Maine Health Care Workers Seek Resolution From SCOTUS

Liberty Counsel seeks a reversal of a lower court’s dismissal of the case and the opportunity to proceed to a discovery phase and trial as there is no guarantee from the state that similar unlawful actions will not occur in the future.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals had dismissed the health care workers’ case without a judgment on the merits stating their challenge is moot since the state repealed the mandate. This ruling conflicts with three other circuit appeals courts which have ruled in favor of other health care workers fired for refusing the COVID shot. By granting the petition, SCOTUS can resolve the circuit court conflict and protect the religious rights of health care workers.

The case centers on a Maine state law that prohibits state health care workers from ever requesting a religious accommodation for a mandated shot despite Title VII’s command for employers to provide reasonable accommodations for religious beliefs. In addition to the unconstitutional statute, Governor Janet Mills threatened to revoke the licenses of all health care employers who failed to mandate the experimental COVID-19 injection to their employees. As a result, these health care workers were terminated from their positions because they would not compromise their religious convictions over the COVID shot. Gov. Mills and the other defendants argue the case is now moot since there is nothing currently harming the health care workers. While the First Circuit agreed the case was moot because the mandate was no longer hurting the plaintiffs, this decision directly conflicts with other precedents from the Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits. These circuits ruled that merely rescinding a COVID shot mandate was not enough to moot the claims from other health care workers since an overarching discriminatory statute or process preventing religious accommodations still remained in place.

The two questions Liberty Counsel presents in the petition to the High Court are:

1. Whether a state that maintains a discriminatory statute that blocks employers from granting any religious accommodation from a specific vaccine, in direct conflict with Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, may escape constitutional review by simply rescinding the specific vaccine mandate yet keeping the original discriminatory statute in place.
2. Whether a state that maintains a discriminatory system that compels vaccination, yet only rescinds one unlawful vaccine mandate after being required to undergo legal scrutiny, engages in a litigation-driven sham to escape overall review of its unconstitutional system.

In the petition, Liberty Counsel argues that Maine officials “suspiciously” rescinded the COVID shot mandate to “evade constitutional scrutiny” when the district court initially began probing the health care workers’ claims. While the First Circuit disagreed believing the recission was due to the mandate no longer being needed, other circuit courts have questioned similar recission timing as “suspicious,” and as potentially acting “in bad faith to avoid litigation risk.”

Though SCOTUS has denied previous petitions by Maine health care workers, Justice Neil Gorsuch indicated in 2021 that the High Court should have taken their case.

In his dissent, Justice Gorsuch wrote, “This case presents an important constitutional question, a serious error, and an irreparable injury. Where many other states have adopted religious exemptions, Maine has charted a different course. There, healthcare workers who have served on the front line of a pandemic for the last 18 months are now being fired and their practices shuttered. All for adhering to their constitutionally protected religious beliefs. Their plight is worthy of our attention.”

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Governor Janet Mills has forced health care workers to choose between their livelihoods and their religious convictions without any consideration for accommodation. With a conflict in the courts, we are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the lower court split on the mootness issue and whether Maine can evade constitutional scrutiny. Maine’s statute and COVID shot mandate caused irreparable harm by forcing people to choose between their faith and their livelihood, and there needs to be a permanent injunction in place to prevent this from happening again in Maine.”