ANN ALTHOUSE DEBUNKS HuffPo’s Pre-Decision Agitprop On The Hobby Lobby Case.
HuffPo doesn’t bother to mention that the case is based on a federal statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — which Congress could amend and to which Congress could have put an exception in the Affordable Care Act. Except that Congress couldn’t do any of those things, and the contraceptive mandate wasn’t even something Congress put in the ACA, because Congress only just barely passed the ACA, and an exception from the need to provide religious exemptions would have made the ACA less politically viable, not more.
Which is why — however you feel about birth control, religious objections to it, and for-profit corporations that find a way to be religious — it’s not bad for Hobby Lobby to win.
But if it does, the “worst decision” will instantly plunge us into war-on-women, election-year politics.
Well, it’s going to be all war-on-women all the time anyway, at least until the Dems nominate a man and the Republicans nominate a woman. Then, overnight, jokes about PMS and menopause will be de rigeur.