Gowdy: Obama lied to women to win

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) accused President Obama of misleading women in order to win reelection by advertising a contraceptive mandate in ObamaCare that he knew would be struck down by the Supreme Court.

“He knows he’s not going to win this at the Supreme Court, but he won in 2012, and that was his real objective,” Gowdy said in an appearance on Fox News’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”

{mosads}As ObamaCare has been implemented, a provision requiring employer-provided health insurance to offer free birth control has met with fierce opposition. While churches are exempted from the rule, religiously based organizations and for-profit corporations are not.

Several companies, including Hobby Lobby, have sued, claiming that the forced provision of birth control violates their owners’ religious beliefs and is illegal under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as well as the First Amendment.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Hobby Lobby’s case after the company succeeded in winning an injunction against the mandate in July.

Gowdy predicted that the Supreme Court would decisively strike down the mandate as illegal and claimed that Obama was equally aware this was the likely outcome.

Gowdy pointed towards the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, in which the court unanimously ruled that the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise prohibits the government from applying anti-discrimination laws to the selection of religious leaders.

“It was nine to nothing in a religious liberty case,” Gowdy said. “The president knows he’s not going to win this case.”