Court Opinion

ID: 9427679
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:34.449424+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:09.011228
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Marshall,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan, Mr. Justice White, and Mr. Justice Blackmun join, dissenting.
The critical question in this dispute is whether § 202 (g) of the Social Security Act, 42 U. S. C. §402 (g), discriminates against unmarried parents or against illegitimate children. The Court determines that the intended beneficiaries of § 202 (g) are dependent spouses, and that the statute therefore distinguishes between categories 'of parents. Having thus characterized the statute, the Court concludes that the use of marital status as an index of dependency on a deceased wage earner is permissible under Califano v. Jobst, 434 U. S. 47, 50 (1977), and Mathews v. De Castro, 429 U. S. 181, 185-186 (1976). If, however, as the District Court found, the statute benefits children, then it incorporates a distinction based on legitimacy which must be tested under the more rigorous standards of Jimenez v. Weinberger, 417 U. S. 628 (1974), and Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 406 U. S. 164 (1972).
Determining the proper classification for purposes of equal protection analysis is, to be sure, not “an exact science.” Ante, at 294. But neither is it an exercise in statutory revision. And only by disregarding the clear legislative history, structure, and effect of the Mother’s Insurance Benefits Program can the Court characterize dependent spouses, rather than children, as the intended beneficiaries of § 202 (g). Just four Terms ago, a unanimous Court concluded that the clear purpose underlying § 202 (g) “is to provide children deprived of one parent with the opportunity for the personal attention *298of the other.” Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S. 636, 648-649 (1975).1 Indeed, the author of today’s opinion for the Court concurred separately in Wiesenfeld on the ground that an examination of the legislative history and statutory context of § 202 (g) “convincingly demonstrates that the only purpose of [§ 202 (g)] is to make it possible for children of deceased contributing workers to have the personal care and attention of a surviving parent.” 420 U. S., at 655 (Rehnquist, J., concurring) (emphasis added). That same legislative history and statutory context now persuade the Court that the “animating concern” of § 202 (g) is to assist a surviving spouse, and that any benefit to a child is merely “incidental.” Ante, at 288-289, 294. I cannot agree. In my judgment, the history and structure of the Act establish as “convincingly” here as they did in Wiesenfeld that § 202 (g) was designed to aid children. And because denial of support for illegitimates bears no substantial relationship to that purpose, I respectfully dissent.
I
The Court concedes, as it must, that Congress intended the Mother’s Insurance Benefits Program to enable surviving spouses to stay at home and care for their children. Ante, at 288. Despite this concession, the Court manages to conclude that the sole beneficiaries of the program, for equal protection purposes, are the spouses who provide care, not the children who receive it. Unencumbered by any direct support from the legislative history, the Court reaches this conclusion by positing that the program was designed to aid surviving parents who “actually suffer economic dislocation upon the death of a wage earner.” Ante, at 289. Given this asserted pur*299pose, the Court finds “obvious logic” in § 202 (g)’s exclusion of unwed mothers, since “Congress could reasonably conclude that a woman who has never been married to the wage earner is far less likely to be dependent upon the wage earner at the time of his death.” Ante, at 289. However, neither the history nor structure of the statute supports the Court’s determination that Congress enacted § 202 (g) to assist dependent spouses rather than their children.
Aid to surviving parents was first extended under the Social Security Act Amendments of 1939 in the form of “widows’ benefits.” The Advisory Council on Social Security, which formulated the program, indicated that payments were “intended as supplements to the orphans’ benefits with the purpose of enabling the widow to remain at home and care for the children.” Pinal Report of the Advisory Council on Social Security 31 (1938). Proposals to grant benefits to dependent widows without minor children were rejected, on the apparent theory that young childless women could work and older widows would, have savings or grown children able to assist them. Report of the Social Security Board, H. R. Doc. No. 110, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., 7-8 (1939). See also H. R. Rep. No. 728, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., 36-37 (1939); Hearings on the Social Security Act Amendments of 1939 before the House Committee on Ways and Means, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., 61 (1939). Subsequent re-enactments of the program reflected no change in the underlying statutory objective — to allow surviving parents “to stay home and care for [their] children instead of working.” 1971 Advisory Council on Social Security, Reports on the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance and Medicare Programs 30 (1971).
Moreover, the entire structure of the statute belies the Court’s determination that Congress intended mother’s insurance to aid a wage earner’s economically dependent spouse rather than his children. Section 202 (g) imposes no express requirement of dependency. As the District Court noted, *300mothers and their legitimate children may obtain benefits under § 202 (g) “regardless of whether [the wage earner] was living with them or supporting them at the time of his death, or even if he never lived with or supported them.” 464 F. Supp. 408, 412 (WD Tex. 1978). By contrast, an unmarried mother and her child who were fully dependent on the insured nonetheless remain ineligible for assistance under §202 (g). That divorced parents and their children qualify for mother’s insurance further undercuts the Court’s attempted linkage between the marital requirement and dependency. A woman previously married to a deceased wage earner is eligible for benefits even if neither she nor her child ever received support from the father, and even if the father was excused from any legal support obligations in the divorce proceedings. Indeed, a mother whose second marriage terminates in death or divorce may claim benefits on the account of her first husband although in all likelihood, any entitlement to support terminated upon her remarriage. See 464 F. Supp., at 413.2 In short, nothing in the structure or history of the statute sustains the Court’s conclusion that the purpose of § 202 (g) is to benefit dependent spouses as opposed to children.
Equally untenable is the Court’s further determination that § 202 (g) has insufficient discriminatory impact on illegiti-mates to warrant further analysis. See ante, at 294. In con-*301eluding that § 202 (g) has no such disparate effect, the Court reasons first that
“[t]he benefit to a child as a result of the parent or guardian’s receipt of mother’s insurance benefits is incidental : mother’s insurance benefit payments do not vary with the number of children within the recipient’s care, they are not available in the foster care context, and they are lost on remarriage or if the surviving parent earns a substantial income . . . Ante, at 294.
But none of these enumerated eligibility requirements support the Court’s characterization of children as "incidental” rather than intended beneficiaries of § 202 (g). On the contrary, these' restrictions, together with two others the Court neglects to mention, are consistent with the stated purpose of the program — to afford parents who would otherwise be forced to work the option of caring for their children at home. That objective is plainly served by eligibility limitations excluding individuals whose economic resources already permit such a choice. Factors including remarriage, outside income, and qualification for foster care payments directly or indirectly reflect such resources; the number of the recipient’s children does not. Similarly, the conditions that mother’s benefits cease when a child reaches 18 or leaves the parent’s care and custody, see § 202 (d)(5), 42 U. S. C. §402 (d)(5), also reinforce the conclusion that children are the actual beneficiaries of § 202 (g). For the parent’s eligibility continues “only so long as it is realistic to think that the children might need their parent at home.” Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S., at 650 n. 17.
The Court further submits that the discriminatory impact of § 202 (g) is not of constitutional dimension because an illegitimate child could conceivably obtain benefits if he leaves the home of his natural mother to live with his deceased father’s wife. This suggestion, of course, presupposes both an extraordinary beneficence on the part of the wife, and no *302strong attachment between the natural mother and her child, assumptions which the Court does not and could not defend.3 And forcing a child to forgo living with his natural mother in order to obtain assistance under § 202 (g) hardly comports with the articulated purpose of the program, to encourage parental care.
In any event, as this Court's prior holdings amply demonstrate, a statute that disadvantages illegitimates as a class is not saved simply because not all members of that class are penalized under all conceivable circumstances. For example, in both Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 406 U. S. 164 (1972), and Jimenez v. Weinberger, 417 U. S. 628 (1974), we rejected an argument that illegitimates suffered no discrimination under statutes extending benefits to legitimate children but only to certain categories of illegitimates.4 Similarly, in *303Trimble v. Gordon, 430 U. S. 762 (1977), the Court held unconstitutional a statute denying illegitimate children the right to inherit from their intestate fathers even though illegit-imates whose fathers wrote wills were not disadvantaged by the provision. So too here, the Court cannot dismiss the discriminatory impact of § 202 (g) by a “hypothetical reshuffling of the facts,” Trimble v. Gordon, supra, at 774, particularly one that disregards the very relationship between a surviving single parent and child which the statute was intended to foster.
Finally, the Court suggests that § 202 (g) does not disadvantage illegitimates in any constitutionally cognizable sense because it is surviving spouses, not their children, who “exercise dominion over the benefits and whose freedom of choice [is] enhanced thereby.” Ante, at 295. However, that the parent makes the decision to stay at home does not render the child any less the beneficiary of that choice. As a practical matter, the parent also exercises “dominion” over the children’s insurance benefits afforded by § 202 (d) of the Act, 42 U. S. C. § 402 (d), but the child is nonetheless the recipient. Children now become “incidental” and “speculative” beneficiaries of § 202 (g) only because the Court declares them to be so.
I would adhere to the understanding, unanimously expressed in Wiesenfeld, that the Mother’s Insurance Program, both in purpose and effect, is a form of assistance to children. Thus, the statute’s eligibility restrictions should be evaluated as they in fact operate, as discrimination based on legitimacy.
II
Statutes that foreclose opportunities solely because of a child’s status at birth represent a particularly invidious form *304of discrimination. Gomez v. Perez, 409 U. S. 535 (1973); Levy v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 68 (1968). To penalize an illegitimate child for conduct he could not prevent and a status he cannot alter is both “illogical and unjust.” Weber v. Aetna Casualty Surety Co., supra, at 175. Accordingly, classifications based on legitimacy violate the equal protection requirements of the Fifth Amendment5 unless they bear a close and substantial relationship to a permissible governmental interest. See Jimenez v. Weinberger, supra, at 637; Mathews v. Lucas, 427 U. S. 495, 509-510 (1976).
In arguing that § 202 (g) meets this test, the Secretary suggests that legitimate children as a class are more likely than illegitimates to be dependent on the insured wage earner at the time of his death. Therefore, because the statute establishes a maximum amount payable to any one wage earner’s survivors, the Secretary contends that the exclusion of ille-gitimates is an appropriate means of allocating finite resources to those most likely to have suffered economically from the insured’s death. Brief for Appellant 28.
The threshold difficulty with this argument is that § 202 (g)’s marital restriction bars recovery by illegitimates regardless of whether any other individuals are eligible to claim benefits on a particular wage earner’s account. Thus, the restriction defended here as a rationing device withholds assistance to illegitimates even when there are no competing claimants among whom to ration. Insofar as the exclusion of illegitimates is designed to allocate limited funds on the basis of need, it is not carefully tailored to achieve that objective. See Trimble v. Gordon, supra, at 770-771; Gomez v. Perez, supra, at 538.6
*305But even if § 202 (g)’s marital restriction operated only in contexts of multiple claimants, it could not withstand scrutiny under Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 406 U. S. 164 (1972), and Jimenez v. Weinberger, 417 U. S. 628 (1974). In both those cases, the Court recognized that the marital status of parents is not a sufficiently accurate index of the economic needs of their children to warrant conclusively denying assistance to illegitimates. At issue in Weber was a workmen’s compensation scheme which provided that unacknowledged illegitimate children could recover on the account of an insured only if payments to other eligible claimants did not exhaust the maximum allowable benefits. Noting that an unacknowledged illegitimate child “may suffer as much from the loss of a parent as a child born within wedlock,” 406 U. S., at 169, the Court declined to view status at birth as an adequate proxy for economic dependence. See also Richardson v. Griffin, 409 U. S. 1069 (1972), summarily aff’g 346 F. Supp. 1226 (Md.); Richardson v. Davis, 409 U. S. 1069 (1972), summarily aff’g 342 F. Supp. 688 (Conn.). Again in Jimenez v. Weinberger, we struck down a statute granting social security benefits to a disabled worker’s legitimate children born after the onset of disability but not to afterborn illegitimate children except under certain limited circumstances. See n. 4, supra. The constitutional infirmities identified in Jimenez are equally evident in this case; that statute, like § 202 (g), was overinclusive to the extent it aided legitimate children not actually dependent on the insured wage earner, and underinclusive to the extent it withheld assistance from illegitimate children who were in fact dependent. And here, as in Jimenez, it serves no purpose consistent with the aims of the Social Security Act to deny illegitimates all op*306portunity to establish their dependence and their concomitant right to insurance benefits. See 417 U. S., at 636.7
We cannot, of course, expect perfect congruence between legislative ends and means in the administration of a complex •statutory scheme. See ante, at 284^-285. But neither should we give our imprimatur to distinctions needlessly predicated on a disfavored social status, particularly one beyond an individual’s power to affect. Although a “blanket and conclusive exclusion” of illegitimate children may be an administratively expedient means of screening for dependence under § 202 (g), see Jimenez v. Weinberger, supra, at 636, it is also inaccurate, unjust, and, under this Court’s settled precedents, unconstitutional.
I respectfully dissent.

 In Wiesenfeld, the Court held that § 202 (g) ’s denial of benefits to widowers reflected impermissible gender-based discrimination. In so ruling, we reasoned that classifications based on the sex of the surviving parent bore no relationship to the statutory objective of enabling children who had lost one parent to receive full-time care by the other. See 420 U. S., at 651.

 The Court dismisses this awkward fact with an equally awkward metaphor. In the Court’s view, Congress’ inclusion of divorced parents represents an attempt to “alleviate hardship and inequity under the Social Security laws.” Ante, at 293. And, under the Court’s analysis, when Congress undertakes such an 'endeavor, “it may quite rightly conceive its task to be analogous to painting a fence, rather than touching up an etching.” Ibid. But this characterization of legislative technique elides the issue relevant here, the purpose of the statutory scheme. Metaphor cannot mask the significance of Congress’ decision to confer benefits on divorced spouses. That these individuals may obtain mother’s insurance of itself negates the proposition that the painter-draftsman was concerned with assisting dependent parents rather than their children.

 Although statistics in this area are difficult to obtain, available data reveal that a very high percentage of illegitimate children reside with their natural mothers. Approximately one-half of all illegitimate births are to women under age 20, see Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, Final Natality Statistics, 1977, p. 19 (Feb. 1979), and studies indicate that between 86% and 93% of these mothers are living with their children. See Report by the Alan Gutt-macher Institute, Research and Development Division of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 11 Million Teenagers 11 (1976) (hereinafter cited as Planned Parenthood Report); F. Furstenberg, Unplanned Parenthood 174 (1966) (hereinafter cited as Furstenberg); Zelnik & Kantner, the Resolution of Teenage First Pregnancies, 6 Family Planning Perspectives 77 (1974) (Table 5). Comparable figures have been reported for mothers over age 20. See Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services, Unmarried Mothers in Wisconsin, 1974 (1975) (Tables 11, 13). The remaining children are residing with either adoptive parents or other individuals. See Planned Parenthood Report 11; Furstenberg 174. One in-depth study found that the latter separations were generally attributable to the mother’s illness or inability to obtain child care during hours of employment. Ibid.

 Under the workmen’s compensation statute at issue in Weber, illegitimate children could recover benefits on the same basis as legitimates only if acknowledged by their fathers. See 406 U. S., at 167-168. Jimenez involved a statute granting disability insurance benefits to illegitimates *303where: (1) state law permitted them to inherit from the wage earner; (2) their illegitimacy resulted from formal or nonobvious defects in their parents’ marriage ceremony; (3) they had subsequently been legitimated; or (4) the disabled wage-earning parent had contributed to their support or had lived with them prior to disability. See 417 U. S., at 631, and n. 2.

 See Vance v. Bradley, 440 U. S. 93, 94-95, n. 1 (1979); Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U. S. 497, 499 (1954).

 That Congress has established a maximum which cannot fully provide for all survivors affords no basis for preferring legitimate children over dependent illegitimates. See Weber v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co., 406 *305U. S. 164, 175-176 (1972); Richardson v. Griffin, 409 U. S. 1069 (1972), summarily aff’g 346 F. Supp. 1226 (Md.); Richardson v. Davis, 409 U. S. 1069 (1972), summarily aff’g 342 F. Supp. 588 (Conn.).

 Unlike the statute upheld in Mathews v. Lucas, 427 U. S. 495 (1976), which presumed the dependence of legitimate children but required proof of dependence by illegitimates, § 202 (g) conclusively bars recovery even to those illegitimates who could establish that they were supported by the deceased wage earner at the time of his death.