In an opinion Monday, Judge Cronan dismissed a challenge brought by a coalition of interfaith advocacy groups to the composition of President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission (the “RLC”), rejecting arguments that the fourteen-member body—which includes Evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish members but no Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, or Buddhist voices—violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s (“FACA”) requirement that advisory committees be “fairly balanced.”
Plaintiffs argued that the RLC’s membership reflects a “Judeo-Christian framework” that excludes their perspectives, and sought to enjoin the RLC from publishing its forthcoming report on the state of religious liberty in America. Judge Cronan found that the organizational plaintiffs had standing to sue, based on the risk that an unrepresentative RLC would produce policy recommendations that undercut their advocacy work. But he rejected the underlying claim on the merits, applying what he described as the “highly deferential” review courts have historically given to FACA’s balance requirement. In doing so, he “reject[ed] the premise that there is a single ‘Judeo-Christian’ viewpoint”:
Given the wide diversity of Christian and Jewish beliefs, there is no reason to think that an Evangelical member would ‘balance out’ a Catholic member any less than a Buddhist member would. And if an unavoidable reality of a fourteen-member commission is that some groups will be left out, Plaintiffs do not justify why leaving out non-‘Judeo Christian’ religions is any more imbalanced than leaving out religions within that group.
The Court was also skeptical of where plaintiffs’ theory would lead, given that, for example, there are only around 70,000 Sikh Americans nationwide:
[D]oes President Trump need to appoint adherents from every single religious denomination in America? . . . [W]ould Plaintiffs’ position suggest that the President must employ a quota system to select members for a committee on an issue of national importance? . . . Fortunately, these questions need not be asked because the RLC must only be “fairly” balanced—not perfectly balanced.