Washington D.C., Apr 25, 2017 / 11:21 am
With President Donald Trump's administration signaling that it is not dropping the HHS mandate cases against religious non-profits, plaintiffs are concerned that the action does not reflect promises made during the presidential campaign.
"The government has a chance to do the right thing here. It got it wrong for five years in these cases, almost six years," said Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents many non-profits in HHS mandate cases.
"And they can do the right thing by dropping their appeals that are in favor of the mandate, and admitting that they were wrong on the issue of the contraceptive mandate, as applied to religious non-profits," Rassbach told CNA Tuesday.
During his presidential campaign, Trump had promised Catholics relief from the HHS mandate, which requires employers to offer health insurance plans covering contraception, sterilization and some early abortion drugs. In a letter to the Catholic Leadership Conference last October, he pointed to his opponent Hillary Clinton's support for the mandate, and said "that is a hostility to religious liberty you will never see in a Trump Administration."