Opinion ID: 110076
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Supremacy Clause

Text: Under § 1343 (3), Congress has created federal jurisdiction of any civil action authorized by law to redress the deprivation under color of state law of any right, privilege or immunity secured [1] by the Constitution of the United States or [2] by any Act of Congress providing for equal rights of citizens or of all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States. Claimants correctly point out that the first prepositional phrase can be fairly read to describe rights secured by the Supremacy Clause. For even though that Clause is not a source of any federal rights, it does secure federal rights by according them priority whenever they come in conflict with state law. [29] In that sense all federal rights, whether created by treaty, by statute, or by regulation, are secured by the Supremacy Clause. In Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 U. S. 111, the Court was confronted with an analogous choice between two interpretations of the statute defining the jurisdiction of three-judge district courts. [30] The comprehensive language of that statute, 28 U. S. C. § 2281 (1970 ed.), [31] could have been broadly read to encompass statutory claims secured by the Supremacy Clause or narrowly read to exclude claims that involve no federal constitutional provision except that Clause. After acknowledging that the broader reading was consistent not only with the statutory language but also with the policy of the statute, the Court accepted the more restrictive reading. Its reasoning is persuasive and applicable to the problems confronting us in this case. This restrictive view of the application of § 2281 is more consistent with a discriminating reading of the statute itself than is the first and more embracing interpretation. The statute requires a three-judge court in order to restrain the enforcement of a state statute `upon the ground of the unconstitutionality of such statute.' Since all federal actions to enjoin a state enactment rest ultimately on the Supremacy Clause, the words `upon the ground of the unconstitutionality of such statute' would appear to be superfluous unless they are read to exclude some types of such injunctive suits. For a simple provision prohibiting the restraint of the enforcement of any state statute except by a three-judge court would manifestly have sufficed to embrace every such suit whatever its particular constitutional ground. It is thus quite permissible to read the phrase in question as one of limitation, signifying a congressional purpose to confine the three-judge court requirement to injunction suits depending directly upon a substantive provision of the Constitution, leaving cases of conflict with a federal statute (or treaty) to follow their normal course in a single-judge court. Swift & Co. v. Wickham, supra, at 126-127 (footnotes omitted). Just as the phrase in § 2281upon the ground of the unconstitutionality of such statutewould have been superfluous unless read as a limitation on three-judge-court jurisdiction, so is it equally clear that the entire reference in § 1343 (3) to rights secured by an Act of Congress would be unnecessary if the earlier reference to constitutional claims embraced those resting solely on the Supremacy Clause. More importantly, the additional language which describes a limited category of Acts of Congressthose providing for equal rights of citizensplainly negates the notion that jurisdiction over all statutory claims had already been conferred by the preceding reference to constitutional claims. Thus, while we recognize that there is force to claimants' argument that the remedial purpose of the civil rights legislation supports an expansive interpretation of the phrase secured by the Constitution, it would make little sense for Congress to have drafted the statute as it did if it had intended to confer jurisdiction over every conceivable federal claim against a state agent. In order to give meaning to the entire statute as written by Congress, we must conclude that an allegation of incompatibility between federal and state statutes and regulations does not, in itself, give rise to a claim secured by the Constitution within the meaning of § 1343 (3).