Republican justices: the Establishment Clause violates the First Amendment

The state of Maine, consistently with the deeply embedded American tradition of avoiding excessive entanglement between church and state, has a program that provides tuition assistance for parents who lack access to a public secondary school but requires that the subsidy be used to attend a secular school. The Supreme Court, on a straight party-line vote, has ruled that in adhering to the Constitution Maine has violated the Constitution.

One problem here, as Breyer observes, is that because not all religious groups have the resources to create schools, the state will now be constitutionally required to favor some religions over others:

And as Sotomayor points out, the decision orders Maine to fund sectarian education that would be illegal if the state provided it directly:

Which amounts to the Court saying that in this context the separation of church and state required by the First Amendment is unconsitutional:

That’s the Roberts Court: terrible decisions that, if the logic means anything, will lead to even worse decisions.