In January, the John Roberts-led Supreme Court will hear arguments about a now-shuttered school "choice" program in Montana. As per usual, the program was intended to siphon students and money away from public schools toward private versions: Specifically, all but one of the 13 participating private schools were explicitly religious.
As explained by The New York Times, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the state can't keep the program because funding religious schools is explicitly barred by the state constitution. The Supreme Court is now taking up the case to decide if Montana should be ... forced? ... to restart the now-ended experiment because reasons, that's why. So get ready for that.
The court seldom seems to weigh in on a case and superemphasize that a lower court's ruling was correct and fine, so we can take from this that the court's conservatives will see a case to be made that Montana residents are required to support individual religious programs, whether they want to or not, nullifying that provision of the state’s constitution. The court has inched more toward the notion that separation of church and state requires the state to fund explicitly religious versions of secular institutions if those religious groups request it, which is always an extremely popular argument on the right, until the Church of Satan shows up asking for the same check.
At that point, conservative lawmakers often suddenly decide those rights or programs shouldn't exist after all.
This is a bit of a baffling case for the Supreme Court to take on, because there doesn't seem to be any obvious thing to reverse. The state is not discriminating against religious schools over nonreligious ones, because the Montana Supreme Court ended the program for all schools, religious or not. And it seems bizarre to think that the same Supreme Court that has been vaporous about big government overreach would demand that a closed program be reopened.
Or not. It's impossible to say.
What we will not be hearing about, in whatever decision emerges: the sanctity of "states' rights" in making these decisions, rather than the states being forced into compliance by federal lawmakers and activist judges. We will also not hear about the dangers of creeping Sharia, of fundamentalist religious extremists establishing madrassas bent on indoctrinating American children. We will hear that whatever you think the separation between church and state means, you are wrong, the prior Supreme Courts were wrong, and anyone to the left of Force Projection Scalia is not just wrong but probably a communist for thinking otherwise.
Other than that, we don't know. It's entirely within the realm of the possible that two decades from now, a good chunk of American schoolchildren will attend hard-right schools teaching tots that womenfolk ought to be submissive, dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to make Donald Trump look bad, and sex is a holy sacrament between a man and his freshly cleaned assault rifle—all paid for by your tax dollars and mine because screw you, that's why. We might get there an inch at a time, because it is very, very hilariously important to Chief Justice John Roberts that he sell himself as nonpartisan even as he upends the last hundred years of court precedents with a "Well, maybe just this once" look on his face, but that seems to be where the path is leading.