As reported by the Christian Science Monitor, last week the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the government's motion to dismiss its appeal of a preliminary injunction won by Tyndale House, a for-profit Bible publishing company, against enforcement of the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage mandate. (See prior posting.) An appeal is pending in the D.C. Circuit in another case raising the same issues and it is being heard by a different 3-judge panel that apparently the government considers more sympathetic to its arguments. Tyndale House had opposed the government's motion to dismiss the appeal, but now that it has been dismissed Tyndale House lawyers say: "The government dismissed its appeal because it knows how ridiculous it sounds arguing that a Bible publisher isn’t religious enough to qualify as a religious employer."
UPDATE: The issue of the motivation behind the government's motion is more complex than suggested above. It turns out that the 3-judge panel which denied appellants an injunction pending appeal in the other pending case, Gilardi v. Sebelius, also granted an expedited appeal and ordered that "the case be scheduled for oral argument on the same day and before the same panel as Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. v. Sebelius", sometime in September. (Full text of order denying injunction and ordering same panel.) Of course, now there is no "same panel" to hear the Gilardi appeal, and it is unclear whether it will go before the panel that heard and denied the motion in Gilardi for an injunction pending appeal-- the one presumably favored by the government. So it may be that the government merely thought that Gilardi was a better case on the merits for it to use to test the issue since the companies there are not engaged in a business related to religion in the way a Bible publisher in Tyndale is. (See prior related posting.) [Thanks to Duane Schmidt for the lead.]
