The Many Dimensions of the Chief Justice's Triumphant Term by Linda Greenhouse
'Among them: Religion got a place at the public table long reserved for secular society.
For once, the conventional wisdom was right: The Supreme Court term that ended last week was a triumph for Chief Justice John Roberts. But, as usual, the conventional wisdom skims the surface, focusing on the obvious: his steering of the court toward a center comfortably aligned with public opinion, and protecting it from an institutionally destructive alliance with a president who assumed the court would do his bidding.
I’m among those who celebrate these outcomes, and I don’t in any way mean to diminish them. Rather, I want to suggest that the 2019-20 Supreme Court term looks even more consequential, for the country and the chief justice, when his triumph is seen in full, in its multiple dimensions.
To do that requires looking closely at the three religion cases decided at the end of the term.
In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the court held that a state that offers a subsidy to private schools can’t exclude religious schools from the benefit. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the court ruled that the federal laws that protect workers from discrimination don’t apply to the lay employees of religious schools who have a role in “educating and forming students in the faith.” And in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, the court excused employers, including corporations, with a “sincerely held” religious or “moral” objection to birth control from having to take even a modest arm’s-length step that results in an employee receiving coverage for contraception, to which the Affordable Care Act entitles her.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in only the first of these cases; he assigned the opinion in the second to Justice Samuel Alito and the third to Justice Clarence Thomas. While the first two involve the First Amendment’s guarantee of the “free exercise” of religion, the third, concerning a rule put in place by the Trump administration, is not based on the Constitution but rather on administrative law and a federal statute.
But the decisions’ commonalities are more important than their differences. All three elevate religion to a position of privilege, short-circuiting the statutory rights of employees or, in Montana’s case, overriding an explicit state constitutional barrier against public financial aid to parochial schools. And all three go to the heart of John Roberts’s project.
By “project” I don’t mean something nefarious. . .
After 15 years of watching John Roberts as chief justice, I’ve identified two main projects.
One concerns race: getting the government out of the business of counting by race by rejecting both affirmative action that increases opportunity for racial minorities and federally policed guardrails to prevent the suppression of minority votes. His early years on the job reflected this deep commitment, first with the Parents Involved case in 2006, overturning efforts by two school districts to maintain integration through race-conscious school assignment measures, and, six years later, with Shelby County v. Holder, which cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The other project is religion: giving religion a place at the public table long reserved for secular society; removing barriers to religious expression in the public square; insisting on organized religion’s entitlement to public benefits as a matter of equal treatment while at the same time according religion special treatment in the form of relief from the regulations that everyone else must live by. Benefits without burdens, equal treatment morphing into special treatment.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/supreme-court-roberts-religion.html?
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