Hobby Lobby Part II Is Barreling Towards The Supreme Court | ThinkProgress

In other ACA news, we have the fall-out of Wheaton College v. Burwell, or a perfect example of moving the goal-posts:

Nevertheless, some employers, including the employers who sought out Wednesday’s order from Alito, remain opposed even to this accommodation. Because sending the letter will set in motion a chain of events that may lead to someone using contraception, conservative “religious liberty” groups have taken the position that sending the letter would make employers “complicit” in the act of providing birth control.

Thus far, the lower courts have not been particularly sympathetic to this argument. As the Third Circuit wrote in the decision temporarily stayed by Alito, “[f]ederal law, not the religious organization’s signing and mailing the form, requires health-care insurers, along with third-party administrators of self-insured plans, to cover contraceptive services.” Thus, the plaintiffs’ “real objection” isn’t to sending a form or letter to the federal government; it is to “what happens after the form is provided—that is, to the actions of the insurance issuers and the third-party administrators, required by law, once the [plaintiffs] give notice of their objection.” Federal law does not grant these plaintiffs “a religious veto against plan providers’ compliance with those regulations, nor the right to enlist the government to effectuate such a religious veto against legally required conduct of third parties.”

Nevertheless, Alito’s order is a warning that this issue will not remain in the lower courts forever. Indeed, the Third Circuit case provides the Supreme Court with a vehicle that it could use as soon as next fall to consider whether the send-the-letter or the fill-out-the-form options will survive contact with the justices, or whether federal law does, indeed, give religious employers “the right to enlist the government to effectuate . . . a religious veto against legally required conduct of third parties.”

Hobby Lobby Part II Is Barreling Towards The Supreme Court | ThinkProgress