How did Justice Ginsburg interpret Congress’s purpose in passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?

In her dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that the majority fundamentally misconstrued the purpose of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

Ginsburg maintained that Congress’s sole intention in passing the RFRA was to restore the compelling-interest "balancing test" that the Supreme Court had utilized prior to its 1990 decision in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith. Under this test, generally applicable laws that burdened religious practice were unconstitutional unless they served a compelling governmental interest.

According to Ginsburg, the RFRA was designed only to codify this pre-Smith constitutional rule. She contended that Congress did not intend to expand the scope of religious-accommodation claims to include for-profit corporations, an entity type never previously recognized as eligible for such exemptions. Furthermore, she noted that the inclusion of a "least-restrictive-means" standard in the RFRA did not signal a departure from precedent, as Congress viewed that standard as an implicit, pre-existing component of the balancing test that the act simply made explicit.1