Posted on 12/15/2017 3:09:09 PM PST by Morgana
Christian groups and businesses once again may be forced to pay for birth control, including forms that may cause abortions, after a federal judge ruled against the Trump administration Friday.
In October, President Donald Trumps administration provided relief from the Obamacare birth control mandate by granting wider exceptions to religious groups.
The new rules provided relief to groups like the nuns of Little Sisters of the Poor and the religious owners of Hobby Lobby, which were forced to challenge the mandate to the U.S. Supreme Court or face crippling fines.
However, several state attorneys general challenged the decision.
On Friday, a challenge by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro succeeded when federal Judge Wendy Beetlestone blocked the Trump administration from enforcing the rule, according to the AP.
The Commonwealths concern is that absent available cost-effective contraception, women will either forego contraception entirely or choose cheaper but less effective methodsindividual choices which will result in an increase in untended pregnancies, Beetlestone wrote. That, in turn, will inflict economic harm on the Commonwealth because unintended pregnancies are more likely to impose additional costs on Pennsylvanias State-funded health programs.
Heres more from the Washington Free Beacon:
Shapiros victory came after arguments in front of Judge Wendy Bettlestone Thursday, where the A.G. contended that the rollback would harm Pennsylvanias 2.5 million women. Dr. Cynthia Chuang, of Penn State University, testified before Bettlestone that the rollback would cause serious medical harm, including unintended pregnancies, Courthouse News reports.
The government disagreed with this argument when, in October, Trump ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to allow for fairly broad-based religious and moral exemptions to the mandate.
The administration expected in October that only a few organizations as few as 200 will take advantage of the expanded exceptions. A senior administration official said then that it was expected that 99.9 percent of women will be unimpacted by this new rule.
Shapiro described the ruling as a critical victory for millions of women.
However, earlier this fall, even Shapiro admitted that the HHS mandate under pro-abortion President Barack Obama was extremely narrow. It was so narrow that even a group of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor, had to fight the whole way to the U.S. Supreme Court for relief.
Other states that are suing Trump include California, Massachusetts and Washington, according to the AP.
The Trump administration says the new rules are motivated by our desire to bring to a close the more than five years of litigation over the pro-abortion mandate. These include cases by the Little Sister of the Poor, Hobby Lobby and countless other religious organizations and businesses.
The new rules argue that the Affordable Care Act does not mandate coverage of birth control, which could mean hundreds of thousands of women would no longer have access to the contraceptive without a copay.
According to TownHall, the new rules provide significantly expanded religious exemptions that the Obama administration refused to offer.
The report continued:
One of the new rules, according to the Times, provides an exemption to employers or insurers that object to covering birth control based on its sincerely held religious beliefs, while another rule gives an exemption to employers with moral convictions against covering birth control.
The new rules state that since all religious objections to the contraceptive coverage mandate cannot be satisfied, it is necessary and appropriate to provide the expanded exemptions.
The Trump administration also notes that there are other means of acquiring birth control.
The government, it says, already engages in dozens of programs that subsidize contraception for the low-income women who are most at risk of unplanned pregnancies.
Pro-life advocates applauded the new rules when they were first proposed in May.
At long last, the United States government has acknowledged that people can get contraceptives without forcing nuns to provide them, Mark Rienzi, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty told USA Today at the time. That is sensible, fair, and in keeping with the presidents promise to the Little Sisters and other religious groups serving the poor.
Irrelevant. Wendy is legislating from the bench because there is no contraceptive mandate in the law.
Yet another overreaching nitwit judge. I can’t wait for the smack down of this misguided soul.
This will be overturned within a week. Totally unconstitutional on several grounds. Freedom of speech— freedonm of religion trumps birth control has already been rulwed on by the supremes . This judge should be impeached.
“Why do we need a president, we have judges” Partisan activist ones at that. Oh joy, go long ropes!
And this judges needs to lose his seat in the court.
The Inferior court does not even have the Authority to issue an Order against a State on Constitutional Issues, why would anyone believe the same inferior court created and controlled by congress has the constitutional authority to over rule the Executive Branch????
A recent detailed study of the courts of all 50 states and the District of Columbia determined that 46 states and the District of Columbia adopt the position that the precedents of lower federal courts are not binding in their jurisdictions. Wayne A. Logan, A House Divided: When State and Lower Federal Courts Disagree on Federal Constitutional Rights, 90 Notre Dame L. Rev. 235, 280-81 (2014). The position of three other states is uncertain. Only one state (Delaware) defers to the constitutional decisions of lower federal courts. Id. At 281.
Federal courts have recognized that state-court review of constitutional questions is independent of the same authority lodged in the lower federal courts. “In passing on federal constitutional questions, the state courts and the lower federal courts have the same responsibility and occupy the same position; there is a parallelism but not paramountcy for both sets of courts are governed by the same reviewing authority of the Supreme Court.” United States ex rel.Lawrence v. Woods, 432 F.2d 1072, 1075 (7th Cir. 1970).
Although consistency between state and federal courts is desirable in that it promotes respect for the law and prevents litigants from forum-shopping, there is nothing inherently offensive about two sovereigns reaching different legal conclusions. Indeed, such results were contemplated by our federal system, and neither sovereign is required to, nor expected to, yield to the other.
Surrick v. Killion, 449 F. 3d 520, 535 (3rd Cir. 2006).
The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that state courts “possess the authority, absent a provision for exclusive federal jurisdiction, to render binding judicial decisions that rest on their own interpretations of federal law.” Asarco Inc. v. Kadish, 490 U.S. 605, 617 (1989). Two justices of the United States Supreme Court in special writings have elaborated on this principle.
The Supremacy Clause demands that state law yield to federal law, but neither federal supremacy nor any other principle of federal law requires that a state court’s interpretation of federal law give way to a (lower) federal court’s interpretation. In our federal system, a state trial court’s interpretation of federal law is no less authoritative than that of the federal court of appeals in whose circuit the trial court is located.
Lockhart v. Fretwell, 506 U.S. 364, 375-76 (1993) (Thomas, J., concurring). See also Steffel v. Thompson, 415 U.S. 452, 482, n. 3 (1974) (Rehnquist, J., concurring) (noting that a lower- federal-court decision “would not be accorded the stare decisis effect in state court that it would have in a subsequent proceeding within the same federal jurisdiction. Although the state court would not be compelled to follow the federal holding, the opinion might, of course, be viewed as highly persuasive.”).
Cool beans.
Dissolve the 9th Circuit.
I did not realize that federal policy would cause unintended pregnancies. I always thought that sexual intercourse between a biological male and biological female was the only way to achieve that outcome.
Learn something new from federal judges almost every day!!
super mega /s
.
It should be. I recall in fall 1965 when I was going to college my mother talking about the pill. She feared it was the start of the downfall of marriage. History shows some 6.5 million women were on it then. I first saw a woman take a birth control pill in 1967 or so. By 1970 I believe all younger women had them. I know they paid for them as I got married the 1st time in August 1971. I cannot believe we taxpayers pay for them. This is more socialism BS.
Unless people are willing to string up these judges, or just shoot them, get used to it. Legislation from the bench is not going to stop.
Obama told any judge whose ruling he didn’t like to jump in the ocean. Trump needs to do the same. The hell with two sets of standards.
How does removal of the mandate affect this?
Bears repeating. This is America's potential Chanukah story. Yes, it has come to that.
Agree, Fire for cause and REPLACE.
Probably either Reform Judaism, Unitarianism, or none.
Thomas Jefferson:
Nothing in the Constitution has given them [the federal judges] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them. . . . The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch. (Letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804)
Our Constitution . . . intending to establish three departments, co-ordinate and independent that they might check and balance one another, it has givenaccording to this opinion to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of others; and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. . . . The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please. (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819)
You seem . . . to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so . . . and their power [is] the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. (Letter to William Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820)
Abraham Lincoln:
The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
This lunatic does not have the final say here. Judges have no authority to MAKE laws.
that’s an awful lot of @ words!
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