The Supreme Court soon could consider whether to hear an appeal of a lower court's controversial ruling that it is unconstitutional for public school students to recite the phrase ''under God'' in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Last June's 2-1 ruling by a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals touched off a political uproar.
Friday, the full 24-judge bench of the court based in San Francisco turned down a Bush administration request to rehear the case. If the ruling is not stayed, or postponed, it takes effect next Monday. Officials at the Sacramento-area Elk Grove Unified School District said students would not recite the Pledge starting this morning.
Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow sued the district over alleged violations of his daughter's rights.
The Justice Department, which joined California, Congress and others in asking the appeals court to reconsider its June ruling, may ask the nation's highest court to reverse the decision.
Judges Alfred Goodwin and Stephen Reinhardt, who wrote the widely criticized 2-1 opinion, rewrote it Friday to narrow its scope. That may complicate the legal picture.
The amended ruling tosses out earlier language invalidating the act of Congress that in 1954 added ''under God'' to the 111-year-old Pledge.
Now, the appeals court leaves the federal law intact but strikes down the Elk Grove school district's policy of teacher-led Pledge recitations. Citing a line of Supreme Court decisions that have disallowed organized prayer in schools, the opinion says the school district ''impermissibly coerces a religious act.''
The two judges issued their rewritten opinion after the defendants failed to persuade a 13-judge majority of the full 9th Circuit bench to order that the case be reargued.
Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, one of seven judges who favored a rehearing, said in a 19-page dissent that Goodwin and Reinhardt may have trimmed their holding ''in an effort to avoid ultimate Supreme Court review.''
Under the new opinion, O'Scannlain says, the Pledge is no longer ''unconstitutional for everybody'' but only for the 9.6 million public school students and their teachers in the nine Western states covered by the appeals circuit.
Even so, O'Scannlain says, Goodwin and Reinhardt are wrong in saying that reciting the Pledge is prohibited by the First Amendment, which forbids government-established religion. Reciting the Pledge is a ''patriotic act,'' he says.
Suggesting that the government will take Newdow vs. U.S. Congress to the Supreme Court, Attorney General John Ashcroft promised to ''defend the ability of Americans to defend their patriotism through the time-honored tradition of voluntarily reciting the Pledge.''
There is no certainty that the Supreme Court will vote to hear the case.
One factor that may prompt the nine justices to review the 9th Circuit ruling: It conflicts with a decision in 1992 by the 7th Circuit in Chicago that upholds the Pledge. The high court often, but not always, resolves conflicts among lower federal courts.
If the Supreme Court takes the case, there is a strong possibility it will view the Pledge more favorably than the 9th Circuit. Though the high court has never been presented directly with the propriety of ''under God'' in the Pledge, several justices have indicated in unrelated cases that they see the Pledge as promoting patriotism, not religion.
Dissenting in the 9th Circuit's 2-1 ruling, Judge Ferdinand Fernandez noted that five justices -- a majority of the Supreme Court -- have made past comments that ''under God'' and similar religious references in public life carry no constitutional dangers.
In a case on another issue in 1985, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, ''Reciting the Pledge may be no more of a religious exercise than the reading aloud of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.''