A further note on the Roberts Court

The ideologues on the Right that made up the majority of a bunch of decisions recently seen frightfully bad judges.  Their MO seems to be to predetermine the result they want, and then craft their decision to get that result, and try to make it as narrow as possible to keep from influencing later decisions.

This is really terrible in several ways.  One, it makes it really hard for lower courts to make later decisions based on recent ones (eg: did the recent decision in re: Aereo negate the old Cablevision ruling?).  Two, their narrowing sometimes fails (as is likely with the Hobby Lobby case; in fact, as they made clear the next day that one particular narrowing wasn't even intended).

Three, it makes clear that their intent is to make new law.  Funny how we hear so much about "legislating from the bench" from right wing sources when it comes to abortion decisions, but nary a peep when it comes to, say, campaign financing laws.

And all of that reduces respect people have for the Court.  Roberts, in his confirmation hearings, said he wanted to restore respect for the Court.  If so, Mission Accomplished, I guess.

Modernizing discrimination?

The Supreme Court, yesterday, heard oral arguments in Hobby Lobby v Sebelius, where the evangelical founders of a for-profit corporation wanted the ability to discriminate against all their female employees, and refuse to cover contraception.  That, of course, violates the Affordable Care Act (ACA); hence Kathleen (glad I looked that up; almost wrote Catherine) Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) being the defendant.

What I find interesting is listening to one of Hobby Lobby's lawyers defending this.  First, let's be clear that this is not about Hobby Lobby being able to exercise its religion (ignoring, for a moment, the farce of an idea that a corporation has religious beliefs); it's about the founders of the company being able to impose their religious beliefs on their employees.

If this is allowed, then you'll definitely find things like companies owned by Scientologists denying mental health care for their employees.

Anyway, the whole reason I mentioned this is that Mr Rienzi kept talking about "least intrusive measures" to make the employees whole, and talking about the availability of the exchanges.  So, it sounds like he's saying that Hobby Lobby shouldn't be required to pay for insurance for their non-evangelical employees (or those who just want contraceptives, I guess.  The fact that a large percentage of Catholics use birth control says that there's more there than just religion).

Hey, that's a much bigger exemption than just birth control.  Let's just require employees of all companies to get insurance on the exchanges.  (Actually, let's just do it right, and go to a single-payer system, so employers have no say in their employees' health care options.)

It'll be interesting to see where this goes, but I predict a shit-storm of epic proportions if Hobby Lobby wins.