SCOTUS Deadlock Leaves In Place Ruling Blocking Religious Charter School

The U.S. Supreme Court was divided evenly Thursday in a high-profile case involving the nation’s first religious charter school, upholding an Oklahoma Supreme Court verdict that ruled the proposed Catholic school unconstitutional.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, resulting in a 4-4 split. Although she did not explain her decision, the former University of Notre Dame law professor has several connections to the attorneys representing the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.

Religious organizations have won a succession of votes from the conservative majority recently, permitting public funds to be used on religious instruction and programs. Critics said that a victory for the school in this case may have significantly increased the availability of government financing for religious schools or caused states to withdraw or reconsider charter school schemes.

Following its regular procedure, the high court issued a brief, unsigned order stating merely that it had divided evenly. The Supreme Court last divided 4-4 in 2022, in a significantly more technical decision about when locomotives must be inspected under federal law.

Religious groups interested in the case will be able to file a new complaint because evenly divided rulings do not establish precedent.

The court did not specify how the justices voted, and oral arguments are not often reliable predictors. However, when the court heard the issue in late April, Chief Justice John Roberts, in particular, posed harsh questions to both parties and looked to be leaving his decision-making options open.

Three of the court’s conservative judges appeared to support the establishment of the institution, while the three liberal justices appeared opposed.

Charter schools, which are privately administered but publicly supported, educate 3.8 million children in the United States, providing an alternative to traditional public schools that are designed to be more inventive and less constrained by state rules. Since their inception in the 1990s, charter schools have grown to over 8,000 nationally by the 2023 academic year.

Oklahoma law, like most other states, considers schools to be public.

Both the Republican governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, and the Republican who served as the state’s attorney general before him, John O’Connor, supported the establishment of the institution. On the other hand, when Gentner Drummond became the Attorney General of Oklahoma in 2023, he immediately withdrew his support for the organization and finally filed a lawsuit to prevent its approval.

In the previous year, the highest court in the state issued a ruling that was favorable to Drummond, determining that the institution had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

However, recently, the United States Supreme Court has handled several appeals, adopting a different perspective.

The majority of the court has concluded that the government is not required to open public services to private firms. On the other hand, it is not possible for it to prevent religious organizations from taking part in the event if it so wishes.

The court decided in 2022 that Maine could not exclude religious schools from a public tuition aid scheme that allows parents to utilize vouchers to send their children to either public or private schools to get financial assistance for their children’s education.

By a vote of 6-3, the court decided that the section of the First Amendment that protects the right to free exercise might be violated by excluding religious organizations from the tuition plan.

“The fact that the Court split 4-4 in this case, with Justice Barrett recused, is not especially surprising,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

“The surprise is that the Court had agreed to take this case up, with Justice Barrett recused, in the first place. That had led some folks to wonder if Chief Justice Roberts might be willing to join the other four Republican appointees in favor of public funding for religious charter schools. Today’s affirmance without an opinion suggests that he isn’t, at least for now,” Vladeck added.