The Montana Legislature established a program that grants tax credits to those who donate to organizations that award scholarships for private school tuition. To reconcile the program with a provision of the Montana Constitution that bars government aid to any school “controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination,”
Art. X, §6(1), the Montana Department of Revenue promulgated “Rule 1,” which prohibited families from using the scholarships at religious schools. Three mothers who were blocked by Rule 1 from using scholarship funds for their children’s tuition at Stillwater Christian School sued the Department in state court, alleging that the Rule discriminated on the basis of their religious views and the religious nature ofthe school they had chosen.
The trial court enjoined Rule 1. Reversing,the Montana Supreme Court held that the program, unmodified by Rule 1, aided religious schools in violation of the Montana Constitution’s no-aid provision. The Court further held that the violation required invalidating the entire program.
Held: The application of the no-aid provision discriminated against religious schools
Fed gives tax deductions for donations to schools , also for church donations.
I haven’t read any of the decision in the Espinoza v. Montana case yet, but I’ve been following this case for a while, and I really don’t have a problem with the outcome here. And I say that as a liberal atheist who supports public schools and who has very little time for government promotion of religion.
This was a school-choice scholarship program designed to help parents, often poor parents, send their kids to private schools. We can debate about whether that sort of school choice program is a good idea, but if you’re going to allow tax credits for donations to a “school scholarship organization” that helps pay for private schooling, I really don’t think it’s a big deal is some of the private schools also happen to be religiously affiliated.
I’ll be interested to read the opinion and the dissents. If anything surprises me, maybe I’ll come back and opine on it.
Are we actually talking tax credits, or just deductions?
Tax credits for donations seems a bit… odd. Essentially, you are giving away taxpayer money. At least with deductions, it is only the marginal income tax of the donation that is being taken from the tax base, not the whole thing.
It’s a tax credit of up to $150 per individual who donates to the scholarship programs.
The total amount allotted for the tax credits was $3 million per year, with a proviso that, in any year where the annual allotment is exhausted, it increases by 10% the following year. That means that, to exhaust the allotment, 20,000 people would have to donate the maximum $150 each (or, more people donating less money per person, obviously).
I don’t know how many Montanans actually made the donations and took advantage of the credit over the course of the scheme.
I’ve only skimmed the SCOTUS opinion and I need to go back and read the Montana Supreme Court decision. But what struck me as odd was that the Montana Supreme Court’s solution (as I understood it) was to strike down the entire tax credit program (for religious and non-religious schools alike).
They sort of got stuck there because the state constitution has a Blaine Amendment (enacted, of course, like similar provisions out of anti-Catholic bias). And that provision stands in tension with the federal religion clauses. I think today’s SCOTUS opinion (in effect) strikes down the Blaine Amendment, and that much I tend to agree with. But I think the Court goes on to say that (because the Blaine Amendment violated the federal constitution) the Montana Supreme Court was required to simply overlook it entirely when interpreting the state law. And that doesn’t make sense to me.
Just want to make a comment about this. The term Blaine Amendment is use 26 times altogether in the Roberts opinion and the Alito concurrence, but despite the fact that I have no real problem with the holding in this case, I think that their constant use of this term (especially Alito) is actually somewhat dishonest in this case.
Yes, Blaine Amendments (as they came to be called) were amendments enacted by a bunch of states in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, largely out of anti-Catholic bias. There’s no two ways about it: much of America was virulently anti-Catholic, and this manifested itself in increasingly obvious ways as more and more Catholics migrated to the United States.
But there are some things worth noting about “no aid to sectarian schools” provisions in state constitutions. First, a number of states had “no aid” provisions well before Blaine’s heyday (1870s), and well before the arrival of significant number of Catholics. An investigation of the history suggests that the key motivating factor behind many of these provisions was often simply a general opposition to state funding for religious or sectarian education. That is, not all “no aid” provisions, even in the nineteenth century, arose out of anti-Catholic animus.
Even more importantly, in this case, while Montana did introduce a Blaine Amendment in the nineteenth century, and it was introduced, in considerable measure, as a result of anti-Catholic sentiment, that doesn’t mean that its current iteration was anti-Catholic. The people of Montana held a new constitutional convention in the early 1970s, and at that convention they re-adopted the “no aid” provision, this time without any hint of anti-Catholic sentiment. Indeed, one of the delegates who supported the “no aid” clause at the 1972 Montana constitutional convention was a Catholic priest who was also the Director of Education for the Diocese of Great Falls.
As I said, I’ve got no real problem with the outcome in this case, but I also don’t really think that anti-Catholic bias was a factor in the Montana policy, and nor should it have been a factor in the court’s decision. Alito, especially, makes far too much of it; he is responsible for 24 of the 26 mentions.
Given Robert’s vote in this case and the earlier one concerning job protections for LGBTQ people I anticipate at minimum a tweet calling for Robert’s impeachment if he is the 5th vote to release Trump’s tax returns. And the armed guards probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. Conservatives have distrusted Roberts for a while now.
I am okay with presidents being held criminally accountable for their behavior, and I am fully confident that there are adequate safeguards against abuse.
After all, Trump bucked precedent and fought release of documents that every other President voluntarily released. He successfully took it all the way to the Supreme Court and may actually win. Whatever the ultimate outcome, he definitely had his day(s) in court and apparently it didn’t keep him from missing any tee times.
It makes sense to me. The Montana Legislature passes a law which gives tax credits for donations to a scholarship program which allows parents to send there children to any private school including religious schools. The government passes an administrative rule that, due to the Blaine Amendment, parents may not send their children to religious schools with these scholarship.
The State Supreme Court rules that it will just scrap the whole program because of the potential conflict with the First Amendment.
The parent has been injured by Montana’s improper application of federal law. But for this improper application, the program would have stood as written allowing scholarships to be used for religious schools.
Imagine a similar program, say of tax credits for a program to allow married couples to go on a second honeymoon. But the Montana Constitution says no money for gay married couples. Instead of holding that the Montana Constitution is in conflict with the U.S. Constitution (per Obergefell) and that gay couples are allowed access to the program, it just scraps the whole program. The gay couple cannot get access to a program it should have been able to access but for the misinterpretation by the Montana courts. It’s the very definition of an injury.
If you read Alito’s opinion, he outlines the historical record pretty well. The short version is that almost all schools even public schools in the 19th century had a copious amount of “generic Protestant” religious education. Then come the Catholics and they start talking about barring aid to “sectarian” schools, meaning Catholic schools.
The faithless electors case had the potential to lead to a shitshow in November if the court had decided that states couldn’t enforce an elector’s pledge to vote for the people’s choice.
Also, it’s three cases: there were actually two faithless elector cases, plus the robocalls case.
Worth noting that the faithless elector cases were basically unanimous. Kagan wrote for herself and everyone else except Thomas. Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence, joined by Gorsuch. I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know how his analysis differs from the majority opinion.
It would likely only ever matter in a very close election anyway, because the political parties are generally pretty rigorous about picking party faithful to be electors in the first place. But it’s precisely in a very close election that you don’t want the whole thing decided by one or two iconoclasts.
Imagine if the electoral college vote were 270-268 one way, and a couple of electors flipped, making it 270-268 the other way. There would likely be riots in the streets.
OK, so I’ve read the opinion and the concurrence in the faithless electors case now.
Justice Kagan’s opinion basically argues that the constitution, and historical practice, give the state the power to enforce its will on electors.
She argues that Article II of the constitution “gives the States farreaching authority over presidential electors, absent some other constitutional constraint” (p. 9). Her opinion also notes that long-standing practice also weighs heavily in constitutional interpretation, and that the history of elections demonstrates that states, from very early on in the history of the republic, dictated the behavior or electors, and that “Courts and commentators throughout the 19th century recognized the electors as merely acting on other people’s preferences” (p. 15).
The majority notes that many historians and legal scholars believe that the framers of the constitution intended the electors to exercise their own, individual judgment, but the majority opinion basically dismisses this consideration in favor of a more directly textual analysis.
Clarence Thomas agrees in the judgment, but not the reasoning. His central position is that the constitution never really addresses in any meaningful way whether or not states have the power to control electors. In particular, he argues that requiring states to put in place a method of choosing electors does not, in itself, give the states power over those electors.
While the majority argues that the constitution gives the states power to control electors, Thomas argues that it doesn’t explicitly grant that power. But because it doesn’t say either way, Thomas argues that the decision should therefore be left up to the states.
