Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown Order - The New York Times

Justice Amy Coney Barrett played a decisive role in the decision, which took the opposite approach of earlier court rulings related to coronavirus restrictions in California and Nevada.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov.

In those cases, decided in May and July, the court allowed the states’ governors to restrict attendance at religious services.

The vote in the earlier cases was also 5 to 4, but in the opposite direction, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justice Ginsburg and the other three members of what was then the court’s four-member liberal wing.

Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, said that revisions to the color-coded zones effective Friday meant that “none of the diocese’s churches will be affected by the gathering-size limits it seeks to enjoin.” The next day, she told the court that the two synagogues were also no longer subject to the challenged restrictions.

In a dissenting opinion on Wednesday, Chief Justice Roberts said the court had acted rashly.

“The Constitution does not forbid states from responding to public health crises through regulations that treat religious institutions equally or more favorably than comparable secular institutions, particularly when those regulations save lives,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

In a concurring opinion in the case from California in May, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that government officials should not “be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”.

“Whenever fundamental rights are restricted, the Supreme Court and other courts cannot close their eyes,” Justice Alito said this month, rejecting the view that “whenever there is an emergency, executive officials have unlimited, unreviewable discretion.”.

In refusing to block the governor’s order while the two appeals went forward, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit drew on Chief Justice Roberts’s concurring opinion in the California case.

Since the restrictions on churches were less severe than those on comparable secular gatherings, the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, they did not run afoul of constitutional protections for religious freedom.

Chief Justice Roberts rejected a similar argument in the California case

In asking the Supreme Court to step in, lawyers for the diocese argued that its “spacious churches” were safer than many “secular businesses that can open without restrictions, such as pet stores and broker’s offices and banks and bodegas.” An hourlong Mass, the diocese’s brief said, is “shorter than many trips to a supermarket or big-box store, not to mention a 9-to-5 job.”

Still, she wrote, religious services are subject to fewer restrictions than comparable secular ones