Supreme Court reveals its class bias

E.J. DIONNE JR.
July 2 at 7:52 PM

It’s not often that social and corporate conservatives come together, but the five right-of-center justices on the Supreme Court fashioned exactly this synthesis in their Hobby Lobby decision this week. In a religious freedom case related to birth control, the majority focused on the liberties of the company’s owners, not of those who work for them.

More than that, the justices continued to press their campaign to create an entirely new legal regime under which corporations enjoy rights never envisioned by our Founders or the generations who followed them.

On the same day and by the same 5-to-4 majority, the court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that home health-care workers who choose not to belong to a union don’t have to pay the union’s cost of bargaining for a contract. The conservative majority again used the slogans of liberty, this time to undercut the ability of low-paid workers to organize themselves for higher wages and benefits.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the court ruled that because the owners of the $2 billion arts-and-crafts chain believed that certain contraceptives are abortifacients, they could not be required by the Affordable Care Act to include them in health plans supported by the law.

The decision, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., is strange in a number of ways. It barely nodded at settling the factual question of whether birth control methods such as an IUD are abortion-inducing. While Alito was at pains to say that the case applied only to objections to birth control and not, for example, to “immunizations,” his language (“may involve different arguments”) was vague.

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