Federal judge blocks Trump administration's broad birth control mandate exemptions Federal judge blocks Trump administra

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: The Hill

08/14/25 1:12 PM ET


The Trump administration’s religious and moral carve-outs to an ObamaCare requirement that all employer health plans cover contraception at no cost were blocked on Wednesday by a federal judge. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia issued a summary judgment that the rules were arbitrary, capricious and an overreach of the authority of the agencies that wrote them in 2017.

Under the rules, essentially any for-profit or nonprofit employer or insurer was allowed to exempt themselves from following the birth control mandate on moral and religious grounds. The rules also let publicly traded companies obtain a religious exemption, but not a moral one.

The Affordable Care Act required employer health plans to cover at least one of 18 forms of birth control approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Religious groups and employers sued, and the Supreme Court in 2014 ruled 5-4 that the contraceptive mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) rights of closely held corporations whose owners had religious objections. Subsequent agency actions tried to find a balance, but the Trump administration in 2017 issued a blanket exemption. The rules didn’t require employers to apply for an exemption because the administration said that would be a violation of their religious rights.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5452415-trump-contraception-exemption-blocked/

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Link to RULING (PDF) - https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Commonwealth-of-Pennsylvania_2025.08.13_OPINION-AND-ORDER.pdf

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Keep religion out of secular life with solid boundaries.

[CousinIT]

2. build this wall...

[JMCKUSICK]

3. How is it that that blanket exemption survived the entire Biden administration?

Partisanship has been a major issue since the Newt Gingrich days. When I speak of my frustration with my party, it is the following that absolutely describes the difference between Democrats and Republicans:
Republicans, when in power, will scratch and claw for every inch of their agenda to the very last second they have it, while Democrats seek that ever elusive bi-partisan compromise as if everything else just wouldn't be worthy without that.
That this is still a rule pisses me off. That something this important feels obscure makes it worse.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. Well when Gingrich took over in 1994

that was the first time in 40 years that the GOP won the House. But as to his convoluted thought process, see the below that I post often (from an interview done with him and his strategy) -

The Man Who Broke Politics

Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.

Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue

Updated on October 17, 2018

(snip)

On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

(snip)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/