Lawyers for Grace Bible Fellowship in the Denver suburb of Brighton were asking the Supreme Court to take their case challenging the state's authority to shut down churches in a health crisis. But on Wednesday the High Court said it would not take up the case.
Attorney Daniel Schmid of Liberty Counsel defended many churches during the COVID pandemic. While his firm isn't involved in this case, he tells AFN one cannot read too much into the court's denial of "cert."
"They have explicitly stated that a denial of cert doesn't indicate any opinion or resolution on the merit of the lower court's decision," the attorney explains.
Schmid says the Supreme Court has already ruled seven times that a governor does not have the right to mandate that a church shut down, but Grace Fellowship was hoping its case would kill the actual public health statute that gave the governor that power.
"The [public health] statute that authorizes him to issue that mandate to begin with … is unconstitutional because it's written so broadly that it allowed him to shut down churches," he tells AFN.
Schmid shares that it was one of the highlights of his career to defend churches in court during the pandemic. "Because there was a disease going around," he contends. "The government thought they could inure to themselves the power to shut down the church. That was staggering to me that that could happen. It still blows my mind."
He says his legal group is still litigating vaccine mandates from the pandemic. "There's still work to do, but we're still engaged in that work even to this day," he states.
