By Yehudit Garmaise

   Last night at midnight, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to grant the requests of shuls and churches in New York to lift COVID-related attendance limits.

   While Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was still on the court, justices had turned down similar requests, but now, thanks to President Trump’s recent appointment of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barret gave the conservatives a 6 to 3 majority. 

   Although, predictably, Chief Justice John G. Roberts and the three other liberal justices did not agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling last night, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, another Trump appointee, criticized the liberal justices’ earlier opinions on setting limits in houses of worship, as he said that giving authority to elected officials “takes judicial modesty too far.”

    “It is time-past time-to make plan that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is not world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops, but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques,” Associate Justice Gorsuch wrote.

   Ever since Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced restrictions on the maximum attendance in houses of worship in October, Agudath Israel and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn have been challenging those restrictions in lower courts. 

   “The restrictions have eliminated the ability of many Jews to worship on important religious holy days,” Agudath Israel’s lawyers wrote. “None of this is necessary to protect public heath.”

   The Roman Catholic Diocese added, “The pandemic alone cannot justify overbroad, untailored closure orders of indefinite duration directed at all ‘houses of worship’ that in another time would plainly be found to violate the Constitution.”