EEOC's judge-less warrant to Catholic hospital is sign of what's to come

The EEOC issued an administrative subpoena to a Catholic hospital system that fired one employee under its no-fault attendance policy. The warrant, which demanded information of all terminations by the faith-based nonprofit healthcare provider, was upheld by a federal court under ridiculously non-existent Fourth Amendment standards. Trinity Healthcare, a nonprofit Catholic healthcare system with 86 hospitals nationally, fired Simore Hasan. The EEOC charged Trinity with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, and demanded information about all its employees who had used up their Family Medical Leave time and were terminated.

Trinity argued that Hasan's firing did not justify the burdensome and expensive process of complying with the EEOC's administrative subpoena for such other terminations of employees, plus those were irrelevant to Hasan's case. Under the non-existent Fourth Amendment standards that have developed for these warrants issued unilaterally by bureaucrats, a federal court in Indiana rolled over for the EEOC. The message to all employers: firing one employee opens you up to a judge-less warrant from the federal government. As reported at Employment Law Daily, "The employer argued that, because the information sought included the identity of the individuals who were not similarly situated, the information was not relevant to the employee’s case." But under the lack of Fourth Amendment standards for these judge-less bureaucrat warrants, including no need to establish probable cause, the court was "unswayed by the employer’s argument that the other employees were not similarly situated to the employee because she was not fired for violating the attendance policy." The May 11 court order in the case, EEOC v. Trinity Health Corp., is assuredly a sign of what's to come as the government expands its jurisdiction over employment matters, especially for faith-based employers. People who don't see the danger of these judge-less warrants by which the federal and state governments violate the Fourth Amendment, often to punish those who disagree with big-government policies, are in for a rude awakening, especially as government continues its assault on religious freedom.