Amity Shlaes:
Some time in the coming months, the Supreme Court will hand down its opinion in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, the case of the retailer that claims that its religious freedom or that of its employees is violated by contraceptive coverage required as part of the Affordable Care Act. The attitude of the health-care act’s supporters toward such cases is irritation. How dare a little religious case trip up the mighty Affordable Care Act and jeopardize the ACA’s establishment as permanent law of the land?
Cases involving religious details, however, do have a way of stopping big social legislation, and not only because they violate the principles of the religious denominations involved. Regardless of the Court’s decision, even pro-choice Jews, Unitarians, and Muslims may eventually change their views on the ACA precisely because of Hobby Lobby and cases like it.
To see how this might happen, it helps to go back to a case involving a commensurately ambitious piece of legislation, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act.
The National Industrial Recovery Act, like the Affordable Care Act, aimed to do nothing less than change an entire sector of the economy — in that case, the industrial and business sector. After passage in 1933, NIRA created a bureaucracy labeled, in its turn, the National Recovery Administration, or NRA. NRA was hard to contradict: Its leader was a general; its emblem, the bald eagle. “Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to trifle with that bird,” General Hugh Johnson told the public. The courts seemed to agree: Nine in ten NRA cases at first were decided in favor of the government.
NRA administrators led companies in the writing of codes for their respective trades. Like the ACA’s rules, these codes were offered in agonizing and counterintuitive detail. In those days NRA codes mandated minimum wages, minimum prices, new health and safety regulations, and business practices that efficiency experts recommended whether or not firms themselves saw their logic.
Before we moved to ”the city,” my dad ran his own farm and ranch with both poultry and lambs for sale.
He butchered them.
BUT it was the customer who picked the one they wanted.
Dad was Jewish, as were most of his customers.
Back then we ALL knew how to pick out a ”good” animal.
You looked for it’s physical confirmation, were its eyes clear, no runny discharges, a good amount of weight on the bones, no missing feathers or coat, and so on.
Today I know many people do not even realize what their meats look like ”on the hoof.”
They couldn’t pick out a healthy one except by accident.
The main thing about this article is this one point:
In either case, it is NOT the gov’t that gets to decide who are religious hypocrites.
But in both cases that is what the gov’t is trying to do.
So, the writer is probably correct: in the case of Hobby Lobby, the ACA could collapse after a SCOTUS ruling in Hobby Lobby’s favor.
Wasn’t it a BLUE eagle?