Federal Judge to HHS: No, You Can’t Discriminate for No Good Reason
4th September 2015
A useful piece of journalism from the Huffington Post. I guess even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then.
Can the government treat some people differently than others on the basis of sheer favoritism? It seems like an obvious question, but decades’ worth of unwarranted judicial deference in constitutional cases have made the answer uncertain. This week, a federal judge gave a rousing negative answer, holding that the Secretary of Health and Human Services could not exempt organizations designated as “religious” by the government from an Affordable Care Act mandate to provide contraceptive coverage without also exempting non-“religious” groups that object to certain contraceptives on the basis of their moral convictions. In refusing to treat the so-called rational basis test–the default standard of review in constitutional cases–as a “rubber stamp” and invalidating a government classification that made “no rational sense,” Judge Richard Leon demonstrated the kind of judicial engagement that is necessary to protect all Americans from regulatory favoritism.