religious freedom challenges to Obamacare
In the upcoming religious freedom challenges to Obamacare, Supreme Court reporters are giving extraordinary attention to an argument by law professor Marci Hamilton, who submitted a friend-of-the-court brief claiming that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is entirely unconstitutional.
But some court watchers have an extremely short attention span. Hamilton has presented this same argument unsuccessfully for 15 years.
RFRA exempts people from government coercion, but Hamilton argues that doing so violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It’s an ironic argument: even though the Constitution enshrines religious freedom, somehow it prohibits religious freedom, too.
Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog calls this “a bold new” idea. But Hamilton has repeated this same argument many times, including in 1996 as counsel for the petitioner in City of Boerne v. Flores. The Supreme Court didn’t agree, leaving RFRA in force against the federal government.
Robert Barnes of The Washington Post nevertheless asserts that in Boerne the court had “not confronted the question of [RFRA’s] constitutionality.” He may be unaware of Hamilton’s own brief in that case. She explicitly raised her Establishment Clause argument against RFRA as a “question presented” and explained at length that “RFRA violates the Establishment Clause.” It didn’t work.
Nine years later, in the O Centro Espirita case, Hamilton filed an amicus brief again insisting that RFRA violates the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court passed over that argument and ruled in favor of the RFRA plaintiffs. That same year, Hamilton filed an amicus brief arguing that RFRA’s companion statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, violates the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court disagreed a third time.
In short, Hamilton’s latest Obamacare brief is more recycled than the paper it is printed on. Hamilton’s website, RFRAfolly.com, documents 20 years of trying to eliminate RFRA. Each subsequent failure to strike down religious freedom has made her argument less and less significant.
At a deeper level, Hamilton contends the Constitution should not give specific protection to religion because some religious people have committed terrible crimes like sexual abuse. While rhetorically provocative, her argument is ad hominem. It has nothing to do with the good families coerced by Obamacare.
Nor is it clear that Hamilton would apply this same idea to her side of the case. In the Obamacare lawsuits, the government is coercing religious people. If Hamilton is right that the sins of “religion” somehow prove religious believers are wrong, what do the sins of “government” do to the Obama administration’s case?
Religious freedom is a shield against tyranny. Governments have committed immeasurable crimes and trampled upon fundamental rights, especially when the executive branch places itself above the rule of law. Would Hamilton or her supporters sign an amicus brief arguing that the government should lose in the Obamacare cases because of Tuskegee, Abu Ghraib, White House drone strikes, and worse?
The idea that RFRA is unconstitutional is ultimately a distraction. The Obama administration is refusing to follow a clear religious freedom law that was passed by a nearly unanimous Congress and signed by President Clinton. The Supreme Court has upheld and applied RFRA and RLUIPA many times in the past 20 years. RFRA applies to Obamacare and protects religious freedom for all Americans, including families in business.
The administration is disregarding RFRA so it can force citizens to buy early abortion pills and birth control for other citizens. It’s not the only statutory command the White House has been willing to violate, inside and outside Obamacare. Laws do not become unconstitutional just because the executive branch wants to impose its will “with or without Congress.”
Dorinda C. Bordlee is senior counsel with Bioethics Defense Fund, which filed a Supreme Court amicus brief supporting Conestoga Wood Specialties and Hobby Lobby.
FIRST AMENDMENT HIERARCHY OF RELIGIOUS RIGHTS
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.”
“the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions”
—Thomas Jefferson
The Right to Believe = Absolute
(harms no one)
The Right to Religious Speech = Highly Protected
(harm unlikely)
THE RIGHT TO RELIGIOUS CONDUCT = THE LAW GOVERNS ACTIONS
(HARM MORE LIKELY)
This is the year of the RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The American public has been deluged with news about the federal and state RFRAs. On the federal front, there are the large for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby, demanding a right under RFRA to shape their benefit packages in opposition to the Affordable Care Act and Title VII. In the states, we have had a viral contagion of state RFRA amendments that would make it possible for businesses to defend refusals to do business with homosexuals and/or same-sex couples (and in Arizona, with women, minorities, and the disabled, among others). In this column, I will focus on the federal level. In my next column for Justia, I will turn to the state RFRAs.
For those of us who have been toiling in the RFRA vineyard for 20 years, it is heartwarming to see the American public awakening to its extreme regime. Only when the people understand and speak up, will our elected representatives cease to mindlessly pander to religious demands and return to the job of serving all of their constituents.
What is a RFRA?
What is a RFRA, you ask? It is a statute that accords believers extreme religious liberty rights. It is not, in fact, a “restoration” of constitutional principles, despite its title. To understand what we are dealing with, consider the following chart:
The Never-Ending Spiral of Extreme Religious Liberty (View as PDF)
A Recent History of the Expansion of Religious Liberty Doctrine
1. 1878-present
Ordered Liberty Under the Constitution, First Amendment, Free Exercise Clause
Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990)
Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993)
Rules:
Believer must prove law imposes a substantial burden.
A neutral, generally applicable law is constitutional unless irrational.
If law is not neutral or not generally applicable, ordinary strict scrutiny applies: the government must prove a compelling interest and that the law is narrowly tailored
The right is only good against the government (state action)
2. 1972
Singular Departure from Ordered Liberty Cases
Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972)
Rules:
Believer must prove a substantial burden
Only Supreme Court case where a neutral, generally applicable law is subjected to strict scrutiny
Government must prove a compelling interest and that the law is narrowly tailored
3. 1993
Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993
Rules:
Believer must prove a substantial burden
Government must prove a neutral, generally applicable law serves a compelling interest
Narrow tailoring is replaced by the more extreme “least restrictive means”
Relief permitted only “against a government”
4. 2000
Amendments to Religious Freedom Restoration Act (further expansion of rights for believers)
Rules: Expands definition of “religious exercise” to: “any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief”
As this chart should make clear, there are critical differences between the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause and RFRA. The chart and the following are intended to be educational, not confrontational, which, unfortunately, is something that I must say in this politically-charged atmosphere. The rhetoric used to lobby for RFRAs as though they are mirror images of the First Amendment has been just that—rhetoric. A RFRA is not a mirror image of the First Amendment and no one—least of all a legislator—should think that it is. And none of the RFRA supporters need to call my description “hysterical,” as they are wont to do, because it is simply factual.
Under the Court’s approach to rights generally, which it often calls “ordered liberty,” the First Amendment subjects a neutral, generally applicable law to rationality review. For example, if you are stopped for a speeding ticket, the fact you are religious does not help. And a law that is not neutral, or not generally applicable, is subject to strict scrutiny. For example, if a law is passed to eject a religious group or if a law provides exceptions for secular conduct but none for conduct that is religiously motivated, it receives strict scrutiny.
Strict scrutiny for the Court in the free exercise cases has meant that the law must serve a “compelling interest” and be “narrowly tailored” to serve that interest. Only laws that are not neutral or not generally applicable have received this strict scrutiny.
A RFRA is a religious liberty special-of-the-day omelet, which breaks eggs and combines them with novel ingredients. First, forget rationality review for any statute. Instead, those statutes that are neutral and generally applicable (i.e., the vast majority of laws) are subjected to a version of strict scrutiny. That is an extraordinary leap in the power of believers to trump the law. That alone means that RFRA does not mirror the First Amendment.
Second, I say they are subjected to a “version” of strict scrutiny, because the original RFRA drafters weren’t satisfied with ordinary strict scrutiny from the free exercise cases. They added a more onerous burden on the government to prove that the law at issue is not just narrowly tailored, but rather is the least restrictive means for this believer. That makes a significant difference, according to the Court.
This leap in the tailoring requirement is often ignored, because people are taken in by the statute’s title and the fact it invokes a “return” to Sherbert v. Verner and Yoder v. Wisconsin. But neither of those cases, while requiring a compelling interest test, imposed the “least restrictive means” test on the government. (And, in truth, Yoder’s application of even ordinary strict scrutiny to a neutral, generally applicable law is the exception that proves the rule.)
The difference between narrow tailoring and least restrictive means is significant, according to the Court. “Narrow tailoring” means that the law is well-tailored to the government interests it is supposed to serve. It does not mean that the means must be specifically tailored to each individual claimant, however. For narrow tailoring, the government does not have to prove that it has considered and rejected all less restrictive alternatives.
Proving a “least restrictive means” is significantly more difficult for the government. “Least restrictive means” means that the law must be tailored to this particular believer. As Justice Powell stated in 1980, and it still remains true, “this ‘means’ test has been virtually impossible to satisfy,” as Justice Powell said in Fullilove v. Klutznick. The Court has not applied this onerous least restrictive means test in a First Amendment free exercise case, as it pointed out in Boerne v. Flores. (True, the Court mentioned the phrase in Thomas v. Review Board, but did not apply it and no majority has invoked it again in a free exercise case, including in the one case applying strict scrutiny after Smith, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah.)
When the government’s burden is increased to the “least restrictive means” test, the believer has a high likelihood of success, and the people protected by the law have a low likelihood of protection.