MSM Gives Us the Mushroom Treatment on HHS Mandate

[Geee]

American Spectator:

In December, there were five federal court decisions relating to Obamacare. Chances are, however, that you will have heard about only one of them. If you do a web search for recent news stories on Hobby Lobby, whose long-shot request for a Supreme Court injunction against the HHS contraception mandate was denied last week, you will get thousands of hits. Virtually every establishment media outlet has posted at least one story on that decision, and most offer several for the edification of their readers.

Now, using precisely the same parameters, do a search for recent stories on Wheaton College. You will get fewer than a dozen results relating to the December 18 decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule a lower court dismissal of Wheaton’s lawsuit against the government pursuant to the HHS mandate. You will find a similar paucity of stories about December rulings against the government in suits brought by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Korte & Luitjohan Contractors, and American Pulverizer, Inc.

The irony here is that Justice Sotomayor’s Hobby Lobby opinion was utterly predictable and, in the long run, probably far less significant than any of the other four decisions. The Wheaton College ruling was not merely a rebuke for the lower court, which naively dismissed the lawsuit last August based on a non-binding government promise “to revise the mandate to accommodate some religious institutions before it goes into effect,” it demolished an argument that the Justice Department has been making in all the anti-mandate lawsuits.