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Damon Landor is a Louisiana man who follows the Rastafarian faith. For two decades, he followed the Nazarite vow, a promise not to cut his hair. When he was imprisoned in 2020, he was concerned that he might be forced to get a haircut. So he printed out a physical copy of a binding appeals court decision from 2017 that prohibited prisons from compelling Rastafarian inmates to cut their hair. When Landor handed the ruling to correctional officers, however, they threw it in the trash, handcuffed him to a chair, held him down, and shaved his head anyway. He later sued, alleging a violation of his free exercise rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a landmark federal law.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court nixed Landor’s lawsuit by a 6–3 vote along partisan lines, holding that he could not sue the guards who maliciously violated his religious liberty. Curiously, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion did not deny that these guards ran afoul of RLUIPA, which authorizes lawsuits against correctional institutions that fail to use the “least restrictive means” of restricting free exercise. Instead, he held that the guards had not “consented” to be sued for damages, so Landor could not recover a dime from them. In reaching this conclusion, Gorsuch did maximum damage to congressional power, undermining its authority to impose meaningful regulations under the Constitution’s spending clause. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent, the blast radius of his decision could also reach “civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more,” transforming federal directives into meek suggestions.

Given Gorsuch’s ostentatious reverence for religious freedom, one might have expected him to give full-throated support to the inmate in Tuesday’s........

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