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"The EEOC said that Star Transport Inc., a trucking company based in Morton, Ill., violated their religious rights ..."

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

Unsurprisingly, there are major constitutional problems with the federal government’s actions concerning this issue imo.

To begin with, regarding the idea of an employer violating an employee’s constitutional rights, please consider the following. The Supreme Court had clarified in United States v. Cruikshank, that case dealing with the scope of constitutional rights, that the Constitution protects a citizen’s enumerated rights only from state and federal government actions, not actions by other citizens.

So the EEOC actually has no constitutional basis for its religious freedom violation accusations against the referenced employer imo. And I don’t think that religious issues were the main reason that the employer fired the employees. After all, the employer had hired them!

The next major constitutional problem with the EEOC’s action is this. Regardless what FDR’s activist justices wanted everybody to believe about the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers (1.8.3), a previous generaton of state-sovereignty respecting justices had clarified the following. The states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate intrastate commerce, which reasonably includes not interfering with an employer’s decision to fire employees.

”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

So the corrupt federal government has no constitutional basis to interfere with an INTRAstate employer’s decisions on the basis of either alleged violations 1st Amendment protected rights or the Commerce Clause imo.

And since the EEOC has been mentioned a few times, please consider this. Even if the states had delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to police an intrastate employer’s decisions, the Founding States had made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, evidently a good place to hide them from Congress, to clarify that all federal legislative powers are vested in the elected members of Congress, not in the executive or judicial branches, or in non-elected bureacrats like those running the EPA, FCC or EEOC. So Congress has a constitutional “monopoly” on federal legislative powers whether it wants it or not imo.

But by delegating federal legislative / regulatory powers to non-elected bureaucrats, powers that Congress doesn’t have in the first place in this case, corrupt Congress is wrongly protecting such powers from the wrath of the voters in blatant defiance of Sections 1-3 mentioned above.

Finally, it appears that the constitutionally undefined EEOC's job is to police all kinds of intrastate discrimination issues related to Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s & 70s. But the major constitutional problem with the federal civil rights acts are the following.

The only civil rights that the feds have the constitutional authority to legislatively protect are those rights based on constitutional rights that the states have amended the Constitution to expressly protect. So the low-information, Democratic-controlled (I think) Congress of the 60s and 70s actually had no constitutional authority to make laws addressing intrastate discrimination issues outside the scope of constitutionally enumerated voting rights.

In fact, this issue is another good example of the corrupt, post-17th Amendment ratification, low-information Senate once again failing to protect the states as the Founding States had established the Senate to do. In this case the Senate wrongly helped to pass the constitutionally indefensible bills that led to the establishment of the EEOC and the civil rights acts.

Note that the Senate also failed to use its constitutional Article V power to lead Congress to propose civil rights amendments to the Constitution to the states. If the states had chosen to ratify such amendments, then Congress would have the constitutional authority to make such laws even if it cannot delegate such regulatory powers to non-elected federal bureaucrats.

As mentioned in related threads, the ill-conceived 17th Amendment needs to disappear, and corrupt, Constitution-ignoring, low-information senators who help to pass unconstitutional bills that hurt the states that they’re supposed to be protecting along with it.