Opinion ID: 746461
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Constitutionality of the CSRA

Text: 11 We review the district court's determination as to the constitutionality of a federal statute de novo. United States v. Wilson, 73 F.3d 675, 678 (7th Cir.1995). Black and Davis raise a number of constitutional concerns, first and foremost, that Congress has overstepped its Commerce Clause power in enacting the CSRA, which punishes the willful[ ] fail[ure] to pay a past due child support obligation with respect to a child who resides in another State. 18 U.S.C. § 228(a). Past due child support refers to any amount--(A) determined under a court order or an order of an administrative process pursuant to the law of a State to be due from a person for the support and maintenance of a child or of a child and the parent with whom the child is living; and (B) that has remained unpaid for a period of one year, or is greater than $5,000.... 18 U.S.C. § 228(d)(1). 12 Congress has expressly recognized that collecting past due child support obligations from out-of-state deadbeat parents has outgrown state enforcement mechanisms. In a report to accompany H.R. 1241 (the bill that would become the CSRA), the House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary noted that in 1989, $16.3 billion in child support payments were due, but only $11.2 billion were made. H.R.REP. No. 102-771, at 7 (1992). The Committee expressed concern that this deficit continues to average $5 billion annually. Id. It also found that statistics suggest that delinquent parents' chances for successfully avoiding support payments increase markedly when they cross state lines. Id. 13 At least forty-two states have made willful failure to pay child support a crime, punishable in some states by imprisonment for up to ten years, but the Committee noted that the ability of those states to enforce such laws outside their own boundaries is severely frustrated. Although most states have adopted the Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act (URESA), which includes provisions that provide for the extradition of interstate child support defendants and the processing of requests for enforcement of support orders, the Committee concluded that interstate extradition and enforcement in fact remains a tedious, cumbersome and slow method of collection. Id. at 7-8. On the day of the CSRA's passage in the House of Representatives, Congressman Charles Schumer stated: 14 The need for this legislation is clear.... Many of our States have done their best.... But the ability of those States to enforce such laws outside their own boundaries is hobbled by a labyrinth of extradition laws and snarls of red tape. As a result, skipping out on child support is one of the easiest crimes to get away with in America today. 15 138 C ONG. R EC. H7324-01 (daily ed. August 4, 1992) (emphasis added). With all of the above concerns in mind, Congress passed the CSRA on October 25, 1992. Challenges to the Act's constitutionality ensued. 16 Whether the CSRA is constitutional is an issue of first impression in this Circuit. At the outset of our discussion, we note that every circuit court that has addressed the issue has found the CSRA to be constitutional. See United States v. Crawford, 115 F.3d 1397, 1401 (8th Cir.1997); United States v. Bailey, 115 F.3d 1222, 1227 (5th Cir.1997); United States v. Johnson, 114 F.3d 476, 479-81 (4th Cir.1997); United States v. Parker, 108 F.3d 28, 29-31 (3d Cir.1997); United States v. Bongiorno, 106 F.3d 1027, 1030-33 (1st Cir.1997); United States v. Hampshire, 95 F.3d 999, 1001-04 (10th Cir.1996), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 753, 136 L.Ed.2d 690 (1997); United States v. Mussari, 95 F.3d 787, 790-91 (9th Cir.1996), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 1567, 137 L.Ed.2d 712 (1997); United States v. Sage, 92 F.3d 101, 104-07 (2d Cir.1996), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 784, 136 L.Ed.2d 727 (1997). Today, we follow their lead.
17 The Commerce Clause confers a plenary power upon Congress to regulate Commerce ... among the several States.... U.S. C ONST. art. I, § 8, cl. 3. The motive and purpose of a regulation of interstate commerce are matters for the legislative judgment upon the exercise of which the Constitution places no restriction and over which the courts are given no control. United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 115, 61 S.Ct. 451, 457, 85 L.Ed. 609 (1941). Congress' power under the Commerce Clause is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution. Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1, 196, 6 L.Ed. 23 (1824). Thus, judicial review in this area is limited and deferential. We need only ask whether Congress could have had a rational basis to support the exercise of its commerce power and whether the regulatory means chosen were 'reasonably adapted to the end permitted by the Constitution.'  United States v. Kenney, 91 F.3d 884, 886 (7th Cir.1996) (citing Hodel v. Virginia Mining & Reclamation Ass'n, Inc., 452 U.S. 264, 276, 101 S.Ct. 2352, 2360 (1981)). This does not mean that a court will inevitably rubber stamp all congressional statutes. It is still the province of the courts to determine whether Congress has exceeded its enumerated powers. See id. (citing Wilson, 73 F.3d at 680); see also Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 2 L.Ed. 60 (1803). 18 The power granted Congress by the Commerce Clause has attained a rather wide scope in the years since Gibbons v. Ogden. Many of the post-Gibbons cases have upheld Congress' regulation of materials, which, at first blush, would not strike most as commerce in any technical commercial sense of the word. See United States v. Bongiorno, 106 F.3d 1027, 1031 (1st Cir.1997) (concluding that [t]he term 'commerce' in the Commerce Clause context is a term of art, and the Court consistently has interpreted it to include transactions that might strike a lay person as noncommercial ); see also United States v. Simpson, 252 U.S. 465, 466, 40 S.Ct. 364, 364, 64 L.Ed. 665 (1920) (finding that transporting whiskey intended for the transporter's personal consumption constituted commerce); Lottery Case (Champion v. Ames), 188 U.S. 321, 354, 23 S.Ct. 321, 326, 47 L.Ed. 492 (1903) (concluding that commerce included carrying lottery tickets). 19 The Supreme Court has also stated that Congress' Commerce Clause power is a positive power ... to govern affairs which the individual states, with their limited territorial jurisdictions, are not fully capable of governing. United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass'n, 322 U.S. 533, 552, 64 S.Ct. 1162, 1173, 88 L.Ed. 1440 (1944). Congress has often used this positive power to pass laws that help the States solve problems that defy local solutions. United States v. Sage, 92 F.3d 101, 105 (2d Cir.1996) (collecting cases), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 117 S.Ct. 784, 136 L.Ed.2d 727 (1997). Because they impose criminal sanctions, these statutes might not, at first glance, appear to be regulations of commerce per se. For example, in Perez v. United States, 402 U.S. 146, 150, 91 S.Ct. 1357, 1359-60, 28 L.Ed.2d 686 (1971), the legislative history of the Consumer Credit Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 891 et seq., evidenced that Congress did not believe that the States alone could foil loansharking. In United States v. Sheridan, 329 U.S. 379, 384, 67 S.Ct. 332, 334-35, 91 L.Ed. 359 (1946), the legislative history of the National Stolen Property Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2314, indicated that Congress wanted to help the States in detecting and punishing criminals who make a successful getaway and thus make the state's detecting and punitive processes impotent. 20 Recently, the Supreme Court concluded that there are three broad areas of activity that Congress may regulate under its commerce power. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 558, 115 S.Ct. 1624, 1629, 131 L.Ed.2d 626 (1995) (citing Perez, 402 U.S. at 150, 91 S.Ct. at 1359). First, Congress may oversee the use of the channels of interstate commerce. Id. (citations omitted). Second, Congress may regulate and protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, or persons or things in interstate commerce, even though any threat to them may only emanate from intrastate activities. Id. (citations omitted). Finally, Congress has the power to regulate those activities which substantially affect interstate commerce. Id. (citations omitted). 21 Black and Davis rely heavily on Lopez. Black maintains that the CSRA lacks a jurisdictional nexus to interstate commerce. More specifically, he argues that the CSRA does not fall into any of the three permissible areas discussed in Lopez because the failure to pay child support: (1) is not a misuse of the channels of interstate commerce; (2) does not put the instrumentalities of interstate commerce at risk; and (3) does not substantially affect interstate commerce. Davis primarily argues that those circuits that have found that the CSRA is constitutional under the second prong of Lopez have stretched Supreme Court jurisprudence in order to find a way to uphold the CSRA. We disagree. 22 The CSRA is a facially valid exercise of congressional power under the Commerce Clause. It regulates the nonpayment of interstate child support obligations. Thus, at the very least, the CSRA regulates a thing in interstate commerce and therefore falls within the second category of Lopez. 1 In United States v. Sage, the Second Circuit concluded that child support orders which obligate one parent in one state to make payments to another parent in another state are functionally equivalent to interstate contracts. 92 F.3d 101, 105 (2d Cir.1996); see also United States v. Bongiorno, 106 F.3d 1027, 1032 (1st Cir.1997). Quite simply, [t]he Act presupposes intercourse, an obligation to pay money, and the intercourse concerns more states than one. Sage, 92 F.3d at 105. Payments stemming from a support obligation will usually travel in interstate commerce by mail, wire, or electronic transfer. United States v. Parker, 108 F.3d 28, 31 (3d Cir.1997). That a support obligation is an intangible and that payments under it may only amount to a transfer of electrons across state lines is immaterial. See United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Ass'n, 322 U.S. 533, 549-50, 64 S.Ct. 1162, 1171-72, 88 L.Ed. 1440 (1944); Bongiorno, 106 F.3d at 1031. 23 Other circuits have characterized the CSRA as a constitutional regulation of the nonpayment of debts in which the judgment creditor and judgment debtor live in different states. See United States v. Hampshire, 95 F.3d 999, 1003-04 (10th Cir.1996); United States v. Mussari, 95 F.3d 787, 790 (9th Cir.1996); see also Bongiorno, 106 F.3d at 1032. Satisfaction of a support obligation may be frustrated by the debtors' intentional failure to pay. Mussari, 95 F.3d at 790. Black criticizes the CSRA for being nothing more than a criminal statute having no substantial relation to interstate commerce. However, a parent's intentional failure to pay child support constitutes a conscious impediment to interstate commerce that Congress can criminalize just as it has other impediments to interstate commerce. Id. (citing Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 250, 85 S.Ct. 348, 354, 13 L.Ed.2d 258 (1964)); see also United States v. Green, 350 U.S. 415, 420, 76 S.Ct. 522, 525-26, 100 L.Ed. 494 (1956) (finding constitutional the Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951, which punishes interference with interstate commerce by extortion, robbery or physical violence [by] ... outlaw[ing] such interference 'in any way or degree.' ). With all of the above in mind, we find that the CSRA fits within the strictures of Congress' Commerce Clause power. 24 Although Black and Davis stress the significance of Lopez to their cases, the Court in Lopez dealt with a very different set of circumstances. In Lopez, the statute in issue was the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which made it a federal offense for any person to knowingly possess a firearm in a place that that person believes, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 551, 115 S.Ct. at 1626. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found that the Act exceeded Congress' Commerce Clause authority. The Court reasoned that the Act was a criminal statute that by its own terms had nothing to do with commerce or any sort of economic enterprise, however broadly commerce is defined. Id. at 561, 115 S.Ct. at 1630-31. The Court determined that the Act did not fit under the third area that may be regulated under the Commerce Clause because [i]t cannot ... be sustained under our cases upholding regulations of activities that arise out of or are connected with a commercial transaction, which viewed in the aggregate, substantially affects interstate commerce. Id. Finally, the Court observed that the Act contained no express jurisdictional element which might limit its reach to a discrete set of firearm possessions that additionally have an explicit connection with or effect on interstate commerce. Id. at 562, 115 S.Ct. at 1631. 25 The Court reasoned that to uphold the Gun-Free School Zones Act it would have to pile inference upon inference such that it would transform congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power normally retained by the States. Id. at 567, 115 S.Ct. at 1633-34. In conclusion, the Court recognized that the broad language of prior cases suggested the possibility of expanding the Commerce Clause power still further, but the Court found that to proceed any further would require us to conclude that the Constitution's enumeration of powers does not presuppose something not enumerated, and that there will never be a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local. Id. at 567-68, 115 S.Ct. at 1634 (citations omitted). 26 Congress need not break out the red pens, for we have a different case here. First, the Court in Lopez ruled out the first two categories and examined the Gun-Free School Zones Act only under the third area of activities that Congress may regulate under the Commerce Clause. Conversely, as we have found, the CSRA could conceivably fall under all three categories enumerated in Lopez and clearly falls under the second category. Second, Lopez did establish that, where the legislative history is silent, a substantial interstate commerce nexus must be 'visible to the naked eye' without resorting to 'pil[ing] inference upon inference' until nothing is left of state autonomy. United States v. Kenney, 91 F.3d 884, 888 (7th Cir.1996). However, that is not a concern here; the CSRA by its very terms provides a multi-jurisdictional element because it applies only to past due interstate support payments. In addition, the legislative history of the CSRA is far from silent. The House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary expressly stated: 27 H.R. 1241 [the bill that would become the CSRA] addresses the problem of interstate enforcement of child support by taking the incentive out of moving interstate to avoid payment. The bill is designed to target interstate cases only. These are the cases which state officials report to be clearly the most difficult to enforce, especially the hard core group of parents who flagrantly refuse to pay and whom traditional extradition procedures have utterly failed to bring to justice. 28 H.R. R EP. No. 102-771, at 8 (1992) (emphasis added). This is just one of several instances where Congress stated that the CSRA would devote its attention solely to interstate cases. Finally, Lopez must also be noted for what it did not do. Kenney, 91 F.3d at 887. Although the majority in Lopez intended to draw an outer limit to congressional authority, this does not mean that Lopez represents a retrenchment of already well-established Commerce Clause precedent. Id. Black and Davis' reliance on Lopez is misplaced. It does nothing to sway our finding that the CSRA is a constitutional exercise of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. 29 Having found that Act falls within one of Congress' enumerated powers, the Commerce Clause, our review as to the propriety of the Act is deferential, and we think that Congress had a rational basis for exercising its commerce power. Congress made express findings that collecting child support from out-of-state parents has grown beyond the States' enforcement capabilities. We also find that the regulatory means chosen were reasonably adapted to the end permitted by the Constitution. The CSRA respects the proficiency of the States in matters of domestic relations by not revisiting their initial judgments and by imposing its criminal sanctions only when a deadbeat parent moves out-of-state and willfully evades the obligation to support his children. Thus, the Act meets both prongs of our rational basis inquiry.
30 Black and Davis next urge us to find that the CSRA violates the Tenth Amendment or to abstain from enforcing the Act on the basis of federalism and comity. They believe that the Act interferes with the States' traditional authority over matters concerning domestic relations and enforcement of criminal laws. 2 31 The Tenth Amendment provides that [t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. U.S. C ONST. amend. X. The Tenth Amendment and Article I complement each other. Mussari, 95 F.3d at 791. That is, if Congress acts pursuant to an enumerated power, there can be no violation of the Tenth Amendment. Id. (citing New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 156, 112 S.Ct. 2408, 2417-18, 120 L.Ed.2d 120 (1992)). Here, because we find that Congress has acted within its Commerce Clause power, we necessarily find no Tenth Amendment violation. 32 Black and Davis believe that we should abstain from enforcing the CSRA because it intrudes into family law matters traditionally reserved to the States. Black relies heavily on Lopez for this point. In Lopez, the Government argued that the possession of a firearm in a local school zone might result in violent crime which in turn would substantially affect interstate commerce because violent crime would cause insurance costs to increase and these costs would have to be spread among the population. Lopez, 514 U.S. at 563-64, 115 S.Ct. 1631-32. The Government suggested that citizens would not want to travel to areas believed to be unsafe and that guns in school zones would threaten the education process and result in a less productive nation. Id. at 564, 115 S.Ct. at 1632. The Court concluded that [u]nder the Government's 'national productivity' reasoning, Congress could regulate any activity that it found was related to the economic productivity of individual citizens: family law (including marriage, divorce, and child custody), for example. Id. However, we reiterate that in Lopez, the Government argued that the Gun-Free School Zones Act substantially affected interstate commerce after the Court quickly disposed of the first two categories enumerated in Lopez. The context of the case before us is different from that in Lopez because the CSRA's relation to interstate commerce is not nearly so tenuous as that of the Gun-Free School Zones Act in Lopez. 33 More importantly, the CSRA does not attempt to regulate domestic relations. In Black's case, a federal court did not enter the initial divorce decree nor did it impose the underlying support obligation that Black refused to pay. Rather, a state court imposed the initial support obligation. Black frustrated that obligation by moving out-of-state and willfully evading state collection efforts. The longer that Black refused to pay, the more the amount of support which he owed accumulated until his case came to fall under the CSRA's authority. Thus, the CSRA did not intervene until an obligation, already imposed under state law, [came] to wear an interstate face. Mussari, 95 F.3d at 791. We also stress that the CSRA does not permit a federal court to revise the domestic relationship adjudicated by the State courts or to modify any part of a State court decree. Sage, 92 F.3d at 107. Finally, we have Congress' express intent that the CSRA was not meant to displace the States' authority over domestic relations. Congressman Henry Hyde, who spearheaded the CSRA, stated: 34 I am especially incensed by those thousands and thousands of delinquent parents who make a mockery of State law by fleeing across State lines to avoid enforcement actions by State courts and child support agencies.... Too often as soon as delinquent fathers move to new States, they seem to vanish as far as State enforcement agencies are concerned. It is not that States have no mechanisms available, it is that these mechanisms lose their effectiveness when a father moves to a new State.... H.R. 1241's goal is to strengthen, not to supplant, State enforcement efforts. 35 138 C ONG. R EC. H7324, H7326 (daily ed. Aug. 4, 1992). 36 Davis urges abstention because the intervention of the federal judiciary under the CSRA would disrupt the establishment and/or the continuity of an important state policy--domestic relations law. He cites Sosna v. Iowa, 419 U.S. 393, 404, 95 S.Ct. 553, 559-60, 42 L.Ed.2d 532 (1975) and Ankenbrandt v. Richards, 504 U.S. 689, 112 S.Ct. 2206, 119 L.Ed.2d 468 (1992) in support. However, in Sosna, the Court merely reiterated that it would disclaim any jurisdiction in the area of divorce. 419 U.S. at 404, 95 S.Ct. at 559-60. In Ankenbrandt, the Court also reaffirmed the validity of the domestic relations exception to federal jurisdiction in diversity cases. 504 U.S. at 697, 112 S.Ct. at 2211-12. The CSRA does not regulate domestic relations per se and does not derive its jurisdictional basis from diversity. Davis' abstention argument is misplaced. 37 In sum, this case does not give us an occasion to chafe over the principles underlying the Tenth Amendment, federalism, or comity. The CSRA does not rear its head into domestic relations issues reserved to the States. Rather, it seeks to enforce an obligation originally entered by a state court, which, due to the machinations of an evasive parent, the state court cannot enforce on its own. 38