There wasn’t a lot of suspense going into Monday’s Supreme Court argument in Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission. This Court is typically very sympathetic to Christian organizations that seek religious exemptions from the law, even as it shows less sympathy for other religious groups such as Muslims.

As the name of the Catholic Charities case suggests, this case involves a Catholic organization that seeks a religious exemption from a state law — in this case, Wisconsin’s law requiring most employers to pay taxes that fund unemployment benefits for their workers. After Monday’s argument, it appears that a lopsided majority of the Court will vote to give Catholic Charities that exemption.

All six of the Court’s Republicans, plus Democratic Justice Elena Kaga,n seemed to favor that outcome, and the Court’s decision could potentially be unanimous.

That said, several of the justices, including Republicans Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did express concerns that there must be some limit on a business’s ability to exempt itself from the law if it claims that its operations are motivated by religion. Roberts, for example, asked whether a group of people who think it is a sin to eat meat could exempt themselves from taxes if they opened a vegetarian restaurant.

Similarly, Barrett noted at one point that there is a difference between a nonprofit charity and a for-profit business, suggesting that she may limit the scope of some religious exemptions to nonprofits.

The question of whether this Court will set some limit on when religiously motivated organizations can claim an exemption from the law is probably more important than the specific dispute before the justices in Catholic Charities. The Catholic Church claims that it maintains its own internal unemployment benefits system that “provides the same maximum weekly benefit rate as the State’s system.” So it........

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