This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 30th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When a state sets up a scholarship program for young people to attend school and gives a decisive role to parents in choosing

those educations. Can it rule out religious schools? Today the Supreme Court said no, it can't.

Cato's Ilia Shapiro and Neil McCluskey discuss Blain amendments, so-called no aid provisions in school choice.

In the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.

Many states have explicitly Department of Revenue.

Many states have explicitly, I guess you'd call them anti-Catholic Blaine amendments in their

state constitutions and these have served to keep public funds from flowing to

religious schools. So Ilia, what was the issue here in the Espinosa case?

Yeah, these bland amendments typically are called no aid provisions and for that matter there are some states that have

similar provisions that don't date to the Blaine era but in any in any event it

prevents or it's supposed to prevent either the direct or indirect funding of religious exercise, schools, institutions, organizations.

In any event, Montana set up a school choice tax credit program that is people could donate to this

scholarship program take a tax credit for that and then parents the families that

qualify for these scholarships can then use them for various schools.

The Montana Revenue Department, like their Treasury, declined or disqualified religious schools from being eligible to receive these parents

scholarship monies.

And then on appeal, when Mrs Espinoza, who works three jobs and wants to send her kids to a good school, when she challenged this

challenge this determination that she couldn't use that for a religious school

on appeal, the Montana Supreme Court said,

okay, look, this action might not be proper.

...