The U.S. Supreme Court ducked yet another case involving religious exemptions and vaccine mandates on Monday. And Justice Neil Gorsuch and a few of his colleagues were not shy about voicing their frustrations about it.

In its latest order list, the high court revealed that it will not take up and hear arguments in Doe v. Hochul next term. The case involves a challenge brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by New York health care workers who were fired after choosing not to get the Covid shot due to their religious beliefs.

SCOTUS rules require that at least four justices must agree to hear a case before it can be considered by the full court. But according to Monday’s order list, only Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito were willing to hear the Doe case.

Writing on behalf of his fellow dissenters, Gorsuch noted how the district court and 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the plaintiffs’ lawsuit, with the latter opting not to “assess the reasonableness of the plaintiffs’ requested accommodations.” He further observed how the circuit court reasoned that granting their sought-after religious accomodations “would have imposed an ‘undue hardship’ on their employers because it ‘would have required the [employers] to violate the state [vaccine] regulation’ and ‘subjected the [employers] to financial penalties or a suspension or revocation of their operating licenses.’”

“Soon after it decided this case, the Second Circuit reiterated its understanding of Title VII’s undue hardship defense, holding that ‘an accommodation that would require an employer to violate’ a state law necessarily ‘imposes an undue hardship’ — and does so even when the state law is ‘unconstitutional as applied’ to the plaintiff,” Gorsuch wrote. But “I harbor serious doubts about the Second Circuit’s rule.”

The Trump appointee went on to dissect the 2nd Circuit’s holding and lay out the legal rationale disputing it. More notably, however, he took to task the significance of the case and its importance to health care workers and other Americans across the country.

While noting that the Covid outbreak is over, Gorsuch pointed out how health care workers were heralded as “courageous[]” for “serv[ing] on the front line during a pandemic only then to lose their jobs” as the result of such mandates. He subsequently warned that, if the 2nd Circuit’s rule is permitted to dominate the country’s legal landscape, “civil rights protected by federal law will give way whenever a contrary state law — even an unconstitutional state law — is in play.”

“Put simply, addressing this case is well worth our time — and correcting its error should have been an easy business,” Gorsuch wrote.

Subtly jabbing his colleagues for their unwillingness to consider the case, the justice highlighted how the high court was willing to “summarily reverse[] a similar decision” involving Louisiana courts — which “held that a state statute barred a plaintiff’s federal claims” — not that long ago. In quoting from that decision, he reasoned that “[i]t would have been the simplest thing to repeat that same message here,” or, if some agree with the 2nd Circuit, to have “scheduled this case for argument.”

“Given the Court’s refusal to follow either of those courses today, I can only hope that lower courts will more carefully consider in future cases whether a defendant can successfully mount a Title VII undue hardship defense simply by pointing to a state-law mandate,” Gorsuch wrote. “I hope, too, that one day soon this Court will choose to settle the question so that other Americans seeking to vindicate their civil rights do not suffer the same fate as those now before us.”

The case involving Covid vaccine mandates is one of several that the Supreme Court has declined to take up in recent years.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics and RealClearHealth. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood