The Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 on whether to approve the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school Thursday, leaving intact a lower ruling that voided the Oklahoma school’s contract.
“The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court,” the court wrote in its one-sentence, unsigned opinion.
Only eight justices sat for the case, since Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused.
The decision lets stand a ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court rejecting the bid to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which spurred a major constitutional battle over the role of religion in state-funded education.
The deadlocked opinion from the nation’s highest court landed swiftly, just weeks after the justices heard the case at the end of April.
It marks the culmination of a multiyear, high-profile legal battle over religious rights that began after the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board approved St. Isidore’s contract.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond (R) led the fight against the school, bringing the case directly to the state’s top court and winning.
Both the charter school board and St. Isidore then appealed to the nation’s top court, saying the opinion was “riddled with missteps.”
James Campbell, the attorney who argued on behalf of the charter school board, said in a statement that Thursday’s decision was “disappointing” but stressed the court could still return to the issue in the future.
“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer,” Campbell said.
At the crux of the dispute was whether the school could be considered a state actor.
The school argued its case was no different than recent ones from Maine, Montana and Missouri, where the justices said state programs that fund private education cannot carve out religious schools.
Drummond’s office asserted the dispute fell into another line of Supreme Court precedent, where the court has long held that states can require their public schools to be secular.
“The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of my position that we should not allow taxpayer funding of radical Islamic schools here in Oklahoma,” Drummond said in a statement. “I am proud to have fought against this potential cancer in our state, and I will continue upholding the law, protecting our Christian values and defending religious liberty.”
The court’s opinion does not provide reasoning or disclose how the individual justices voted.
But at oral arguments, four of the court’s conservatives appeared sympathetic to the school’s contentions, while the court’s three liberal justices appeared to lean toward Drummond’s side. That would leave Chief Justice Roberts as the swing vote.
Barrett did not publicly explain her recusal from the case, but court-watchers believe it stems from her close friendship with Nicole Garnett, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, whose religious liberty clinic represented St. Isidore.
The decision was one of two opinions handed down by the Supreme Court on Thursday.
In the other case, the court unanimously sided with the federal government in a wire fraud case it brought against Stamatios Kousisis and Alpha Painting & Construction over contracts Pennsylvania’s Transportation Department awarded them for painting projects in Philadelphia.
The contracts required Alpha to include disadvantaged businesses as part of its work, which the company falsely claimed it was. Kousisis and the company argued the allegations against them, which relied on what is known as the “fraudulent inducement” theory, are not covered by the federal wire fraud statute, so the charges should be dismissed.
“The fraudulent-inducement theory is consistent with both the text of the wire fraud statute and our precedent interpreting it,” Barrett wrote in the court’s opinion.
Updated at 11:48 a.m. EDT
