Court Opinion

ID: 9428880
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:25:02.977688+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:15.758420
License: Public Domain

Justice Blackmun,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion. Its action today provides an eloquent and sufficient answer to Justice Rehnquist’s dissent: despite the vehemence with which his opinion is written, Justice Rehnquist has persuaded only one Justice to his position. But because the dissent attempts to plumb the Court’s psyche, see post, at 41-42, n. 12,1 I feel compelled to add comments addressed to Justice Rehnquist’s ruminations on equal protection. In particular, I cannot leave unchallenged his suggestion that the Court’s decisions holding resident aliens to be a “suspect class” no longer are good law.
Justice Rehnquist’s analysis on this point is based on a simple syllogism. Alienage classifications have been subjected to strict scrutiny, he suggests, because “aliens [are] *20barred from asserting their interests in the governmental body responsible for imposing burdens upon them.” Post, at 40. But “[m]ore recent decisions,” he continues, have established that “the political powerlessness of aliens is itself the consequence of distinctions on the basis of alienage that are constitutionally permissible.” Ibid. This prompts Justice Rehnquist to pose what one supposes to be a rhetorical question: “whether political powerlessness is any longer a legitimate reason for treating aliens as a ‘suspect class’ deserving of ‘heightened judicial solicitude.’” Post, at 41. The reader would infer from this analysis that Justice Rehnquist would uphold state enactments disadvantaging aliens unless those enactments are wholly irrational.
With respect, in my view it is Justice Rehnquist’s analysis that is wholly irrational; simply to state his proposition is to demonstrate its logical flaws. Most obviously, his exegesis of the Court’s reasons for according aliens “suspect class” status is simplistic to the point of caricature. By labeling aliens a “‘discrete and insular’ minority,” Graham v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 365, 372 (1971), the Court did something more than provide a historical description of their political standing. That label also reflected the Court’s considered conclusion that for most legislative purposes there simply are no meaningful differences between resident aliens and citizens, see Ambach v. Norwick, 441 U. S. 68, 75 (1979), so that aliens and citizens are “persons similarly circumstanced” who must “be treated alike.” F. S. Royster Guano Co. v. Virginia, 253 U. S. 412, 415 (1920). At the same time, both common experience and the unhappy history reflected in our cases, see Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 454 U. S. 432, 462-463 (1982) (dissenting opinion); Ambach v. Norwick, 441 U. S., at 82 (dissenting opinion), demonstrate that aliens often have been the victims of irrational discrimination.
In combination, these factors — disparate treatment accorded a class of “similarly circumstanced” persons who historically have been disabled by the prejudice of the major*21ity — led the Court to conclude that alienage classifications “in themselves supply a reason to infer antipathy,” Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U. S. 256, 272 (1979), and therefore demand close judicial scrutiny. This understanding, which is at the heart of the Court’s modern alienage decisions, was unreservedly reaffirmed this Term in Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 454 U. S., at 438 (“citizenship is not a relevant ground for the distribution of economic benefits”).
Justice Rehnquist nevertheless suggests that the Court’s original understanding somehow has been undercut by “more recent decisions” recognizing that aliens may be excluded from the governmental process. For this proposition he cites Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, supra; Ambach v. Norwick, supra; and Foley v. Connelie, 435 U. S. 291 (1978). Again, with all due respect, Justice Rehnquist is simply wrong. The idea that aliens may be denied political rights is not a recently discovered concept or a newly molded principle that can be said to have eroded the prior understanding. To the contrary, the Court always has recognized that aliens may be denied use of the mechanisms of self-government, and all of the alienage cases have been decided against the backdrop of that principle. Indeed, this aspect of the alienage-equal protection doctrine was explored at length in Sugarman v. Dougall, 413 U. S. 634, 647-649 (1973), the second of the Court’s modern decisions in the area.2 See Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 454 U. S., at 438-442 (citing Sugarman); Ambach v. *22Norwick, 441 U. S., at 74 (citing Sugarman); Foley v. Connelie, 435 U. S., at 294-296 (citing Sugarman). Yet in cases contemporary with or postdating Sugarman the Court has experienced no noticeable discomfort in applying strict scrutiny to alienage classifications that did not involve political interests. See In re Griffiths, 413 U. S. 717 (1973); Examining Board v. Flores de Otero, 426 U. S. 572 (1976); Nyquist v. Mauclet, 432 U. S. 1 (1977).
It is not surprising, then, that none of the “more recent decisions” relied on by Justice Rehnquist so much as suggested that the Court’s earlier analysis had been undercut. Instead, those cases pointedly have declined to “retrea[t] from the position that restrictions on lawfully resident aliens that primarily affect economic interests are subject to heightened judicial scrutiny.” Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 454 U. S., at 439. See Ambach v. Norwick, 441 U. S., at 75 (that aliens may be denied political rights “is an exception to the general standard applicable to classifications based on alien-age”); Foley v. Connelie, 435 U. S., at 296. This reflects the Court’s proper judgment that the alienage cases are not irreconcilable or inconsistent with one another. For while the Court has recognized, as the Constitution suggests, that alienage may be taken into account when it is relevant — that is, when classifications bearing on political interests are involved — “[t]he distinction between citizens and aliens . . . ordinarily [is] irrelevant to private activity,” Ambach v. Norwick, 441 U. S., at 75 (emphasis added). And it hardly need be demonstrated that governmental distinctions based on irrelevant characteristics cannot stand. If this dual aspect of alienage doctrine is unique, it is because aliens constitute a unique class.3
*23Finally, even were I to accept Justice Rehnquist’s view that powerlessness is the end-all of alienage-equal protection doctrine, I would find preposterous his further suggestion that, because States do not violate -the Constitution when they exclude aliens from participation in the government of the community, the alien’s powerlessness therefore is constitutionally irrelevant. From the moment the Court began constructing modern equal protection doctrine in United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U. S. 144 (1938), it never has been suggested that the reason for a discrete class’ political powerlessness is significant; instead, the fact of powerlessness is crucial, for in combination with prejudice it is the minority group’s inability to assert its political interests that “curtail[s] the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.” Id., at 152-153, n. 4. The very powerlessness of a discrete minority, then, is itself the factor that overcomes the usual presumption that “ ‘even improvident decisions [affecting minorities] will eventually be rectified by the democratic process.’ ” Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U. S., at 272, quoting Vance v. Bradley, 440 U. S. 93, 97 (1979). If anything, the fact that aliens constitutionally may be — and generally are — formally and completely barred from participating in the process of self-government makes particularly profound the need for searching judicial review of classifications grounded on alienage. I might add that the Court explicitly has endorsed this seemingly self-evident proposition: in Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 426 U. S. 88 (1976), after noting that “[s]ome of [an alien’s] disadvantages stem directly from the Constitution itself,” the Court declared that “[t]he legitimacy of the delineation of the affected class [of aliens] buttresses the conclusion that it is ‘a “discrete and insular” minority’ . . . and, of course, is consistent with the premise that the class is one whose members suffer spe*24cial disabilities.” Id., at 102, n. 22. I find Justice Rehnquist’s attempt to stand this principle on its head perplexing, to say the least.
One of the few assertions that can be made with complete confidence about the Court’s alienage-equal protection decisions is that no opinion for the Court has ever so much as suggested that Justice Rehnquist’s lone dissent in Sugarman, 413 U. S., at 649 — which espoused a view similar to the one he hints at today — expressed the proper approach for deciding these cases. Of course, one cannot condemn another for sticking to his guns. Barring a radical change in the Court’s reasoning in cases concerning alienage, however, one can expect that today’s equal protection writing by Justice Rehn-QUIST will join his opinion in Sug arman, to use his phrase, as “lifeless words on the pages of these Reports.” Post, at 48.

 The Justice opines that “[i]f the Court has eschewed strict scrutiny in the ‘political process’ [alienage-equal protection] cases, it may be because the Court is becoming uncomfortable with the categorization of aliens as a suspect class.” Post, at 42, n. 12.

 Among other things, the Court noted in Sugarman that the State may exclude aliens from governmental positions “that go to the heart of representative government,” in an attempt “ ‘to preserve the basic conception of a political community.’” 413 U. S., at 647, quoting Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U. S. 330, 344 (1972). The Sugarman Court thus recognized the “State’s historical power to exclude aliens from participation in its democratic political institutions.” 413 U. S., at 648. This makes Justice Rehnquist’s analysis particularly perplexing; his discussion appears to suggest that Sugarman — decided in 1973 — somehow undercut the analysis of Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 426 U. S. 88 (1976). See post, at 40.

 Justice Rehnquist suggests that alienage classifications involving political interests are subjected to a lesser standard of review because “the strength of the State’s interest is great when it seeks to exclude aliens from its political processes.” Post, at 41, n. 12. This suggestion is inaccurate. Such classifications are permissible because the Court has rec*23ognized that they are likely to be based on meaningful distinctions: alienage “is a relevant ground for determining membership in the political community.” Cabell v. Chavez-Salido, 454 U. S. 432, 438 (1982).