Monday, June 30, 2014

Fall out on Hobby Lobby - Obama takes ANOTHER face shot from the Supreme Court. SEIU gets chopped.

WOW.  ANOTHER tough day for the rogue president.

The Hobby Lobby case (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) was, depending on who you listen to, either "narrowly tailored" or , according to Justice Ginsburg, "sweeping."

But either way, it's another bitch-slap to the president and the left wing.

The case revolved around a religious exemption from Obamacare's mandate that all companies over a certain size provide birth control coverage for their employees.  Hobby Lobby and others challenged, claiming a religious exemption.

That the case turned out in Hobby Lobby's favor was, essentially, a no-brainer.  The first Amendment is fairly straight forward on that, using the plain language standard of Carcieri:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.[1]
"Prohibiting the free exercise thereof" seems rather obvious: this law absolutely would prohibit the free exercise of the well-established point of many religions concerning birth control.

For the left, this is the end of the known universe as we know it.

My question is this: will this apply in cases such as "Sweet Cakes?"

That Gresham bakery was forced to shut down after they refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.  Tought to be deliberately fomenting a situation where they could claim discrimination in the face of the bakery's claim of a religious exemption from the special rights for gays laws.  Those laws would have required them to ignore their own religious tenets and do what these people wanted.

Would the basic legal premise of this decision apply to a situation such as this?  If a closely-held company can claim a religious exemption from Obamacare, is there some reason a closely held bakery couldn't claim a religious exemption from being set up by gays to be exploited as "bigoted" and so forth because they refuse to recognize gay marriage for religious reasons and have the temerity to act on those principles?

And the other SCOTUS case this morning: public sector unions have been taking face shots left and right.  Two previously deeply and darkly blue states held hostage to union whims for decades, suddenly became right to work states for the most part (First, Wisconsin under Scott Walker and then Michigan under Rick Snyder) and forced union members bailed by the thousands.

Now in a case that's bound to have the same kind of shattering effect on, say, for example, the SEIU, SCOTUS ruled that home health care workers cannot be compelled to pay union dues to a union they do not want to join.

(Just as a brief aside, our own Congresscritter, Jaime Herrera, COSPONSORED an SEIU bill that would have required that very thing while she was running for Congress (And in the State House of Representatives))

At minimum, this is a step towards ending mandated dues collections by governments at all levels for purpose of keeping the coffers of democrat front groups (Oppps... sorry... I mean "unions") full.

Democrat SEIU types have go to be tearing their hair out.  What are they going to do now?

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