The U.S. Supreme Court is allowing a decades-old constitutional amendment in the state of Michigan to stand, one that bans public funds for private schools.
Five Michigan families told the justices they each have school-age children for whom they wish to obtain public assistance for private, religious school tuition in the state. Each parent is also a member of the Parent Advocates for Choice in Education (PACE) Foundation. The families claim the state amendment violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee to equal protection.
They contended that although the law technically banned public money for all private schools, the burden fell primarily on parochial schools. The Michigan Supreme Court agreed but was overruled by a federal appeals court and the parents then appealed to the Supreme Court, but failed to win high court intervention.
The case against the state argued that the amendment has survived in Michigan because the state has “cleverly defended” it as targeting any nonpublic school, not just sectarian schools.
“If this Court does not act, Michigan’s workaround will become the loophole through which many states discriminate against religious families and individuals,” lawyers for the families wrote in their petition to the high court.
There are 37 states with this type of provision, dubbed a Blaine amendment after a congressman in the 1800s named James Blaine spurred several similar amendments. Justice Clarence Thomas in a case in 2000 wrote of Blaine amendments that it was an “open secret that ‘sectarian’ was a code for ‘Catholic.’”
But the solicitor general for Michigan argued that the state’s 1970 amendment was a response to scarce public funds being allocated to any nonpublic schools, and that these families failed to show standing to bring the challenge, noting that their complaint did not allege the parents nor children were Catholic or religious at all.
