The New Court

Not really very Supreme if you ask me:

The decisions show that "President Bush got exactly what he hoped for, a court substantially further to the right," said Tom Goldstein, a Harvard Law School lecturer on Supreme Court litigation who has also argued cases before the high court. If O'Connor were still on the court, he said, all four cases might have been decided differently.

The faith-based case is particularly important, Goldstein said, because it protects Bush's programs from legal challenges and indicates that the court will be "less concerned about keeping church and state separate, so later decisions will be more sympathetic to government's cooperating with religious institutions."

The plaintiffs in the case, including taxpayers from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, had argued that the funding of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, violated the established separation of church and state, putting the government in the position of steering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to groups with strong religious affiliations. The plaintiffs argued that Bush was spending taxpayer funds to hold conferences at which religious groups were urged to apply for federal grants.

But the Supreme Court, while not ruling directly on the First Amendment church-state issue, found that the taxpayers who sued the government can not do so simply because they pay taxes.

Writing for the majority, Alito said the federal budget is so big "it is a complete fiction to argue that an unconstitutional federal expenditure causes an individual federal taxpayer any measurable economic harm. And if every federal taxpayer could sue to challenge any government expenditure, the federal courts would cease to function as courts of law and would be cast in the role of general complaint bureaus."

Alito noted that the Supreme Court had previously made an exception under which taxpayers could sue if Congress appropriates funds in a way that violates the separation of church and state. But in this case, Alito wrote, the faith-based initiative funds were "paid for out of general Executive Branch appropriations" and therefore were not directly funded by Congress.

So who funds the Executive Branch? Does that money fly in from the heavens? I don't think that the theory behind faith-based initiatives is bad, in that it allows for more charitable organizations, many of whom are religious groups, to obtain federal assistance for their efforts, but it's only a good idea if no particular religion or group is given more than another and no religion is discriminated from these funds. But this verdict to claim that taxpayers can't sue over the budget is just a semantic argument. The court decided to take this case, that's why they have a say in what is considered worthwhile for them to arguments. They blocked it as cronies of the administration, not as a fair and unbiased judiciary. Their reasoning itself is just more caveats for the administration to play puppet games with our rights and freedoms.