The popular craft chain Hobby Lobby has been granted a full rehearing of its case challenging Obamacare’s abortion pill mandate.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals announced on Friday that Hobby Lobby’s appeal will go before the entire court as per the company’s request. Cases are customarily held before a panel of three judges, except in what are called en banc hearings.
“It’s extraordinarily rare for the court to do that,” stated Kyle Duncan of The Beckett Fund, which is representing Hobby Lobby in the courts. “We think the takeaway is that the court as a whole recognizes how important the case is and wants to devote their full attention to it.... We are grateful that the court granted Hobby Lobby’s petition,” he said.
The court plans to hear the case soon as the company has until July before it will begin to be fined as much as $1.3 million a day for noncompliance....
Hobby Lobby, owned by evangelical Christian David Green, had been seeking an emergency injunction against the mandate from all available venues since its request was first turned down by a federal district court in Oklahoma City.
While Hobby Lobby states that it has been covering, and will continue to cover, birth control for its over 13,000 employees nationwide,
it refuses to pay for two pills that are included in Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate: the morning-after pill and the week-after pill.
