Opinion ID: 613270
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Limiting Broad Dicta of Early Cases

Text: Branson should be read in the context of the modern trend to limit the scope of the political subdivision standing doctrine. Branson interpreted two early Supreme Court decisions, Trenton v. New Jersey, 262 U.S. 182, 43 S.Ct. 534, 67 L.Ed. 937 (1923), and Williams v. Mayor of Baltimore, 289 U.S. 36, 53 S.Ct. 431, 77 L.Ed. 1015 (1933). These cases contain broad dicta suggesting that a municipality can never sue its parent state. In Trenton, the city claimed that a New Jersey statute imposing a fee on the city for withdrawing water from the Delaware River violated the Contract Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. See 262 U.S. at 183, 43 S.Ct. 534. The Court ruled for New Jersey, holding that [a] municipality is merely a department of the State, and the State may withhold, grant or withdraw powers and privileges as it sees fit. Id. at 187, 43 S.Ct. 534. Trenton relied on an earlier precedent, Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, 207 U.S. 161, 28 S.Ct. 40, 52 L.Ed. 151 (1907). In Hunter the Court approved Pennsylvania's right to annex the City of Allegheny into the City of Pittsburgh over Allegheny's objections based on the Contract Clause and the Due Process Clause. Id. at 179, 28 S.Ct. 40. After listing the powers of a state over its municipalities, the Court concluded that [i]n all these respects the State is supreme, and its legislative body, conforming its action to the state constitution, may do as it will, unrestrained by any provision of the constitution of the United States. Id. In Williams, the Court rejected an equal protection challenge to a Maryland statute exempting a railroad from local taxes. 289 U.S. at 40, 53 S.Ct. 431. Justice Cardozo explained that [a] municipal corporation ... has no privileges or immunities under the Federal Constitution which it may invoke in opposition to the will of its creator. Id. It would be difficult to square Branson's allowing a political subdivision to sue its parent state with the sweeping dicta of these cases. But the legal landscape changed between 1933 and 1998, and Branson was decided after the Supreme Court had taken a narrower view of these earlier decisions. The Supreme Court did not address political subdivision standing after Williams until Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339, 81 S.Ct. 125, 5 L.Ed.2d 110 (1960). In Gomillion, African-American citizens of Alabama sought to enjoin the mayor of Tuskegee and other local officials from enforcing a redistricting plan that, they argued, violated the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment. Id. at 340, 81 S.Ct. 125. The defendants, relying on Hunter, invoke[d] generalities expressing the State's unrestricted power  unlimited, that is, by the United States Constitution  to establish, destroy, or reorganize by contraction or expansion its political subdivisions, to wit, cities, counties, and other local units. Id. at 342, 81 S.Ct. 125. The Court, commenting on Hunter and Trenton, explained that the cases that have come before this Court regarding legislation by States dealing with their political subdivisions fall into two classes: (1) those in which it is claimed that the State, by virtue of the prohibition against impairment of the obligation of contract (Art. I, s 10) and of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, is without power to extinguish, or alter the boundaries of, an existing municipality; and (2) in which it is claimed that the State has no power to change the identity of a municipality whereby citizens of a pre-existing municipality suffer serious economic disadvantage. Id. at 343, 81 S.Ct. 125. [2] The Court determined that the earlier cases' precedent should be limited to the specific constitutional provisions that those cases addressed. See id. at 344, 81 S.Ct. 125. Justice Frankfurter stated for the Court that a correct reading of the seemingly unconfined dicta of Hunter and kindred cases is not that the State has plenary power to manipulate in every conceivable way, for every conceivable purpose, the affairs of its municipal corporations, but rather that the State's authority is unrestrained by the particular prohibitions of the Constitution considered in those cases. Id. The Court summarized its position: This line of authority conclusively shows that the Court has never acknowledged that the States have power to do as they will with municipal corporations regardless of consequences. Legislative control of municipalities, no less than other state power, lies within the scope of relevant limitations imposed by the United States Constitution. Id. at 344-45, 81 S.Ct. 125. [3] Gomillion was not a suit between a municipality and its parent state. But its interpretation of the cases that created the political subdivision standing doctrine is telling. The Court said that state legislative control of municipalities is subject to constitutional limitations. Under the Gomillion analysis, Hunter, Trenton, and Williams prevent political subdivision standing only when a municipality attempts to sue its parent state under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Contract Clause. Some of the circuits also have limited the broad dicta of the earlier cases. [4] The majority argues that the Supreme Court's language in Gomillion expressing skepticism about the political subdivision standing doctrine is dicta. But so is much of the language from Hunter, Trenton and Williams that created the political subdivision standing doctrine. With their dicta stripped, those cases hold that a municipality cannot bring suits against its parent state on Contract Clause, Due Process Clause, or Equal Protection Clause grounds. In determining whether a municipality may bring a dormant Commerce Clause claim, it is at least as helpful to examine the Supreme Court's dicta from 1960 as its dicta from 1907, 1923, and 1933, particularly because Gomillion spoke directly to the scope of the doctrine. Consistent with the trend reflected in Gomillion, in Board of Education of Central School District v. Allen, 392 U.S. 236, 88 S.Ct. 1923, 20 L.Ed.2d 1060 (1968), the Court reached the merits of an Establishment Clause challenge to a New York education statute brought by two local school boards against the state education commissioner of their parent state. The majority points to Allen 's reference to individual board members' personal stake in the case, Maj. Op. at 1260 (quoting Allen, 392 U.S. at 241 n. 5, 88 S.Ct. 1923), but the school boards, not their individual members, were the plaintiffs. What the Court did not do in Allen  and in any other case since 1933  is follow Trenton and Williams and deny political subdivision standing to a political subdivision. As Justices Marshall and White later said, Allen cannot be squared with a bar against political subdivisions' raising constitutional claims against their parent states. See City of S. Lake Tahoe v. Cal. Tahoe Reg'l Planning Agency, 449 U.S. 1039, 1042, 101 S.Ct. 619, 66 L.Ed.2d 502 (1980) (White, J., joined by Marshall, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). [5] The foregoing cases inform the different readings of Branson in this case. The majority reads Branson as a narrow exception to a broad prohibition of political subdivision standing. The dicta in early Supreme Court cases support this reading. But, as the majority acknowledges, courts have retreated from the absolutist gloss of the early cases. [6] Maj. Op. at 1259. Taken together, Gomillion and Allen suggest that courts should read the earlier political subdivision standing cases more narrowly than the broad dicta of the earlier cases. That is precisely what Branson did. [7]