Attorneys at the Department of Justice requested a 60-day extension to a holding period that was placed on challenges to a contraceptive health mandate created under the Affordable Care Act.

“There is a whole series of related cases,” Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal and educational institute, told LifeZette in a phone conversation Monday.

The Supreme Court sent all the cases back to the lower courts.

Christian and other religious universities took issue with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations under Obamacare that required nonprofits to notify the government if they objected to providing contraceptive health care coverage to employees. “The government would then order the nonprofits’ insurers to provide the coverage as part of the employee policy, at no cost to the employer,” as The Atlantic reported in 2016.

The Supreme Court decided the related case, Zubik v. Burwell, in May 2016. “Hundreds of religious entities were affected by the contraceptive mandate,” Rassbach told LifeZette. “The Supreme Court sent all the cases back to the lower courts in May of 2016.”

Related: High Court to Hear HHS Mandate

Yet the litigation process continues.

“During that interval, there has been a presidential election, a new President inaugurated, both a new Attorney General and a new Secretary of Health and Human Services sworn in, and a new Supreme Court Justice confirmed by the Senate,” Rassbach wrote in a status report filed April 20 in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

“There have also been four orders issued by this Court continuing the stay of this appeal … The government’s position in this case has also changed dramatically — both before and after the events described above — in ways that make any continuation of the government’s appeal untenable,” Rassbach continued.

“The government’s been asking for extra time to figure out what it’s going to do with the cases,” Rassback told LifeZette.

All of the cases around the country are now in a holding pattern, Rassbach said. “Our clients also don’t want to linger in limbo forever,” he said.

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Rassbach’s law firm represents both East Texas Baptist University and Houston Baptist University.

“Both [of these universities] are Christian liberal arts colleges in Texas, both hold faith central to their educational missions, and both are standing up to the HHS mandate, which forces them to violate their conscience or pay crippling fines,” according to the Becket Fund.

The case suspension was set to expire Monday, yet the government requested an extension on the stay.

“From our perspective, we’ve been in almost six years of litigation under this mandate,” Rassbach said. “It’s time to get it wrapped up.”

The government should not have forced religious nonprofits — such as the Little Sisters of the Poor — into distributing contraceptives, Rassbach said. “It would be good to get an ‘I’m sorry’ from the government.”