Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, last month, as my friend from Massachusetts just mentioned, the Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration's Health and Human Services mandate infringes on the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom. This is a guarantee that Americans have enjoyed for the entire history of our country. It is the first freedom in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The first sentence has the words ``freedom of religion.''
In the very recent past, the Congress of the United States voted for a bill that protected freedom of religion unless there was some extraordinary reason not to have freedom of religion in our country. It is important to try to maintain some sense of good humor and be willing to work with people on other issues. As it is, people come to the floor and just say the same things over and over that are not true.
Everybody is entitled to their own opinion on religious freedom. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion on the President's health care bill. Everybody is not entitled to their own facts. If we were dealing with the facts as they truly exist right now, this would be a much different debate.
In fact, just a couple of days ago the Washington Post Fact Checker said that what the Senate Democrats are saying in their rhetoric is just wrong. He said: They are simply wrong. He said the court ruling does not outlaw contraceptives. The court ruling does not prevent women from seeking birth control. The court ruling does not take away a person's religious freedom. In fact, all the court ruling does is say that although many people are exempted from this law, we are going to find a way to have people's religious rights upheld.
In America you should not be forced to choose between giving up your business for your faith or giving up your faith for your business. Under the Constitution and under the political heritage of this country and the foundation this country was built on, the government has no right to ask people to make that choice. There are plenty of protections in the Religious Restoration Freedom Act that passed just a few years ago that don't allow this to be taken to some unacceptable extreme.
Religious freedom has historically been a bipartisan issue. In fact, the law the Court based their decision on was introduced in the House by then-Congressman Chuck Schumer--now Senator Schumer who sits right over there--and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. They were the people who proposed this legislation. President Clinton signed the bill into law. The Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, voted for the bill. The minority leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, was a cosponsor of the bill, and this was just considered something that was easily done.
It was unanimously passed in the House. It got three no votes--the vote was 97 to 3 in the Senate. This was in 1993, not 1893. This was a dozen years ago when the understanding was clear that there was a principle in our country that if you are going to violate that principle, you better have taken every step possible not to violate the principle of religious freedom. People on the other side would say it was only a handful of years ago when the bill passed and they didn't know that was what it meant.
Of course they knew that was what it meant. One of the reasons they know that is what it meant is because they knew at the time that this principle was a principle the government would adhere to.
In fact, the specific language in the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act that I introduced in the 112th Congress plus the specific language that Senator Kennedy put in the Health Insurance Consumer's Bill of Rights Act in 1997 exempted the protected religious faith. It says that based on the religious or moral convictions of the issuer, the issuer didn't have to do things they thought were wrong.
In the 103rd Congress Senator Moynihan introduced the Clinton health care package--sometimes called Hillary care--which said that nothing in this title should be construed to prevent any employer from contributing to the purchase of a standard benefits package which excludes coverage for abortion or other services if the employer objects to such services on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction. It can't get much clearer than that.
According to Senator Schumer--when the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was introduced it said the government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability unless it demonstrates such a burden is, one, in the furtherance of a compelling governmental interest or, two, is the least restrictive means of furthering that governmental interest.
This is not a law--the Affordable Care Act--that people are not exempted from. In fact, every woman and man in America who works for an employer that has fewer than 50 people employed is exempted from this act. There are entire religious faith groups exempted from this act if they don't believe in government health care. There are waivers the President has issued over and over that exempt people from this act--many of whom were employees of fast-food restaurants and other places that had minimal packages. The President said we are going to exempt them for a while.
People who work for employers with under 50 employees are exempted forever until the law changes. There are millions more people who work for employers with under 50 employees than work for employers that will have a sincere faith-based interest in not doing the wrong thing.
The majority of people who worship in this country in a given week go to worship in a church where they say this practice is wrong. It doesn't mean it is illegal. It doesn't mean anybody who hears them or appreciates them can't do whatever they want to do. But it does mean you can easily go to church and be told this is the wrong thing to be a part of.
The companies involved in the court case have a great tradition of following their faith. When you get a full-time job at Hobby Lobby, your starting wage is $14 an hour--almost twice the minimum wage. You have to work a couple of hours to have the extra $10 a month that some of these particular medicines, procedures, and birth control pills would cost. They are closed on Sunday. They close earlier at night than their competitors so people who work there can have a family life. In fact, the government conceded these were companies that were clear in their belief.
Now, if you have millions of people who are not covered by the law, why can't you find a way to exempt people from providing a small portion of health coverage that they feel is the wrong thing to do? What did the government say? The government said: Well, you have a way out; you don't have to provide insurance at all. So if you are an employer of faith and you want to do everything you can to provide the best benefit--probably in excess of the government-required benefits in almost all areas you want to provide--your
choice is to not provide insurance at all.
In fact, the suggestion was made that they would save money by not providing insurance at all because it would cost $2,000 per employee not to provide insurance at all. That was the penalty in the law, and the government suggested that was probably a lot less than these companies were paying for insurance.
They said: Why not just pay the penalty? You don't have to violate your faith. You can just violate your belief to take special responsibility for your employees. You can pay the $2,000 penalty and save money.
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While I'm on the $2,000 penalty, I will say that one of the egregious overreaches of what the government was trying to do here is to say if you don't provide insurance at all, your penalty is $2,000. If you don't provide the exact insurance the government says you have to provide--whether it is based on your faith or otherwise--your penalty is $36,500 per employee.
You can provide better insurance in every other area than what the government says, you can provide insurance in areas that the government didn't even require you to provide insurance, you can do anything you want to do beyond what the government says to do, but if you don't do everything the government says, you have to pay $36,500 per employee per year. And that was in the regulation.
That is the law that Members of the House and Senate voted for. I was not one of them. I was against this law. But the law said you have to pay $2,000 if you don't do anything at all. But the Obama administration said you have to pay $36,500 if you didn't do exactly what they said you have to do. It is the wrong application of religious freedom. The idea that people could not have access to any FDA-approved product is just wrong. Somehow if your employer can keep you from having access to anything you want to have access to that has been approved by the FDA is wrong
as the millions of women and men who work for companies who aren't covered under the law prove every day. They prove it every day. If we listen to our friends on the other side, one would think we would be driven backward--we are talking about on behalf of religious freedom, being driven back into the dark ages of December 2013--when everybody who could buy a product in December of 2013 can buy that same FDA-approved product today.
This is about religious freedom. It is not about money. In fact, this bill proposed in the last Congress--I had a provision in that bill that a few Democrats voted for--more Democrats voted for the bill than Republicans voted against it. There was bipartisan support for the bill. I offered an amendment that said if the Department of Health and Human Services wants to, they can promulgate a rule that requires an employer to add a benefit of equal value for any benefit the government requires that they don't want to offer. That is an easy way to say there is no economic motive at all. Maybe the government doesn't require mental health coverage, and if an employer can offer that mental health coverage of equal value to a benefit the employer's faith prohibits being a part of--the bill that most Democrats in the Senate voted against had that provision in there.
This is not about our pocketbooks. This is not about what something costs. This is about whether the government has done everything possible to accommodate people's deeply held religious beliefs. The first freedom in the first sentence in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution mattered when it was put in there, it mattered when 16 or so of the current Members of the Senate voted for the Religious Freedom Act, it mattered when Ted Kennedy and Senator Moynihan put this exact same ability in the health care laws they proposed less than 20 years ago, and it matters today.
I hope we move on to solving problems based on the real facts rather than continuing to talk about facts as my friends would like them to be rather than facts as they really are.