Carson v. Makin
Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. ___ (2022), was a United States Supreme Court case related to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Free Exercise Clause. It was a follow-up to Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The case centered on the limits of school vouchers offered by the state of Maine, which had disallowed the use of vouchers to pay for religious-based private schools. In a 6–3 decision the Court ruled that Maine's restrictions on vouchers violated the Free Exercise Clause, as they discriminated against religious-backed private schools. The minority opinions argued that the decision worked against the long-standing principle of the separation of church and state, since state governments would now be required to fund religious institutions. Background Many U.S. states offer tuition assistance for private schools in lieu of public schools for primary education, using school vouchers. But several states have established in their constitutions, by way of a Blaine Amendment or similar wording, that the state cannot fund religious schools. About half Maine's students live in rural areas, many of which lack public high schools. Since 1873, Maine has provided tuition assistance program for residents of those areas to send their children to nearby public or private schools, which until 1980 included religious schools. The tuition covers board and travel, amounting to about as of 2021. The program funds around 11 nonsectarian private schools across the state, handling approximately 4,800 students, and additional nonsectarian schools in neighboring states. Maine changed the program in 1980 to prohibit the vouchers from being used at secular schools run by religious organizations on the basis that funding such schools violates the U.S. and state constitutions, specifically the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state. During the Trump administration, school choice became a major issue under President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Trump urged Congress to pass legislation to support school choice and vouchers, including for religious schools, but failed to gain sufficient support due to conflicts in the Senate and the unlikely chance of its success in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris () had established that an Ohio voucher program that allowed parents to use the vouchers for private religious schools did not violate the Establishment Clause. Before Carson, the Supreme Court ruled in two precedent cases. In the first, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (), the Court ruled that denying a religious school in Missouri the funds to rebuild a playground while providing funds to non-secular schools violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, and that government programs cannot discriminate on the basis of religion in their operations. In the second, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (), the Court held that if states do offer such assistance, they cannot prevent such tuition from being used for religious schools simply because the schools are religious. Lower courts In 2018, the Institute for Justice took representation of two Maine families to challenge the exclusion of