from w nyc studios it's brian lear a daily politics podcast it's tuesday june 21st so there were five more

opinions delivered by the supreme court this morning not the biggest of the big ones that you know what they are that we're waiting for.

But we're going to speak about one of the rulings that did come down this morning, and it's possible implications for the separation of church and state.

A tuition assistance program in Maine gave families money to send their children to private schools when their local public

school district did not have a public high school at all. But that program originally excluded

religious schools. Today's ruling from the Supreme Court finds the exclusion of religious schools

unconstitutional. So back with us now, Emily Bazelon, staff writer for the New York

Times Magazine, co-host of Slates, Political GabFest podcast, and Creative Writing and Law Fellow at the Yale

Law School. Hey, Emily, thanks for coming back on. Hey, Brian, my pleasure. Can you give us some

background on this case, Carson versus Macon? Yeah, for sure. So the state of Maine

has parts of the states where they have school districts, but not enough kids for a high school.

And so in those rural parts of the state, there's a program where your family gets to pick your high school and the

state will pay for it if it's a private school. But there was a restriction. If you would like to go

to a religious private school, the state said, sorry, we are not going to pay for that because we

see that as endorsing a particular religious point of view. And we think that that's not the policy we want.

And also we think it violates the establishment clause in the First Amendment, which says that the

state shall not establish religion. The vote was six to three. On what grounds did the conservative

majority, and that is the conservative majority on the court today for so many

things, right? Six, three, on what grounds did they find the exclusion of religious schools

unconstitutional? So what the Supreme Court is saying here is that effectively the free exercise

clause, the right to exercise your religious freely, just kind of erases the violation

of the establishment clause here. So there's this tension. The state doesn't want to endorse

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