A really awful Supreme Court decision handed down today in a church-state case from Maine, where a private-school voucher program to compensate for the lack of public high schools in rural areas forbade funding for "sectarian" schools in which religious instruction was part of the program:
It doesn't exclude them at all. They exclude themselves by refusing to go to public institutions. That's a nonsensical argument.
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 21, 2022
Yes, that's the question the justices should have argued, though they'd still have been wrong. Instead they went into the insanely radical territory of French's tweet. Have you bothered to look at the oral arguments? https://t.co/YV32NA3XX3
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
That's a radical departure from even their own precedent https://t.co/Ag6r9nsD0r pic.twitter.com/BDOXMyjopj
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
And especially offensive given the history of the pervasive use of private Protestant schools as vehicles for educational segregation, especially in the South, after Brown v. Board https://t.co/y6MF9tocyr Could have found for plaintiff without such a sweeping ruling.
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 21, 2022
I should have written "they exclude themselves by demanding public funding for their religious instruction."
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
No. The vouchers are given for a very specific purpose, to pay private school tuition in a non-sectarian program (to remedy the state's failure to provide enough public high schools in rural areas--if there were enough public schools they wouldn't be offered).
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
The US government can do that and has done so for centuries. That's what the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment says. You may think it's silly, but you need to understand that it's an actual subject matter out there in the big world that has been discussed at length.
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
Oh please nobody cares how it "seems" to you. It's a legal argument, not a feelings test.
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
Of course it's a legal argument, and it "seemed" to me that the legal arguments of the four I mentioned were better. They clearly carried the day, at any rate. They reject your distinction between use-based and status-based discrimination as shown here. pic.twitter.com/X9tcSOxoyM
— Matt Yoder (@MyoderOhio) June 22, 2022
Actually, it's Roberts's distinction:
In 2017, he wrote the opinion that said a state could not exclude a church from a Missouri program that provided support for safety measures at playgrounds. That decision was narrow enough to draw support from liberal Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan. In a footnote, it said the ruling addressed only “express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing,” and not “religious uses of funding.”
Which he has now walked back:
Roberts wrote in Tuesday’s ruling, “Maine’s decision to continue excluding religious schools from its tuition assistance program … promotes stricter separation of church and state than the Federal Constitution requires.”
I'm in New York, where the church-state wall is "stricter than the federal Constitution requires" because that's the way most of us want it. Am I going to see the so-called "federalist" Court toss out my state's laws because Roberts thinks we don't "require" them?
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
Some snake-handler congregation that's already in violation of the Constitution as I understand it for endorsing Trumpy candidates in defiance of its tax exemption is going to start demanding money from Albany for its school's prayer-filled sports events? Watch out.
— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2022
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