Court Opinion

ID: 9439122
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 06:22:35.490706+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:26:10.332056
License: Public Domain

SENTELLE, Circuit Judge,

concurring in the result:

As the majority opinion exhaustively sets forth, in the present appeal BellSouth mounts the same sort of constitutional attack on 47 U.S.C. § 271 that it previously pursued unsuccessfully against 47 U.S.C. § 274 in BellSouth Corp. v. FCC, 144 F.3d 58 (D.C.Cir.1998) (“BellSouth I”). In the prior case BellSouth and the other Bell operating companies (“BOCs”) argued that Congress had punished their prior anti-competitive conduct by singling them out by name for legislative debarment from participation in the lucrative line of business constituting electronic publishing. In the present case they assert the unconstitutionality of § 271 on the same basis, as it singles them out by name for disqualification from immediate entry into the business of providing in-region long distance telephone service until they comply with burdens not imposed on any other entity no matter how similarly situated. *695I found their arguments persuasive in BellSouth I. See 144 F.3d at 71-74 (Sentelle, J., dissenting). I find them equally persuasive today.
As the majority today sets forth, Article I, section 9, clause 3 of the Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any “Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law.” See Maj. op. at 683. As the majority further recognizes, that clause prohibits any statute that “(1) applies with specificity, and (2) imposes punishment.” Maj. op. at 683. Specificity is not at issue here. Section 271, like § 274, specifies its applications solely to the BOCs by their names. It does not apply to any other of the “over 1,300 local exchange carriers,” BellSouth I, 144 F.3d at 71, no matter how large or market dominant they are or become. Thus, under the two-part test correctly set forth by the majority, if § 271 imposes punishment it is an unconstitutional bill of attainder. It does, and it is.
The Supreme Court has previously “announced a three part test to determine whether a statute imposes ‘punishment’ for purposes of the Bill of Attainder Clause”:
(1) whether the challenged statute falls within the historical meaning of legislative punishment; (2) whether the statute, viewed in terms of the type and severity of burdens imposed, reasonably can be said to further nonpunitive legislative purposes; and (3) whether the legislative record evinces a congressional intent to punish.
Id. at 72 (quoting Selective Serv. Sys. v. Minnesota Public Interest Research Group, 468 U.S. 841, 852, 104 S.Ct. 3348, 82 L.Ed.2d 632 (1984)). The limitations on the BOCs constitute punishment under that three-part test.
First, this line of business limitation embodied in § 271 is a restriction of a sort falling within the historic meaning of legislative punishment. “[Legislative bars to participation by individuals or groups in specific employments or professions” unquestionably fall within the category of punishments forbidden by the Bill of Attainder Clause. Selective Serv. Sys., 468 U.S. at 852, 104 S.Ct. 3348; United States v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437, 85 S.Ct. 1707, 14 L.Ed.2d 484 (1965) (invalidating statute barring communist party members from labor union offices); United States v. Lovett, 328 U.S. 303, 106 Ct.Cl. 856, 66 S.Ct. 1073, 90 L.Ed. 1252 (1946) (striking down law cutting off salaries to three named government employees); Cummings v. Missouri, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 277, 18 L.Ed. 356 (1867); Ex Parte Garland, 71 (4 Wall.) 333, 18 L.Ed. 366 (1867) (barring former confederate rebels from entry into professions). I find unpersuasive the majority’s attempt to distinguish these prior cases on the basis that the “line of business” restrictions before us leave open the possibility that they may one day be overcome. I find nothing in the history of bill of attainder jurisprudence that suggests that the fact that debarment from business will or may someday end prevents the temporary or potentially temporary bar from constituting punishment.
I find even less persuasive the majority’s paralleling the line of business restrictions with regulatory restrictions applicable to entire industries. While it may be true as the majority argues that environmental laws specific to an industry do not constitute punishment, I do not see how this lessens or even affects the punitive nature of a restriction applicable not to a specific industry but rather to specific named individuals or corporations within an industry inapplicable to others in the same industry,' whether or not similarly situated. Both punitive effect and specificity are necessary to render a legislative enactment an unconstitutional bill of attainder. Supreme Court precedent upholding regulatory restrictions (whether punitive or not) where specificity is lacking is inappo-site. See, e.g., FCC v. National Citizens Committee for Broad., 436 U.S. 775, 98 S.Ct. 2096, 56 L.Ed.2d 697 (1978); Board of Governors of Fed. Reserve Sys. v. Agnew, 329 U.S. 441, 67 S.Ct. 411, 91 L.Ed. 408 (1947). In short, in my view, the first prong of the three-part test of bill of attainder status is plainly met.
Second, as to whether the statute furthers nonpunitive legislative purposes, the laudable goal of opening the telecommunications industry to competition by deregulating the long distance market is not served by forbidding specific persons, whether natural or corporate, from competing on the same terms as *696others. If the BOCs possess characteristics that require that they be more stringently regulated than other entities, then Congress could further its nonpunitive goals by imposing limitations on local exchange carriers of a certain size or market dominance. I do not see how this provision specifying the individual Bell operating companies furthers the nonpunitive goals of the new statutory regime; rather, it furthers the punitive goal of penalizing their past anticompetitive conduct. Pursuit of this punitive goal strikes at the heart of the prohibition against “Bills of Attainder” and “ex post facto Laws” which constitute an essential part of the Constitution’s structural separation of powers among the branches of government: the redress of past conduct is the province of the Judiciary, not of the Legislature. As we recognized in BellSouth I, Article I, section 9, clause 3 of the Constitution was designed to prevent punishment “without the benefit of a judicial trial.” BellSouth I, 144 F.3d at 62.
As to the third element of the Selective Service System test, that is, whether the legislative record evinces a congressional intent to punish, as I stated in my dissent in BellSouth I, while I think this “the least important” of the three factors, id. at 73, I think it amply met. The timing of the enactment along with its effect in undoing the termination of the prior judicial redress of the BOCs’ past conduct really leaves no doubt as to Congress’s motive. Congress clearly had available to it “less burdensome alternatives” under which it could have addressed its “legitimate nonpunitive objectives” while refraining from singling out the BOCs for punitive legislative treatment. See Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425, 482, 97 S.Ct. 2777, 53 L.Ed.2d 867 (1977).
For these reasons, were we writing on a clean slate I would vote to hold 47 U.S.C. § 271 unconstitutional as a violation of the Bill of Attainder Clause. But I recognize that we do not write upon a clean slate. BellSouth I announces the law of the Circuit. The prior opinions of other panels of this court bind us. Melcher v. Federal Open Market Comm., 836 F.2d 561, 565 n. 4 (D.C.Cir.1987); National Treasury Employees Union v. United States, 990 F.2d 1271, 1286 n. 7 (D.C.Cir.1993) (Sentelle, J., dissenting) (“The law of this Circuit, whether in error or not, is binding absent correction by a higher court.”), aff'd in part and rev’d in part, 513 U.S. 454, 115 S.Ct. 1003, 130 L.Ed.2d 964 (1995). While the BOCs have labored to find distinctions between § 274 which we struck down in BellSouth I and § 271 which is before us today, they have produced none of constitutional significance. I therefore concur in my colleagues’ decision that we must uphold § 271 as we upheld § 274.
I do not find that the BOCs’ other arguments concerning the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment or the statute’s inconsistency with the constitutional separation of powers change the result. The equal protection argument is simply the bill of attainder argument dressed in different clothes. The separation of powers argument is to me a powerful one, but one which cannot carry the day. While I would agree that by undoing the judicial decision on this same subject matter, § 271 — and for that matter § 274 — falls afoul of the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 514 U.S. 211, 115 S.Ct. 1447, 131 L.Ed.2d 328 (1995), I do not think we could enter such a holding consistent with our precedent in BellSouth I. The characteristics which make these statutory sections inconsistent with constitutional separation of powers are the same ones which in my view make them inconsistent with the protections of Article I, section 9, clause 3. See Brown, 381 U.S. at 442, 85 S.Ct. 1707 (“The best available evidence, the writings of the architects of our constitutional system, indicates that the Bill of Attainder Clause was intended not as a narrow, technical (and therefore soon to be outmoded) prohibition, but rather as an implementation of the separation of powers, a general safeguard against legislative exercise of the judicial function, or more simply— trial by legislature.”). This Circuit having decided those issues adversely to the BOCs *697under the more specific rationale cannot consistently decide in their favor under the more general. Therefore, again, I join the majority’s result, but only for reasons of stare decisis and binding precedent, not because I believe it correct.