Supreme Court / Obama Administration

[B-Man]

JAMES TARANTO NOTES THE NEW YORK TIMES’ INCONSISTENCY:

–editorial,

New York Times,

Oct. 25, 1993

“

Three years ago the Supreme Court threw away decades of precedent and watered down the religious liberty of all Americans. . . . By radically changing the ground rules for deciding claims of religious liberty, the Court alarmed organized religion, civil liberties organizations of all stripes and Senators as different in outlook as Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Orrin Hatch of Utah. . . .

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act reasserts a broadly accepted American concept of giving wide latitude to religious practices that many might regard as odd or unconventional. The bill deserves passage. .

. . With the Restoration Act, Congress asserts its own interest in protecting religious liberty. It’s a welcome antidote to the official insensitivity to religion the Court spawned in 1990.”

–editorial,

New York Times,

July 1, 2014

“

The Supreme Court’s deeply dismaying decision on Monday in the Hobby Lobby case swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty. . . . It was the first time the court has allowed commercial business owners to deny employees a federal benefit to which they are entitled by law based on the owners’ religious beliefs, and it was a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability.”

 

 

Well, the tone of blustering moral superiority is consistent.

 

 

.

[B-Man]

Shameless Smear of The Supremes

by Rich Lowrey

 

It has long been suspected that the Supreme Court hates women, although it took the court’s 5-4 decision in the Hobby Lobby case to fully reveal its blatant misogyny.

 

The court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act forbids the administration from forcing Hobby Lobby — an arts-and-crafts chain owned by evangelical Christians — to cover contraceptives that its owners object to on religious grounds (specifically, four drugs that it believes act as abortifacients).

 

If you don’t see the anti-women agenda at work in this decision, you aren’t as discerning as the hysterics on the left who point out, accusingly, that the five justices in the majority are all men. QED.

 

Sen. Harry Reid, displaying his unfailing instinct for the inane, tweeted, “It’s time that five men on the Supreme Court stop deciding what happens to women.”

 

The majority leader seems to believe that the court was deliberating in the case of Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., et al. v. The Fate of Women’s Freedom in the United States.

 

The ruling was quite limited. It didn’t strike down the contraception mandate, and as such is only a small carve-out from the sweeping extension of government power represented by the mandate.

 

The decision only says that the mandate can’t apply to Hobby Lobby and other closely held corporations (defined by the IRS as firms where five or fewer individuals hold 50 percent or more of the value of the corporation) that oppose it on religious grounds.

 

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in the 1990s with large bipartisan majorities, created a broad protection for religious liberty.

 

It says that government can’t create a substantial burden on someone’s exercise of religion unless it is using the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest.

 

The court held that there are less restrictive means for the government to get women the drugs in question, including paying for them directly rather than forcing Hobby Lobby to cover them.

 

{snip}

 

Of course, Hobby Lobby doesn’t have the power to deny its employees the drugs it finds objectionable, nor does it claim such a power. Women who work for the company can buy them on their own.

 

For that matter, Hobby Lobby doesn’t claim the right to stop them from having abortions. The women who work for Hobby Lobby have exactly as much “choice” now as they did prior to the decision.

 

The left can’t get its head around the idea that the law or the Constitution sometimes limits the means whereby it seeks to achieve its ends. The left doesn’t really do law. It often doesn’t even do reasoning.

 

It does bullying and demagoguery. In the argument over Hobby Lobby, it has brought the logic of the “war on women” — its shameless smear job — to the Supreme Court.

 

There are numerous lawful ways around the Hobby Lobby decision. If it wants to get at the root of the matter, Congress can carve out an exception from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act for the contraception mandate, or repeal the act in its entirety.

 

 

More at the link

 

http://nypost.com/2014/07/02/shameless-smear-of-the-supremes/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow

[Nanker]

What else is new? Liberals are whining because they didn't get their way because an authority figure told them to get back and live within the law. They always whine because that's what petulant fools with no regard for anyone else but their own egomaniacal selves do. "I thought it, therefore I must have it." It's the equivalent to a child in a supermarket checkout line throwing a tantrum because their mommy won't buy them a candy bar or whatever shiny thing that's put in front of them at the moment by the powers that be.

 

Empty pot - meet wooden spoon... bang, bang, bang! It make noise! It's social masturbation done in public. They have no credibility other than in their own circles of sanctimonious, greedy, jealous friends on Facebook where they pass around intellectual thoughts and articles they found in Cosmo, TMZ, and People magazine. They're dumb as ****.

[Tiberius]

 

Empty pot - meet wooden spoon... bang, bang, bang! It make noise! It's social masturbation done in public. They have no credibility other than in their own circles of sanctimonious, greedy, jealous friends on Facebook where they pass around intellectual thoughts and articles they found in Cosmo, TMZ, and People magazine. They're dumb as ****.

 

OMG! Liberals are awful!

[Philly McButterpants]

This ruling and the subsequent fallout has truly revealed the extent of the duplicity of the American left. And not just the run of the mill liberal buddy or two on facebook, etc. these are people that should know better. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid, the NYT etc are all guilty of mis-informing their low-information followers.

[3rdnlng]

This ruling and the subsequent fallout has truly revealed the extent of the duplicity of the American left. And not just the run of the mill liberal buddy or two on facebook, etc. these are people that should know better. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid, the NYT etc are all guilty of mis-informing their low-information followers.

 

I have FB friends who are posting schit like that comes out of the mouths of Hillary, Elizabeth the Native American and Slimy Harry. They appear to have no clue as to the real ruling. It's unbelievable how normally intelligent people can be so blinded to the truth when they espouse the liberal way.

[B-Man]

MEGAN MCARDLE: Who’s The Real Hobby Lobby Bully?

 

Here’s the most interesting thing to me about the long, loud debate over the recent Hobby Lobby decision: Both sides believe that they are having someone else’s views forcibly imposed upon them. . . .

 

Cards on the table: I think that institutions Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor are obviously correct — they are being forced by the government to buy something that they don’t want to buy. We can argue about whether this is a good or a bad idea, but the fact that it is coercive seems indisputable. If it weren’t for state power, the Little Sisters of the Poor would be happily not facilitating the birth-control purchases of its employees; the Barack Obama administration has attempted to force them to do otherwise. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this coercion violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it must therefore cease.

 

All this is old ground.

The interesting question is why people on the other side view ceasing the coercion as itself coercive while arguing that the original law did not, in fact, force anyone to violate their religious beliefs.

 

I think a few things are going on here. The first is that while the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts. That emotional disconnect makes it hard for the two sides to even debate; the emotional tenor quickly spirals into hysteria as one side says “Sacred!” and the other side says, essentially, “Seriously? Model trains?” That shows in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, where it seems to me that she takes a very narrow view of what role religious groups play in the lives of believers and society as a whole.

 

 

More at Link:

 

 

Hillary Clinton’s Big Lie about Hobby Lobby

 

Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and a smart one at that. So she knows better than this statement she made about the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision:

It’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.

 

Politifact rates Clinton’s statement as Mostly False. The WaPo‘s fact-checker gave it 2 Pinocchios.

But although both articles say Clinton is dissembling to a certain extent, they both give Clinton’s statement a more generous interpretation than it deserves, with the WaPo even insinuating that her error might have been inadvertent.

 

Absurd; as I said, Clinton is a razor-sharp lawyer when she wants to be. She should have gotten the maximum number of Pinocchios and then some.

 

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[Rob's House]

I was hoping more liberals would chime in on this. I've heard a lot of moralizing and platitudes but I've yet to hear a coherent legal argument against the ruling.

[3rdnlng]

I was hoping more liberals would chime in on this. I've heard a lot of moralizing and platitudes but I've yet to hear a coherent legal argument against the ruling.

 

The only way they can try to trash the ruling is to misrepresent it. Planned Parenthood is claiming that the ruling allows corporations to prevent women from obtaining contraceptives.

[Alaska Darin]

Actually, it's the Constitution that says that.

[B-Man]

Supreme Court's favorability increases after Hobby Lobby decision

 

Public opinion of the Supreme Court has improved in the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision, particularly among independents

 

Although the Hobby Lobby decision was unpopular with Democrats, whose image of the Court shifted from mixed to negative after the ruling, Republicans (who were more positive about the Court to begin with) became even more positive. Favorable ratings of the Supreme Court jumped six points among Republicans, while unfavorable views rose seven points among Democrats.

 

But the greatest change in perception of the Supreme Court came from independents. Last week, independents were more unfavorable than favorable, this week, a majority of independents are favorable.

 

https://today.yougov.../supreme-court/