With Trump pick aboard, top US court tackles religious rights

Dig a little deeper, and you'll find potentially momentous implications for the nationwide debate over school choice voucher programs.

Updated at 2:05 p.m. April 18 with state attorney general's office recusing itself - A U.S. Supreme Court case over who qualifies for state grant money in Missouri should move forward, lawyers for the state and a Columbia, Missouri, church said Tuesday.

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia will argue before the nation's highest court challenging the state's denial of an application for a grant from the Department of Natural Resources to resurface its preschool playground.

A full bench will hear oral arguments in this case, since Justice Neil Gorsuch is now filling the seat left vacant by Justice Antonin Scalia's death previous year. "That's just wrong", said Greitens.

"It's either going to reach escape velocity and just become a much more prominent part of our education system", he says, "or it's going to be heavily constrained in this moment". He is imperiling the religious freedom of both his state's churches and his citizens. But what does it have to do with vouchers programs? Idaho has a version of the Blaine Amendment in the Constitution. Although the proposal failed to gather enough votes in Congress, a majority of states added Blaine Amendments to their constitutions, most of which were adopted during the last quarter of the 19th century. Thirty-seven states have some version of a Blaine Amendment on the books, according to a white paper co-authored by the Institute for Justice and the American Legislative Exchange Council, two groups squarely on the side of school choice.

"The Missouri Supreme Court has interpreted [the state constitutional] language as significantly more explicit and more restrictive than the federal Establishment Clause", the letter by ADF lawyer David A. Cortman says, referring to the First Amendment's prohibition on a government establishment of religion. As an appeals court judge, he was receptive to arguments that government programs can violate religious freedom. A broad ruling by the Supreme Court could require states to ignore their own constitutions and direct taxpayer money to churches, synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship - opening a Pandora's box that puts our religious freedom at risk.

A main point of contention concerns how to read a 2004 Supreme Court case, Locke v Davey.

Firstly, the justices may choose to re-tread safer ground already covered by the court.

[T] he conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the church, urged the court to hear and rule on its case.

Here's the skinny on the case before the Supreme Court, from SCOTUSblog. The U.S. Constitution's First Amendment calls for a separation of church and state and guarantees the free exercise of religion. Lower courts around the country have offered starkly different interpretations of various Blaine amendments - supreme courts in Wisconsin and Arizona ruled the opposite way from Colorado, for example - which is a classic precursor to Supreme Court intervention. The church's brief to the high court stated, "A rubber playground surface accomplishes the state's purposes whether it cushions the fall of the pious or the profane".

Now that Missouri has agreed that tax dollars should be available to houses of worship, the state and the church are on the same side of this legal contest. This arrangement has done wonders for religion in America.