Trump Administration Not Backing Off Legal Battle With Catholic Nuns
This is why you shouldn't trust a man who has no principles of his own to do right by yours.
Stephanie Slade Apr. 25, 2017 3:40 pm
What you see with Donald Trump is what you get. Until it's not.
On the campaign trail the GOP nominee repeatedly vowed to side with the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns who run nursing homes to care for the indigent elderly. They and six other religious nonprofits had been embroiled in a legal battle with the Obama administration over a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule saying they had to help make sure their employees have access to totally free contraception and sterilizations.
The Supreme Court last spring kicked the case back down to a lower court and ordered the two sides to try to come up with a compromise—getting women access to birth control, in other words, but doing so without forcing the sisters, who object on moral grounds to those products and procedures, to be involved in a way they believe makes them complicit in sin.
But that was when most everyone still believed that Hillary Clinton would be our next commander in chief, and, thus, that she would get to select the person to fill then–recently departed Justice Antonin Scalia's seat on the high court. It was also assumed that her HHS Department would be eager to continue the fight against the Catholic sisters, et al.
After Trump shocked the world on November 8, all those predictions flew out the window. But it seems the new set of assumptions that replaced them—namely, that Trump, a Republican who campaigned promising to protect religious liberty, would actually do so—may have been wrong as well. In October, he penned a letter to the Catholic Leadership Conference in which he explicitly proclaimed that
Hillary Clinton supports forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor who have taken care of the elderly poor since 1839 [to] pay for contraceptives in their health care plan (even though they have never wanted them, never used them and never will), and having the government fine them heavily if they continue to refuse to abide by this onerous mandate. That is a hostility to religious liberty you will never see in a Trump administration.
As The Washington Post is now reporting, conservative Trump voters may have been taken for a ride they weren't expecting. Rather than rescinding the HHS mandate or dropping the government's case, his Justice Department yesterday "asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for an additional 60 days to negotiate."
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