The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority has flexed its muscle in a ruling to protect religious worship and freedom. On Wednesday, Nov. 25, Justice Amy Coney Barrett cast the pivotal vote in a 5-4 emergency ruling to limit the authority of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in placing restrictions on religious services that limits attendance at gatherings. SCOTUS ruled in favor of letting the states decide such matters in prior cases brought by the church against Cuomo’s order. Here are 5 things you need to know about supreme court ruling protecting religious worship and freedom during covid-19.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the case was brought by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and an Orthodox Jewish organization called Agudath Israel of America. They said Cuomo’s order violated their First Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court ruled in their favor. In the majority opinion, it said since the state didn’t limit occupancy in businesses like “acupuncture facilities, campgrounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities,” therefore New York’s restrictions on places of worship did violate the groups’ religious rights.
“Members of this Court are not public health experts, and we should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area. But even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten. The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty,” the opinion said.
The majority opinion was agreed on by conservative Justices Barrett, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented in the supreme court ruling. He was joined by liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. They said the ruling was unnecessary as the areas in question had already been upgraded from red zones (areas with the highest severity of infections of the virus) to yellow zones (less severe than red). They also said the court shouldn’t interfere with public health authorities.
Roberts wrote there was “simply no need” for the court to intervene. “None of the houses of worship identified in the applications is now subject to any fixed numerical restrictions,” Roberts wrote said, but he added New York’s 10 and 25 person caps at religious institutions in red zones “do seem unduly restrictive.”
“The Governor might reinstate the restrictions. But he also might not. And it is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic,” Roberts continued.
“The virus is transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets produced when a person or group of people talk, sing, cough, or breathe near each other,” Justice Breyer added in his dissenting opinion.
“The nature of the epidemic, the spikes, the uncertainties, and the need for quick action, taken together, mean that the State has countervailing arguments based upon health, safety, and administrative considerations that must be balanced against the applicants’ First Amendment challenges,” Breyer continued,
“Justices of this Court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
The ruling in favor of the synagogues and churches was a departure from earlier this year when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive and similar cases were heard by the court in May and July.
In those cases, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of leaving the state’s capacity restrictions in place in churched in California and Nevada, The Associated Press (AP) reported.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin
Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
Gorsuch criticized Roberts’ earlier and current opinions and accused him of “a serious rewriting of history” for using a 1905 precedent in public health law from Jacobson v. Massachusetts. According to Gorsuch, Robert’s use of it to justify the court’s earlier decisions was improper.
“Jacobson hardly supports cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,” Gorsuch wrote. “As we round out 2020 and face the prospect of entering a second calendar year living in the pandemic’s shadow, that rationale has expired according to its own terms. Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical. Rather than apply a nonbinding and expired concurrence … courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause. … We may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack. Things never go well when we do.”
Roberts did not let Gorsuch’s accusations go unanswered.
“I do not regard my dissenting colleagues as ‘cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,’” Roberts wrote. “They simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”
He also noted Gorsuch used three pages of his opinion in the supreme court ruling to address “exactly one sentence” of his, Politico reported.
“What did that one sentence say? Only that ‘[o]ur Constitution principally entrusts “[t]he safety and the health of the people” to the politically accountable officials of the States “to guard and protect,”’” Roberts wrote. “It is not clear which part of this lone quotation today’s concurrence finds so discomfiting … But the actual proposition asserted should be uncontroversial, and the concurrence must reach beyond the words themselves to find the target it is looking for.
Though Barrett did not write separate opinions like her conservative colleagues on the court, experts say her vote on the matter is the first to indicate confirmation that the court will shift in a “rightward” direction and diminish Roberts’ influence as a mediator between the conservative and liberal justices.
“In recent years, the chief justice played a mediating role between two four-member conservative and liberal blocs on the court. He typically adopted conservative legal principles, but voted for procedural reasons with liberal justices in several high-profile cases. With Justice Barrett adding weight to the conservative wing, Chief Justice Roberts may find fewer opportunities for that balancing act,” reported WSJ.
More religious groups have filed cases since Barrett joined the court.
Cuomo acknowledged the ruling of the court, but said I was “more illustrative of the Supreme Court than anything else” and “irrelevant from any practical impact” as restrictions had already been lifted in the areas where the groups who brought the case.
“Why rule on a case that is moot and come up with a different decision than you did several months ago on the same issue?” Cuomo asked during a conference call with reporters. “You have a different court. And I think that was the statement that the court was making.”
“It’s irrelevant from any practical impact, because the zone that they were talking about has already been moot — it expired last week. So I think this was really just an opportunity for the court to express its philosophy and politics. It doesn’t have any practical effect,” Cuomo said. “And in terms of religious gatherings, look, I’m a former altar boy. Catholic, Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Jesuits at college, so I fully respect religion, and if there’s a time in life when we need it, the time is now, but we want to make sure we keep people safe at the same time. And that’s the balance we’re trying to hit.”
