by Katelynn Richardson
Despite a unanimous loss at the Supreme Court, Wisconsin is pressing forward in its fight to deny Catholic Charities a tax exemption.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in June that Wisconsin’s denial of a religious exemption from the state’s unemployment tax for the Catholic Charities Bureau, an arm of the Diocese of Superior in Wisconsin, violates the First Amendment.
Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Joshua Kaul is now asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to eliminate the exemption for all religious groups. While the justices held the state violated the First Amendment by excluding “only some religious nonprofits,” they did not give specific instructions for fixing the violation, he argued.
“Discrimination is cured by restoring equal treatment, which can be accomplished here in one of two ways: either by expanding the statutory exemption to groups like Catholic Charities or else by eliminating it altogether,” Kaul (pictured above) argued in a Monday brief.
The justices’ decision reversed the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s prior finding that the Catholic Charities Bureau does not qualify for an exemption because it is not “operated primarily for religious purposes.”
Last year, liberal justices became the majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court after Democratic-aligned Susan Crawford beat Republican-aligned Brad Schimel. Crawford defeated Schimel 54% to 45%, which came out to over roughly 184,000 votes, according to CBS News. Over $100 million was spent on the race between Crawford and Schmimel, according to the Wisconsin Law Journal.
Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the state’s arguments because claiming “a Catholic ministry serving those in need isn’t religious was always absurd.”
“Trying to wriggle out of a 9-0 loss is even more absurd,” he said. “The state should take the L and move on.”
Wisconsin now claims that if the exemption remains in place, the Supreme Court’s ruling forces them to “trade one form of discrimination for another.”
“Again, to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, an expanded Exemption would have to cover nonprofits that are simply motivated by religious beliefs (like certain hospitals), even if they have no distinctively religious activity,” the attorney general wrote. “Meanwhile, comparable secular nonprofits doing the same work (like hospitals with no religious affiliation) would still have to participate in the state system, solely because they lacked a religious motivation for their work.”
The Wisconsin Attorney General’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Attorneys defending the Catholic Charities Bureau argued the state’s “animus is anything but subtle.”
“Indeed, it is unavoidably clear that there has been one and only one circumstance in which Wisconsin has ever tried to jettison the entire scheme of religious exemptions—when it lost at the United States Supreme Court and was forced to include Catholic Charities,” they wrote.
In the Supreme Court’s June decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that it is “fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality between religion and religion.’”
“There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one,” she wrote. “When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny.”
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Katelynn Richardson is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
Photo “Josh Kaul” by Josh Kaul.
