Protecting the Constitution from the People: Juricentric Restrictions on Section Five Power

Not available Copyright Information: All rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. Contact the author or original publisher for any necessary permissions. eScholarship is not the copyright owner for deposited works. Learn more at http://www.escholarship.org/help_copyright.html#reuse Protecting the Constitution from the People: Juricentric Restrictions on Section Five Power ROBERT C. POST* REVA B. SIEGEL** “America is its Constitution.” In a recent string of decisions invalidating federal civil rights legislation, the Supreme Court has repeated the simple but powerful message: “The Constitution belongs to the courts.” Beginning from the premise that Congress’s “authority is limited to those powers enumerated in the Constitution,” the decisions emphasize that it is the Court’s special responsibility to mark where Congress “has exceeded its constitutional bounds.” The Court has insisted that Congress’s enumerated powers be circumscribed by “judicially enforceable outer limits,” even at the cost of considerable “legal uncertainty.” These decisions break with the judicial practice of the last half century, when the Court employed doctrines of deference to vindicate democratic values in constitutional interpretation, defining the scope of federal power in terms that gave great weight to Congress’s judgments about the nation’s needs and interests. No longer does the Court emphasize the respect due to the constitutional judgments of a coequal and democratically elected branch of government. Now it claims that only the judiciary can † Copyright 2002 by Robert C. Post and Reva B. Siegel. All rights reserved. We are grateful for the advice and critique of good colleagues and friends, including Bruce Ackerman, Jesse Choper, Michael Dorf, Mel Eisenberg, Owen Fiss, Willy Forbath, Phil Frickey, Barry Friedman, Howard Gillman, Jim Gordley, Linda Greenhouse, Stephen Griffin, Ian Haney-Lopez, Jill Hasday, Larry Kramer, Linda Krieger, Marty Lederman, Sandy Levinson, Ira C. Lupu, John Manning, Rachel Moran, William Marshall, David McGowan, Paul Mishkin, William Nelson, and Sambhav Sankar, and Jed Shugerman. * Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall). ** Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School. 1. Sign on antiwar protest wall, Point Reyes Station, California, Jan. 27, 2002. 2. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 566 (1995). 3. United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598, 607 (2000). For the Court’s decisions limiting congressional power under the Commerce Clause, see United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000); United States v. Lopez , 514 U.S. 549 (1995). Cf. Solid Waste Agency of N. Cook County v. U. S. Army Corps of Eng’rs, 531 U.S. 159 (2001); Jones v. United States, 529 U.S. 848 (2000). For the Court’s decisions limiting congressional power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356 (2001); United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000); Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, 528 U.S. 62 (2000); Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank , 527 U.S. 627 (1999); City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997). 4. Morrison, 529 U.S. at 610; Lopez, 514 U.S. at 566. 5. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 566. The Court warns that “any possible benefit from eliminating this ‘legal uncertainty’ would be at the expense of the Constitution’s system of enumerated powers.” Id. Evidently the Court has been more determined to remind Congress that courts enforce constitutional limits on national power than to identify the exact nature of such limits. 2 INDIANA LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 78:1 define the meaning of the Constitution. These remarkable decisions reflect not only the objective of protecting states from an overreaching national government, which sounds in federalism, but also the distinct theme of separation of powers. At issue is the “cardinal rule of constitutional law” that “ever since Marbury this Court has remained the ultimate expositor of the constitutional text.” The Court has been particularly skeptical of Congress’s efforts to exercise its power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment “to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” Congressional lawmaking under Section 5 raises especially knotty issues of separation of powers, because Section 5 legislation necessarily involves congressional judgments about the meaning of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Rehnquist Court has increasingly come to regard Section 5 legislation as challenging the Court’s ultimate authority to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment. In a series of cases that began with City of Boerne v. Flores in 1997, and that culminated two Terms ago in Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, the Court has imposed ever more restrictive conditions on Congress’s ability to exercise its Section 5 power. These restrictions reflect the Court’s growing apprehension that Congress may be playing too large “a role in interpreting and applying the Constitution.” The decisions express with growing clarity the Court’s claim to an exclusive authority to interpret the Constitution. This article explores the understanding of the Constitution that underlies the Court’s claim to such exclusive authority. The Court’s recent decisions invalidating Section 5 legislation invoke the Constitution as a document that speaks only to courts. We call this vision the “juricentric Constitution.” The juricentric Constitution imagines the judiciary as the exclusive guardian of the Constitution. It allows the Court’s coordinate branches to enforce the Constitution only insofar as they enforce judicial interpretations of constitutional meaning, an approach that radically circumscribes Congress’s power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court justifies these restrictions in a way that fundamentally misdescribes American constitutional culture, as we show by examining constitutional practice during the closing decades of the twentieth century, when the Court regularly looked to Congress to anchor and orient its constitutional judgments. We advance this argument in three stages. Part I of this Article discusses the recent decision of Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, which most fully exemplifies the Court’s vision of the juricentric Constitution. Garrett subjects Section 5 legislation to close scrutiny, prohibiting Congress from exercising its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment unless it first documents conduct that a court might find represents a pattern of constitutional violations. By requiring Congress to act like a court before exercising its constitutional authority to enact Section 5 legislation, Garrett imposes a substantial and improper burden on congressional power to enforce civil rights. Garrett imposes 6. Morrison, 529 U.S. at 616 n.7. 7. U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 5. 8. 521 U.S. 507 (1997). 9. 531 U.S. 356 (2001). 10. Morrison, 529 U.S. at 616 n.7. 11. 531 U.S. 356 (2001). 2003 ] JURICENTRIC RESTRICTIONS ON SECTION FIVE POWER 3 this burden in order to prevent Congress from exercising independent interpretive authority. In Part II, we analyze the Court’s justification for this burden. The Court believes that Congress threatens the Court’s role as the “ultimate expositor of the constitutional text” when Congress apprehends constitutional violations in ways that differ from the Court’s. The Court thus sets up a sharp opposition between its own “legal” constructions of the Constitution and Congress’s “political” understandings, which it uses to justify excluding the political branches of government from matters of constitutional interpretation. The dichotomy is false, however, because the Court’s own authority to interpret the Constitution has both legal and political dimensions. As the history of both the New Deal and the Second Reconstruction illustrate, the Court must engage in a continual dialogue with the political understandings of the nation in order effectively to exercise its own constitutional authority. In Part III, we explore historical alternatives to the Rehnquist Court’s vision of the juricentric Constitution. In the 1960s, and for decades thereafter, the Court forcefully defended its prerogative to declare the meaning of the Constitution and simultaneously constructed doctrine that encouraged Congress to exercise its Section 5 power. The major civil rights statutes of the Second Reconstruction were enacted within this constitutional environment. The Court upheld this legislation on grounds that deliberately ambiguated the exact relationship between Section 5 power and the Court’s own interpretations of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ambiguity established the possibility of a lively and consequential dialogue between the Court’s legal interpretation of the Constitution and the constitutional ideals democratically embraced by the nation. Although the Rehnquist Court is certainly not obliged to preserve these constitutional arrangements, we argue that its recent decisions, exemplified by Garrett, are fundamentally indifferent to the subtle but fundamental interconnections between the constitutional dimensions of our political life and the democratic dimensions of our constitutional culture. Garrett’s dissenting Justices passionately voice such concerns, but in the end this is a question to which Congress itself must speak.