CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: The Supreme Court is leading a Christian conservative revolution  Fri Feb 04, 2022 7:31 pm | |
| Almost as soon as Justice Barrett was confirmed, the Court handed down a revolutionary “religious liberty” decision. It hasn’t slowed down since.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/70449826/GettyImages_1235654113.0.jpg)
ustice Amy Coney Barrett had been a member of the Supreme Court for less than a month when she cast the key vote in one of the most consequential religion cases of the past century.
Months earlier, when the seat she would fill was still held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court had handed down a series of 5-4 decisions establishing that churches and other houses of worship must comply with state occupancy limits and other rules imposed upon them to slow the spread of Covid-19.
As Chief Justice John Roberts, the only Republican appointee to join these decisions, explained in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), “our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States.” And these officials’ decisions “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”
But this sort of judicial humility no longer enjoyed majority support on the Court once Barrett’s confirmation gave GOP justices a 6-3 supermajority. Twenty-nine days after Barrett became Justice Barrett, she united with her fellow Trump appointees and two other hardline conservative justices in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020), a decision striking down the very sort of occupancy limits that the Court permitted in South Bay. The upshot of this decision is that the public’s interest in controlling a deadly disease must give way to the wishes of certain religious litigants.
Just as significantly, Roman Catholic Diocese revolutionized the Court’s approach to lawsuits where a plaintiff who objects to a state law on religious grounds seeks an exemption from that law.
Before Roman Catholic Diocese, religious objectors typically had to follow a “neutral law of general applicability” — meaning that these objectors must obey the same laws that everyone else must follow. Roman Catholic Diocese technically did not abolish this rule, but it redefined what constitutes a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that nearly any religious conservative with a clever lawyer can expect to prevail in a lawsuit.
That decision is part of a much bigger pattern. Since the Court’s Republican majority became a supermajority, the Court has treated religion cases as its highest priority.
It’s made historic changes to the law governing religion even before it moved on to other major priorities for the conservative movement, such as restricting abortion or expanding gun rights. The Court has also taken on new religion-related cases at a breakneck pace. In the eight years of the Obama presidency, the Court decided just seven religious liberty cases, or fewer than one per year. By contrast, by the second anniversary of Barrett’s confirmation as a justice, the Court most likely will have decided at least seven — and arguably as many as 10 — religious liberty cases with Barrett on the Court.
In fairness, many factors contribute to this uptick in religion cases being head by the Court, and at least some of these factors emerged while Barrett was still an obscure law professor. The Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), for example, opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits that would have failed before that decision was handed down. And lawyers for Christian conservative litigants have no doubt responded to Hobby Lobby by filing more — and more aggressive — lawsuits.
This piece did not attempt to quantify the number of times the Court has been asked to decide religious liberty cases, only the number of times it decided to take the case.
But the bottom line is that the federal judiciary is fast transforming into a forum to hear the grievances of religious conservatives. And the Supreme Court is rapidly changing the rules of the game to benefit those conservatives.
The Court’s new interest in religion cases, by the numbers
As mentioned above, the Supreme Court heard fewer than one religious liberty case every year during the eight years of the Obama presidency.
In deriving this number, I had to make some judgment calls regarding what counts as a “religious liberty” case. For the purposes of this article, I’m defining that term as any Supreme Court decision that is binding on lower courts, and that interprets the First Amendment’s free exercise or establishment clause. I also include decisions interpreting two federal statutes — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act — both of which limit the government’s ability to enforce its policies against people who object to them on religious grounds.
I focused on these two constitutional provisions and these two federal laws because they deal directly with the obligations the government owes to people of faith and its ability to involve itself in matters of religion.
My definition of a “religious liberty” case excludes some Supreme Court cases involving religious institutions that applied general laws or constitutional provisions. Shortly after Obama became president, for example, the Court denied a religious group’s request to erect a monument in a public park. Yet, while this case involved a religious organization, the specific legal issue involved the First Amendment’s free speech clause, not any religion-specific clause. So I did not classify that case as a religious liberty case.
In any event, using this metric, I identified seven religious liberty cases decided during Obama’s presidency,¹ the most consequential of which was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.
Interestingly, the Court did not decide significantly more religious liberty cases in the three years that Donald Trump was president prior to the pandemic, just four in total.² The Court then did decide a rush of pandemic-related religious liberty cases in 2020, including South Bay and Roman Catholic Diocese.
.https://www.vox.com/22889417/supreme-court-religious-liberty-christian-right-revolution-amy-coney-barrett
 |
|
