Now the Trump administration has played the Supreme Court justices for chumps. The accommodation, carefully worked out and fought over, is a thing of the past. In its place is a flat-out exemption, with no requirement that women be offered any alternative route to coverage. “There are multiple federal, state, and local programs that provide free or subsidized contraceptives for low-income women,” the administration explained airily, noting that “many forms of contraception are available for around $50 per month.” Further, “As the government is under no constitutional obligation to fund contraception, even more so may the government refrain from requiring private citizens to cover contraception for other citizens in violation of their religious beliefs.”

These statements call to mind a particularly callous old Supreme Court case, United States v. Kras, in which a man with an income of a few hundred dollars a month and unpaid bills of $6,000 tried to file for bankruptcy but ran up against the $50 filing fee. He challenged the constitutionality of the fee and lost. “There is no constitutional right to obtain a discharge of one’s debts in bankruptcy,” Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote for the 5-to-4 majority, observing that the fee could be paid over time for about $2 a month — less, he pointed out, than the price of a movie. (This was 1973.) Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote a stinging dissent that accused the majority of having no understanding of how poor people actually live. “The desperately poor almost never go to see a movie, which the majority seems to believe is an almost weekly activity,” he wrote.

The administration says the average price of a year’s birth control is $584. That’s probably low (an IUD can cost $1,000 up front, but the administration amortizes that cost over the five-year life of the product) but that’s not really the point. Others have called attention to the administration’s truly astonishing effort to show that birth control really isn’t all that important and may even be counterproductive. Statements like the one on page 46 of the religious exemption document, “Contraception’s association with positive health effects might also be partially offset by an association with negative health effects,” are hogwash, the result of careful cherry-picking of the literature, some of it quite dubious. One cited article from the Ave Maria Law Review by Michael J. New, a well-known anti-abortion activist, insists that there is “little evidence that increasing the use of contraception reduces the unintended pregnancy rate.”

The real point is that the Trump administration has outsourced a crucially important building block of national health care policy, enabling a fanatical fringe of the Republican base to exercise raw political power, clothed in religiosity under cover of the grandiloquently named Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That 1993 law, passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and signed by President Bill Clinton, is the object of growing buyer’s remorse on the part of liberal and moderate Americans — and should be.

To fully appreciate what happened last week, it’s important to understand what happened in the years following the Hobby Lobby decision. The Obama administration did as the Supreme Court said and offered the accommodation as Justice Alito described it. But a group of religiously affiliated nonprofits, mainly but not exclusively Catholic-run schools, colleges, nursing homes and other social service organizations, refused to accept it. Not good enough, they said, claiming that they would still be complicit in the sin of contraception, even if the employees’ receipt of the benefit required no action on the employer’s part beyond notifying the government that it was opting out. Only the complete exemption offered to actual churches would suffice. (It’s hard to understand how these employers justify giving their employees a paycheck that might be used to buy birth control, but I guess that’s a private matter.) The nonprofits took the Obama administration to court and lost almost everywhere.

When seven cases reached the Supreme Court last year, consolidated under the name Zubik v. Burwell, the justices asked both sides whether they would accept an arrangement in which no opt-out notification was necessary. Yes, both said, resulting in the court’s decision to send the cases back to the lower courts to work out the details. But that was not to be. The administration insisted that no matter how the opt-out was handled, women must still be able to get “seamless” contraception coverage, that is, without having to apply for a separate plan and search for a doctor willing to accept the coverage. The nonprofits held fast and would not agree. The impasse lasted until the end of the Obama administration.