Supreme Court Sides With Christian Charity Targeted By Wisconsin

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of a Catholic charity that sued Wisconsin after it was mandated to pay certain unemployment taxes while other religious organizations were exempted.

In its ruling, the court struck down a decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court that said the Catholic Charities Bureau had to pay taxes on unemployment compensation. The court said that the interpretation of state tax law by Wisconsin’s Supreme Court violated the First Amendment.

The First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religions and subjects any state-sponsored denominational preference to strict scrutiny,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority decision. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s application of [Wisconsin law] imposed a denominational preference by differentiating between religions based on theological lines.”

Catholic Charities Bureau is an organization that provides services to poor people, the disabled, the elderly, and children with special needs as a ministry of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Superior. According to its website, it provides around 50 programs to over 10,500 people.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, saying that in addition to violating the First Amendment, the Wisconsin Supreme Court violated the church autonomy doctrine, which means that a religious institution is not defined by any corporate entity it may form.

“I would reverse for an additional reason — that the Wisconsin Supreme Court violated the church autonomy doctrine,” Thomas wrote. “However incorporated, Catholic Charities and its subentities are, from a religious perspective, a mere arm of the Diocese of Superior. The Wisconsin Supreme Court should have deferred to that understanding, and its failure to do so amounted to an unlawful attempt by the State to redefine the Diocese’s internal governance.”

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Thomas noted that the government could not use entities created by religious institutions as a backdoor means to regulate their internal governance.

“In short, the corporation is made for the church, not the church for the corporation. Both the basic principles of church autonomy and the history of religious corporations establish that religious institutions are more than the corporate entities that they form,” he wrote. “It follows that the government may not use such entities as a means of regulating the internal governance of religious institutions.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also issued a separate concurring opinion.

‘We’re Not Gonna Have Anybody Around To Wipe Our A**es’: Vermont Dem Slams Limiting Immigration

Vermont Democrat Congresswoman Becca Balint, the state’s first female and openly gay member of Congress, slammed the Trump administration’s actions toward immigrants while declaring that if immigration is decreased, “We’re not gonna have anybody around to wipe our a**es.”

Speaking at a town hall in Newport, Vermont, Balint launched into a diatribe in which she posited that there weren’t enough people in America “to fill the jobs we have right now.”

“We all know our AG system in Vermont would collapse without migrant labor; that’s just a reality. That’s the reality,” she began. “We know our economy is completely bound up in immigration and migrant labor, and of course, we have to come to a place in Congress where it is no longer a political issue but we see it as an existential issue for the country. If we don’t have avenues for people to come here legally to work or to build a home here — I’m gonna be really crude right now, we’re not gonna have anybody around to wipe our a**es, because we don’t have enough people in our country now to fill the jobs that we have right now.”

“But we have to make sure those folks are getting a decent wage and making sure that their rights are protected,” she continued, then offering a bone to those who want secure borders, saying, “And we also have to make sure that we have an adult conversation in Congress about the give and take and how this works, because it is not a xenophobic or racist thing for people to say they want to know our borders are secure. That alone is not.”

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Then she segued to attacking the Trump administration: “What falls apart is how policies are enacted, and right now, we have a fair amount of lawlessness that is happening among ICE and Homeland Security that was not anything, I think, that most voters wanted. What they wanted was to know there was a secure border, that there would be pathways to citizenship, and rules would be the same for everybody. The problem is right now people are following the rules, and every step of the way and they are still being carted off and kidnapped and not being allowed to have access to their attorneys.”

Balint told Fox News of President Trump: “He has made immigrants, regardless of status, feel unsafe and targeted all around the country. As Vermonters, we’re so proud that we are seen as a safe place to land. I’m unwavering in my position that immigrants and refugees are welcome in Vermont and that every worker in every job deserves dignity and fair wages — from doctors and scientists to carpenters and farmworkers. … I’ve relentlessly condemned the Trump administration’s cruel practices targeting and separating immigrant families, and I will continue to stand up for the rights of every person in this country.”

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