It doesn’t matter if they don’t cite the ruling itself in the letter. Reasonable people are capable of distinguishing between the outrageous and the rational in most circumstances. Here you have a pack of religious groups using the same arguments as a winning case just after that verdict was handed down. The part about religious objection from a business standpoint is quite clear that they mean to invoke Hobby Lobby. Seriously, only dishonest or stupid people cannot see that link
And speaking of that, some of you defending the request by the rabid religious nutjobs must think those religious morons are utterly and completely retarded. The Hobby Lobby case was a very publicized and watched case by both sides. You guys must think these religious people lived under a rock if you actually believe that they did not pay any attention to a far-reaching case that would have trickle-down implications across the US. So which is it? Are they complete fucking idiots or liars? Which one is more palatable to you?
The problem is that if they are using arguments from the Hobby Lobby case, those using have no relation to the case they’re using them on. Their letter asks Obama to include, in his upcoming Executive Order, religious exemptions similar to those in the Senate version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The request has nothing to do with Hobby Lobby and nothing to do with the RFRA, which would not apply. (I can explain why if anyone’s interested.)
So, no: the fact is that this request is based on the upcoming Executive Order and the desire to mirror the religious exemptions present in the Senate version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
But you apparently feel otherwise. So please specify the precise portions of their letter that you believe evokes the RFRA or the Hobby Lobby ruling.