Catching up on Some Stuff in the Fat File

Details: 07 December 2012

A benefit of several weeks of surgery-caused medical leave was that the down time for healing provided opportunities to work on the fat file marked "things to read and review when there’s time."

This included a lot of catching up on "Obamacare," the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Numerous analyses and commentaries that had been variously deposited in the fat file were typically informational and interesting.

Some of PPACA is already in effect. This includes, as of last August, the highly controversial, unjust mandate for coverage of contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs as applied to many private, non-secular employers. A lot of PPACA though, including most of its major policies, takes effect January 1, 2014. There are more than enough issues and yet-to-be answered questions to project an implementation mess between now and then and on into the future One commentator says implementation of PPACA is inevitably headed into the "eye of a hurricane."

The issue of the definition of religious employer for purposes of exemption from the -government’s mandate forcing employers to cover sterilization and contraceptives, including those that can function as early abortions, will continue to be contested.

The federal lawsuit that was filed in Nebraska by the state Attorney General, on behalf of his office and the attorneys general of six other states, as well as three church institutions and two individuals, was dismissed on July 17 by a U.S. District Court judge in Lincoln. He ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue because they were not facing any direct and immediate harm. This is because the federal government relented a bit in June and allowed a "safe harbor" until August 2013 for religious organizations that cannot qualify under the narrow definition used for the exemption.

The lower court’s ruling has been appealed to the Eighth Circuit.

The General Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty says, don’t read too much into this dismissal. "The decision has nothing to do with the main question of why the mandate violates the Constitution and federal religious-liberty law," Kyle Duncan wrote in Bench Memos.

More about the struggle with the federal government over mandated coverage of contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs: In an article in the diocesan newspaper of Arlington, VA, a pastor reflected on the life of St. Thomas More and urged that More’s faithful witness to his Catholic faith and willingness to lose his life rather than violate his conscience be instructive and inspirational in the present dilemma.

As Chancellor of England, lawyer and author Thomas More faced a moral crisis when the Catholic Church would not approve King Henry VIII’s divorce and the king responded by redefining the Church to fit his desire. Because his conscience would not allow him to support that response, More resigned from office. The king then demanded that More take an oath affirming the divorce. When More refused, he was imprisoned and subsequently beheaded.

In his article, the Virginia pastor compared Thomas More’s struggle with the king to that of the current struggle against a mandate that is attempting to define and dictate what is or isn’t religious enough to qualify for an exemption.

The Virginia pastor’s name is Father Paul D. Scalia. His father is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

On a fat-file topic of a much different nature:

Since 1997, Arizona has had a law that allows individuals to claim a credit against their state income-tax liability for up to $500 of contributions made to tax-exempt, charitable organizations that allocate at least 90 percent of their revenue for private-school scholarships. This scholarship-tax-credit program in Arizona is like what was introduced as legislation in Nebraska in 2009-10 (LB 67) and again in 2011-12 (LB 50).

Charles M. North, Ph.D., J.D., a professor of Economics at Baylor University, issued a report that assessed data from Arizona’s scholarship-contribution tax-credit legislation for calendar year 2008. He calculated that it would have cost the state, county and local governments $241.5 million to provide a public-school education for all the private-school students who received scholarships from the program. That was more than four times the amount of revenue not collected due to the credit.

In a narrower context, North calculated that the cost to provide a public education to students who, but for the scholarship assistance, would not have been able to enroll in a private school, would have been $99.8 million per year.

Overall, North’s assessments showed that contributions to private-school scholarship programs saved Arizona taxpayers from $99.8 million to $241.5 million in 2008, at a cost of only $55.3 million in revenue reduction.

In 2010, a similar analysis in Nebraska, conducted by a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice, forecast a net benefit of $51 million over 10 years.

It is time for Nebraska legislators to get serious about facilitating this school-choice policy in the Cornhusker State, and for Catholic-school parents to work for it.