The chief justice remains a swing vote. Photo: Leah Millis-Pool/Getty Images A day after he dismayed cultural conservatives by writing an opinion for a 5-4 majority that struck down a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana , Chief Justice John Roberts rejoined the Supreme Court’s right wing in a major church-state case. Writing for a conservative 5-4 majority in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue , Roberts overruled a Montana Supreme Court decision that killed a state aid program for children in private schools on grounds that it violated a state constitutional prohibition on public aid for religious activities. That prohibition, wrote Roberts, violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise of religion clause insofar as aid was denied students strictly because they attend religious schools. “A state need not subsidize private education,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote . “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Roberts’s opinion sought to chart a path between the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment, expanding the narrow argument he made in 2017 in a case involving a Missouri program for playground improvements that collided with a state constitutional provision similar to […]
