Private businesses are trying to block Obamacare on religious grounds? What do companies worship besides, perhaps, the almighty dollar?

That’s the question at the heart of two conflicting rulings from lower courts that the Supreme Court has decided to take up in its second constitutional showdown over President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Since the law also known as Obamacare was passed, dozens of Christian employers have challenged its birth-control mandate that requires employers to provide health insurance coverage for FDA-approved contraception.

Abortion rights opponents believe some of the allowed contraceptive methods block fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman’s uterus. That’s disputed by other research findings that the methods in question actually work before fertilization occurs.

To placate such objections, the Obama administration has changed the requirement to allow explicitly religious organizations and some other nonprofits to opt out of paying for insurance directly, passing the costs on to their insurance provider instead.

But that doesn’t apply to the big for-profit corporations at issue in the two cases that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear.

In one of them, the 10th Circuit Court upheld the argument of Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a chain of 500 arts-and-crafts stores with 13,000 full-time employees, that the mandate would violate the rights of owners David and Barbara Green under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. That law says that a “person” can seek to opt out of a law under some circumstances if obeying it would “substantially burden” the exercise of his or her religion.

But is a corporation a “person?” Yes, says the 10th Circuit, under the Citizens United decision, which holds that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individual people to spend money as a form of speech in political campaigns.

Not so, says the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, in the second of the two decisions the justices will review. In rejecting the arguments of Conestoga Wood Specialties, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of wooden cabinets owned by a Mennonite family, the appeals court wrote that corporations “do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors.”

That sounds right to me. Even if the corporations qualified as “persons” under the 1993 law, which I am sure would surprise many of those who voted for it, the law cites a “substantial burden” on the exercise of religion.

If any “burden” is imposed on the employers in these cases, it hardly can be called “substantial” any more than the burden government routinely imposes on taxpayers to fund overseas wars or domestic social programs to which they personally object.

But if the high court grants corporations a religious license to pick and choose whichever government rules they want to follow or taxes they want to pay, a substantial burden would be imposed on the ability of the health care law to work — which would be just fine with some of its critics.

The impact of such a decision would reach far beyond Obamacare. That’s why the Supreme Court has drawn boundaries around the First Amendment’s “free exercise of religion” clause since its ruling in the 1878 test case of the bigamy conviction of George Reynolds, the personal secretary to Mormon leader Brigham Young.

Reynolds contended that his bigamy conviction violated his First Amendment rights as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which would not renounce bigamy until 1890. He lost, mainly because of legal reasoning drawn partly from a letter by Thomas Jefferson in which he drew a sharp distinction between religious belief and religiously motivated actions.

Because belief “lies solely between man and his God,” Jefferson wrote, “the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions.” In that spirit, the Supreme Court’ wrote, “Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice?”

One hopes not. Government should not intrude on religious faith, but for the sake of the common good, it occasionally must intervene in acts that are motivated by religious belief.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

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“I’m seldom accused of being too nice,” writes Rep. Luis Gutierrez in his lively new autobiography. Yet the feisty and frank Chicago Democrat has been sounding a lot like Mr. Nice Guy these days as he tries to salvage immigration reform in the GOP-controlled House.

His book, Still Dreaming: My Journey from the Barrio to Capitol Hill, stirred considerable buzz for its less-than-flattering portrayal of President Barack Obama, of whom Gutierrez was an early supporter, for failing to push immigration reform during his first term as he had promised.

But on the heels of the government shutdown and the debt-ceiling showdown, the second-term president and both parties have new incentives to pass immigration reform — with less than a month left on the congressional calendar before the end of the year.

“I feel very, very optimistic,” Gutierrez told me in a phone interview between meetings on Capitol Hill. In spite of Washington’s bitter partisanship on full display in recent weeks, “quiet diplomacy” and “dialogue” about immigration reform “continued during all of that time.”

Not everybody shares his optimism. Immigration has long divided House Republicans and the rest of the Grand Old Party. Amid changing times and demographics, the party faces a dilemma over how it can polish its brand and expand its reach without losing its conservative base.

Pragmatic moderates in the GOP leadership want to fix our broken immigration system to spur economic growth and broaden the party’s ethnic diversity after last November’s presidential election loss. The only specific policy recommendation in the national party’s post-election “autopsy” called for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform.

But conservatives oppose anything that resembles “amnesty,” including the “pathway” to legalization and ultimately citizenship that Gutierrez and other Democrats want for the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented workers.

Conservatives would rather emphasize border enforcement, even though more than half of the undocumented are estimated not to have entered over the border, but to have overstayed their visas.

The pressure is so fierce that Florida Republican senator Marco Rubio sounded this past weekend as though he was turning against the immigration bill he co-wrote and helped to persuade his fellow senators to pass in June.

In statements released by his spokesman Alex Conant, Rubio proposed a piece-by-piece approach to immigration reform instead of the comprehensive bill favored by the Senate. “(A)t this time, the only approach that has a realistic chance of success is to focus on those aspects of reform on which there is consensus through a series of individual bills,” the spokesman said.

Pessimists say Rubio, a possible presidential hopeful, is knuckling under to pressure from the Tea Party right. But reformers argue that his support for scaled-back immigration reform is not a deal-breaker, since the Republican-led House was never going to pass the Senate’s comprehensive bill anyway. Since Rubio already lost credibility with House conservatives when he helped to author the bill with the Senate’s “Gang of Eight,” his latest move can be seen as a gesture to meet House Republicans halfway.

Among Democrats, Gutierrez has tried to stay upbeat and keep talking to key Republicans, which is not always easy. For that unease, he didn’t let his own party off the hook, either. After all, he pointed out, President Obama and Democrats didn’t push comprehensive immigration reform when they ran both houses of Congress.

And when he and Rep. Paul Ryan made two joint appearances in Chicago in April on behalf of immigration reform, Gutierrez reminds us, he took heat from Democrats for palling around with the enemy. Outreach, he insists, has to work both ways. “Wash D.C. is a place where bipartisanship is always lauded but never rewarded,” he said.

With non-Hispanic whites expected to become a minority by the mid-2040s, the future of the Republicans as a national party is at stake. Opponents of reform complain that new immigrants would be a gift to Democrats, since they have tended to vote that way. But experience shows Hispanic immigrants and others can be very persuadable, when parties show that their votes are wanted.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

AFP Photo/ Andrew Burton

Observing Washington politics close-up has given me a new appreciation of Shakespeare. Now I see where he got his ideas.

“Today, you could say that almost all of our political rhetoric, comes from two books from the 16th and 17th centuries: the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s plays,” Michael Witmore, director of Folger Shakespeare Library, told me last year.

I recently talked to Witmore again at the 71-year-old independent research library and theater, which sits only a block east of the Capitol.

What, I wondered, would Shakespeare say about today’s era of government shutdowns, debt-ceiling showdowns and Obamacare website meltdowns? He wouldn’t be surprised, Witmore said with a smile, “After all, he wrote the script.”

Indeed, after perusing some of the Bard’s most famous quotes, it is not hard for me to look at today’s headlines and imagine, say, President Barack Obama confronting congressional Republicans with, “Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?” (Hamlet).

Or Treasury Secretary Jack Lew reporting on job growth: “We have seen better days.” (Timon of Athens)

Or House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) looking over his shoulder at Tea Party rivals: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.” (Julius Caesar).

Or Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) defending his ill-fated push into the partial government shutdown: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” (Hamlet).

Or maybe Health and Human Services Secy. Kathleen Sebelius as Lady Macbeth dealing with Obamacare’s website woes: “Out! Out, damn glitch…!”

But Witmore called my attention to As You Like It, a comedy that in Act 5, Scene 4, delivers “one of the great comic treatments of the politics of brinksmanship (that) we in the capital know well.”

In the scene, a jester named Touchstone instructs us in the etiquette of giving “the Lie with Circumstance,” a gesture to soften disputes — of which today’s Capitol Hill has many.

To express disagreement, he recommends the little word “if” in a way that almost sounds like you are conceding agreement — as in, “If you said so, then I said so.”

“Your If is the only peace-maker,” Touchstone concludes. “Much virtue in If.”

Brilliant. Cut through the Elizabethan English and one hears Shakespeare capturing what I call the essence of passive-resistant diplomacy. The “if” accepts the validity of the other person’s judgment without closing the door on the possibility that the other person is wrong.

President Obama offered an excellent example, in my view, when he recently was confronted in an Associated Press interview with a controversy that he did not need, yet could not easily avoid: the long-building uproar over the racial slur that the Washington’s pro football team, the Redskins, uses as their name.

In May, the current team owner Dan Snyder told USA Today, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

No matter how much some well-meaning fans try to sugarcoat it, the name is a slur and needs to go. But how does a president make that point without sounding like a hater of the team? How about a virtuous “if?”

“If I were the owner of the team,” the president said in a fatherly tone, “and I knew that there was a name of my team — even if it had a storied history — that was offending a sizable group of people, I’d think about changing it.”

That’s about as forceful as anyone can call for banishing a racial slur without giving anyone a good reason to feel offended. Snyder responded with an open letter to fans that defended the name, although this time he didn’t say “NEVER,” all caps or not.

If the name’s days are numbered, as I suspect they are, Obama helped move the ball down the field.

Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, called politics “the art of the possible.” Such is the magic of the Shakespearean “if,” I believe. Leaders need to think not only about how bad things are but also how good they could be.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

Image via WIkimedia Commons

Why another shutdown? Our government has three parties these days: Democrats, Republicans and the new radical Republicans.

That “radical Republican” label has some history. The old radical Republicans were the Grand Old Party’s progressive wing. They were opposed during the Civil War and through Reconstruction by the party’s liberals and conservatives.

They strongly opposed slavery, demanded harsh policies against ex-Confederates and pushed civil rights and voting rights for newly emancipated slaves. Abraham Lincoln and other moderates sought compromise and unity for the party and the nation. Today’s radical right would probably call Lincoln an appeaser or a “RINO” — Republican in Name Only.

Today’s radical Republicans are quite the opposite in ideology, if not in temperament, of the originals. Today’s Tea Party-era radicals call themselves “conservative” but they radically challenge, block and overturn established laws, policies and traditions that get in the way of their ideological goals — even if it means a federal government shutdown or a possible default on the nation’s debt obligations.

Long-running partisan battles over taxes, spending, deficits, the debt ceiling and other fiscal concerns have come to a head this season in pitched, last-ditch battles by Republicans to block, repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare.”

Democrats believe that their hard-won Obamacare law — having survived congressional opposition, the Supreme Court and a presidential election in which it was a central issue — should be given a chance to work.

Republicans like Texas senator Ted Cruz fear that once Obamacare kicks in, as he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in July, it “will never, ever be repealed” after Democrats “get the American people addicted to the sugar.”

In other words, if people get a chance to try Obamacare, they might like it as much as they like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs long decried by conservatives as socialistic.

They have a right to hold objections to programs they don’t like. But conservatives do their country a disservice by holding the normal functions of government hostage to their tests of ideological purity. That’s not just coming from me. It also comes from many of their fellow conservatives.

Some of the party’s best known conservatives have come under attack from the GOP’s Tea Party wing for failure to be conservative enough. The Senate Conservatives Fund, for example, has been running ads that attack Republican senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Their sin: reluctance to support their party’s self-destructive strategy against Obamacare.

“Tell Senate Republicans to stand with Ted Cruz and [Utah senator] Mike Lee,” says the group’s website, “not [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell [of Kentucky] and [Senate Minority Whip] John Cornyn [of Texas].”

Other conservative groups, including the Tea Party Patriots, For America and Heritage Action have mounted ads attacking Republicans in both houses who don’t rigidly support their efforts to defund Obamacare.

Over on the House side, Cruz has thumbed his nose at traditional protocols by plotting strategy with Tea Party House members — against Speaker John Boehner’s wishes.

But what is Boehner to do? He’s been warned by the Tea Partiers that he’ll be voted out of his speakership if he passes any major legislation with less than a majority of House Republicans. The radical right may be a minority of the House but they appear to leverage a majority of the power against Boehner’s lack of a counter-strategy.

Cruz has taken de facto leadership of the new radical Republican assault on Obamacare, most visibly by speaking for more than 21 hours in a pseudo-filibuster about his objections to the program. This has won soaring support for him in the party’s right wing, setting him up for what most likely will be a presidential run in 2016. One wonders whether he cares more about Republicans or the Ted Cruz Party.

So far, the strident GOP push to overturn Obamacare, even as Americans in need of health care sign up for its state insurance exchanges, shows Republicans to be holding on to the same self-defeating strategy that lost the 2012 presidential race: Talking ceaselessly to themselves.

Worse, they’re arguing among themselves, battling for their party’s political soul instead of real solutions to the problems that voters sent them to Washington to solve.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

What if we had a mass shooting and nobody noticed?

That gloomy thought came to mind as I listened to the unsettling sound of silence that followed the September 16 Navy Yard shooting in the nation’s capital that killed 12 people, plus the shooter.

Three days later it came to mind again as a shooting spree in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood made national news. Thirteen were injured, including a 3-year-old boy who was shot in the face. Four people have been charged in the reportedly gang-related incident.

President Obama eloquently expressed the grief, outrage and frustration that every decent American should feel about “yet another mass shooting” at the Navy Yard.

But overall reaction to the workplace slaughter by a reportedly deranged gunman was sadly and noticeably subdued compared to the national outrage that reignited the national gun debate following the massacre of 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut.

That’s because after all the anguish, debate and proposed legislation that emerged from the Newtown tragedy, the legislation was voted down in the Senate and everyone returned to other matters — like House Republicans voting uselessly to repeal Obamacare more than 40 times. Opposition to even modest measures was too strong, especially from rural centers of pro-gun culture.

If even the massacre of children and the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, could not move Congress to pass new gun safety measures, it’s no wonder that the energy for gun safety seems to have drained out of Capitol Hill.

But that doesn’t mean that we Americans can’t do anything but wring our hands over the continuing carnage. As even mass shootings lose their ability to shock us, both sides of the gun debate need to face a bracing reality: The gun violence problem is not only local and it’s not only about guns.

Those points were urgently expressed by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter in a joint speech in Washington last Thursday. They called for a new “surge” in attention and national action to the “virus” of gun-related violence.

Calls for national action are hardly new, but I was encouraged by the mayors’ refusal to be, as Landrieu put it, bogged down by the “seemingly mind-numbing debate about gun control.”

Instead they emphasized remedies everyone should be able to agree on. They included more cops on the street, as in a stronger COPS program — Community Oriented Policing Services — passed by Congress under President Bill Clinton; stronger cooperation with the federal government to target criminals with illegal guns and stronger measures against straw purchases and interstate gun traffickers.

Yet the two mayors also called for more personal responsibility and engagement by parents, pastors, coaches and neighbors. “Babies having babies just doesn’t work,” Landrieu said.

I’ve heard Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly left some scheduled meetings with members of Obama’s cabinet in Washington early after hearing of the mass shooting back home, express a similar agenda in his slogan: “Policing, prevention, penalties and parenting.”

Bottom line: A problem as complex as urban violence must be pushed back the same way it emerged: in every sector of community and political life.

But first we have to care. Citing the number of black men killed by homicide in his city in 2012, Nutter observed: “If the Ku Klux Klan came to Philadelphia and killed 236 black men, the city would be on lockdown.”

The same would be true if “international terrorists killed 236 Philadelphians of any race,” he said. “And, yet, 236 African-American men murdered in one city — not one word. No hearings on the Hill, no investigations … nothing but silence.”

We need to end the sound of silence. It was easier to take national political action in the ’90s. The economy was doing well and Congress was not as fiercely divided as it is today. But, as the two mayors said in Washington, we should not be more willing to pay for safe streets in Afghanistan than to make our streets safer at home.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

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