Free Republic

Today, the Supreme Court granted Wheaton College an injunction pending appeal against enforcement of the contraception mandate, even though Wheaton was eligible for the accommodation HHS has provided for religious non-profits. Specifically the Court ordered: If the applicant informs the Secretary of Health and Human Services in writing that it is a non-profit organization that holds itself out as religious and has religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, the respondents are enjoined from enforcing against the applicant the challenged provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and related regulations pending final disposition of appellate review. To...

Muslim Store Cites Hobby Lobby in Shoplifter Mutilation Case On Wednesday, the owner of a small chain of convenience stores was arrested in Peoria, Illinois after he chopped off the hand of a 16 year-old shoplifter who had attempted to steal a bag of potato chips and a 16 oz. soda. But due to the Supreme Court's recent Hobby Lobby decision, that man was released from custody on Thursday, even after pleading guilty to the attack. On July 2nd, Seif Majeed, 41, of Peoria caught a young, unidentified shoplifter, chained him to a pipe in a back room, and then...

Hillary Clinton ‘Bewildered and Confused’ By Supreme Court’s Contraceptive Rulings By Liz Kreutz Jul 4, 2014 Hillary Clinton said she’s “very bewildered and confused” by the Supreme Court’s ruling to further allow employers with religious objections to avoid offering contraceptives in their healthcare plans. Just days after the Supreme Court issued its controversial Hobby Lobby decision and ruled in favor of a for-profit corporation seeking an exemption from the contraceptive mandate, the court issued an unusual order Thursday providing temporary relief to a non-profit college that also objects to the mandate. Clinton, who is openly pro-choice, called the latest development...

Supreme Court Sides With Christian College In Birth Control Case The three female justices say their colleagues are reversing themselves from this week’s Hobby Lobby ruling. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) BY ROBERT BARNES July 3 The three female justices of the Supreme Court sharply rebuked their colleagues Thursday for siding with a Christian college in the latest battle over providing women with contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act, saying the court was retreating from assurances offered only days ago. In a short, unsigned opinion, the court said that Wheaton College in Illinois, at least temporarily, does not have to comply...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that the Supreme Court's Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby decision makes the United States akin to extremist authoritarian and theocratic nations that restrict women's rights. When asked Monday about the Court's decision, Clinton, who may run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, said, "it is a disturbing trend that you see in a lot of societies that are very unstable, anti-democratic, and frankly prone to extremism, where women and women's bodies are used as the defining and unifying issue to bring together people, men, to get them to behave in ways that are...

Lawyers in politics seem to have great difficulty understanding the law these days. First, the “constitutional lawyer who sits in the Oval Office” had his hat handed to him by the Supreme Court on a wide range of issues, and with unprecedented unanimity. Now the woman angling to succeed him, who is often described as an accomplished attorney herself, apparently can’t be bothered to familiarize herself with a case before rendering judgment on it. Hillary Clinton gets two Pinocchios from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler for her remarks on the Hobby Lobby case, but probably deserved two more for...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed that its decision a day earlier extending religious rights to closely held corporations applies broadly to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the new health care law, not just the handful of methods the justices considered in their ruling. The justices did not comment in leaving in place lower court rulings in favor of businesses that object to covering all 20 methods of government-approved contraception....

Hillary Clinton is the clear frontrunner at this very early point in the 2016 presidential race and, after the midterm elections, the pro-life movement will undoubtedly bring up a laundry list of her pro-abortion actions and comments. Here is something that will undoubtedly be added to the list.The potential presidential candidate proves in her response to the Supreme Court’s decision protecting Hobby Lobby from the Obama HHS mandate that she really has no fundamental understanding of what the case was about.John McCormack of the Weekly Standard breaks it down: On Monday evening, Hillary Clinton said that she found the Supreme...

After today's Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby, the left and Democrats are predictably claiming the 5-4 decision bans contraception for women. Matt Canter @mattcanter DSCC: Nearly every GOP candidate supports radical measures that would block birth control &roll back women’s health care rights even further 10:34 AM - 30 Jun 2014 3 Retweets Sandra Fluke @SandraFluke Supreme Court rules that bosses can deny employees coverage of birth control. #HobbyLobby #NotMyBossBusiness 9:24 AM - 30 Jun 2014 177 Retweets 55 favorites That claim is completely false. Not to mention, Hobby Lobby itself provides coverage of 16 different...

In its decision Monday in the Hobby Lobby case, the conservative Supreme Court majority that upheld corporations' religious objections to birth control spends an inordinate amount of time defending itself from the reasoning and wrath of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. Justice Samuel Alito, whose name is on the decision, alludes no fewer than 24 times to the "principal dissent," which Ginsburg wrote for the four-member minority. Plainly, he felt Ginsburg's powerful intellect breathing down his neck as he tried to find a path to upholding the Hobby Lobby parties' attack on women's rights without expanding corporate "personhood" too much....

Contrary to what you may have read in less enlightened corners of the Internet, the Supreme Court did not deny access to contraception to anyone. Rather, it ruled today that if the owners of a closely held company have religious objections to providing contraceptives or abortifacients in their insurance policies, the Obama administration cannot force them to do it. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) trumps the administration’s regulations. The act says that religious objectors must be exempt from a government policy that imposes a substantial burden on their beliefs if the government has a less burdensome way of advancing...

The Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) has won a last-minute reprieve from enforcement of a federal mandate calling for required coverage of contraceptives in employees' health-care programs. Citing the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision announced by the Supreme Court on June 30, the 11th federal circuit appeals court issued an injunction blocking fines that would have been assessed against EWTN beginning on July 1 for a failure to comply with the contraceptive mandate. The 11th circuit court found, in issuing its order, that EWTN "has asserted, without dispute, that it 'is prohibited by its religion from signing, submitting, or facilitating...

I imagine the horrified shrieks that rose from the streets outside the Supreme Court on Monday as the decision in the Hobby Lobby case began to filter out into the crowd of liberal observers was reminiscent of those poor souls who watched helplessly as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire claimed the lives of 146 young, female garment workers. In fact, the similarities are eerie. It seems that liberal commentators have convinced themselves that, just as was the case in 1911, the courts and the country have deemed women to be of lesser value than their male counterparts. The distinction...

This morning’s Supreme Court ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby will doubtless precipitate a flood of stories from the establishment “news” media claiming that an entrenched cadre of conservative justices have dealt a grievous blow to the reproductive freedom of women and somehow endowed corporations with religious rights. These reports should be ignored as so much hysterical nonsense. What the Court actually said was that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) requires the government to provide closely held corporate objectors to Obamacare’s contraception mandate the same accommodation it already provides nonprofit organizations. The Green and Hahn families, who own two...

The big news across America today is the final pre-summer decisions of a Supreme Court that has not been altogether on board with the cafeteria constitutionalism of the Obama Administration. Obamacare Rebuffed By High Court In Contraception RulingUp to a point. Hobby Lobby will continue to pay for all its employees' contraception except for a trio of abortifacients - that's to say, "morning-after pills" that dispose of any long-term consequences from the night before. A month's worth of these pills costs nine bucks from Wal-Mart. In the old days, we used to add "or less than a daily paper or...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: We're still back, however, to the thing that we've all talked about on this program for years. Here we have two cases Democrat, and everybody else breathlessly awaits what nine people who wear black robes are going to say. And whatever those nine people say is final, fini, that's it. And it's awfully precarious. Somebody asked me today, "So are you expecting any Supreme Court vacancies this term, Rush? Do you expect any of them to resign?" I said, "Gee, I hope none of ours." If one of the libs resigns, okay, Obama gets to name a...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I want to go back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Jeffrey Toobin sound bite, not 'cause it's Toobin, but because he read Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg dissenting opinion which, by the way, is 35 pages long. That's pretty sweeping dissent for a narrow ruling. Thirty-five pages. And she whines a lot in her dissent. For example, "Until today, religious exemptions had never been extended to any entity operating in 'the commercial, profit-making world.'" I knew I was right about that. I knew that in that sense, I don't think we can call landmark, but it certainly is unprecedented....

Opinion analysis: Does the new religious exemption go far enough? (UPDATED) UPDATE 2:14 p.m. Acting swiftly in the wake of the Court’s ruling on Monday, and relying directly upon that decision, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday blocked all enforcement of the mandate against an Alabama Catholic TV network, a non-profit entity. The concurring opinion of the Court of Appeals, written by Circuit Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., argued that the accommodation, discussed in the following post, is itself likely to be struck down.

(VIDEO)FULL TITLE: White House Press Secretary: The constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees with Supreme Court on Hobby Lobby (VIDEO)//// White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said on Monday that the “constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office” disagrees with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in favor of Hobby Lobby. “There are now a group of women of an indeterminate size who no longer have access to free contraceptive coverage simply because of some religious views that are held not by them, necessarily, but by their bosses. “We disagree and the constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office disagrees with that...

Having had his omnipotence chipped away at last week, President Obama has - seemingly - been pushed too far by the Supreme Court's decision on contraception and Obamacare this morning: The White House stated... SUPREME COURT DECISION ON CONTRACEPTION COVERAGE JEOPARDIZES HEALTH OF WOMEN EMPLOYED BY THESE COMPANIESWILL WORK WITH CONGRESS TO MAKE SURE WOMEN AFFECTED BY RULING WILL HAVE SAME ACCESS TO CONTRACEPTIONWILL CONSIDER WHETHER PRESIDENT CAN ACT ON HIS OWN TO MITIGATE EFFECT OF SUPREME COURT RULING Totalitarian? You decide... One wonders if the phrase "do you know who I am?" was uttered this morning? As The Hill adds,...