Radio Recap – BREAKING: Major Victory for School Choice at the Supreme Court

The latest Supreme Court ruling was a major victory for school choice and religious liberty.

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live, we discussed the major victory for school choice at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, again, ruled in a 5-4 decision.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the Supreme Court, you could say, the right way. It was a school choice case, the Espinoza case. We’ve talked about it on the air when we at the ACLJ launched our School Choice Initiative.

For people out there who may have asked, "Why now?", this is not something new for the ACLJ. We’ve been involved in the school choice issue for a very long time, even before it was something that was in fashion to even talk about and when it was just starting in the states across the country.

They’ve been working on these laws and some of these laws have been around a long time. There’s been a ton of discussion about whether states can fund religious institutions or any kind of religious groups via these voucher and other programs where it’s really supposed to be up to the parents to make that decision to choose where to send their child to school.

We are seeing the erosion of that idea. The idea that you can somehow distinguish private school that is not affiliated with a religious group and one that is. They are both non profits.

My dad, Jay Sekulow, made the following point:

We had a case a number of years ago for Josh Davey, Locke v. Davey. There the court ruled that you cannot compel a government to pay for the seminary training of a student. What’s interesting about this case is first, it limits significantly the holding in Locke v. Davey. In fact, it says this: we have “repeatedly held that the Establishment Clause is not offended when religious observers and organizations benefit from neutral government programs. See, e.g., Locke, 540 U. S., at 719.” That’s great. It limited that holding and then protected the religious institutions or people who want to choose a religious school among many options for school choice. It’s a very positive decision by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Also, Justice Sam Alito wrote a concurring opinion on which he obviously agreed funds could be used for religious training, religious schools; and he cites a law review article that I wrote with a colleague, Jeremy Tedesco, who was my law clerk at the time. Actually, it became part of my dissertation. It was an adaption from my dissertation. In it I talked about the Philadelphia Bible Riots and the anti-Catholic animus that led to what’s called the Blaine Amendments, which were these really anti-religion, they were aimed at Catholics but really could have been aimed at anybody. Justice Alito cites my law review article in two separate footnotes.

That’s the first time that’s happened. We’ve had our brief cited, when we’ve filed a brief in the case as well, but I’ve never had a law review article that we wrote cited.

We’ve been working on this issue for almost thirty years.

The full broadcast is complete with more discussion by our team of the recent Supreme Court decision which was a victory toward our School Choice Initiative.

Watch the full broadcast below.