Court Opinion

ID: 9651911
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:58:58.852645+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:43.073695
License: Public Domain

MADDEN, Judge
(concurring in the result).
I agree with the decision of the court, but, because of the importance and variety of the problems presented, I make the following additional observations.
Nothing is claimed to have been done or said or written by any of the plaintiffs which was unlawful. No statute or legal doctrine is brought forward under which it is claimed that they could have been restrained before utterance or action, or punished thereafter by so much as a penny fine. And no indirect adverse legal consequences were attached to what they said or did by any legal doctrine, or by statutes such as the Hatch Act, 18 U.S.C.A. § 61 et seq., or the various provisions in other acts disqualifying for Government employment members of organizations which advocate the overthrow of our constitutional form of government. It is not claimed that they violated those laws. In short, what they did was completely innocent and of interest or consequence to the law of the land as it then was, or, as to all persons except the three plaintiffs, as the law still is. And this was true without any resort to constitutional protections of freedom of utterance or action'. The law, wholly apart from the Constitution, did not touch what they had done. But as a consequence of their having done what they did, the three plaintiffs find themselves excommunicated, reduced to the status of three second-class citizens among all of the millions of their fellows. They find themselves subject to the same obligations as their fellow first-class citizens to obey the laws, pay taxes, and serve in the armed forces and on juries; but completely and perpetually disqualified from serving their Government in any of the thousands of positions in which any of the rest of us, if technically capable, may serve. It is not claimed that the three plaintiffs were not competent to perform, or did not faithfully perform, the duties of the positions they held.
Has Congress the power to remove, by statute, named individuals from Government service, and make them perpetually ineligible to hold positions in Government service because they have engaged in conduct which was entirely lawful? Section 304 purports to do this. If it in fact accomplishes it, it has accomplished, under the guise of law, a shocking and outrageous injustice, unique in our history, and discouraging because it follows one hundred and fifty years of experience under the best Government men have devised. The court’s problem is not, of course, whether Section 304 is unjust, but whether it is unconstitutional. But when the injustice of the particular law is so shocking, and the threat of its repetition and extension is so menacing to our institutions, as in the case of Section 304, one can hardly be blamed for saying to himself, even before he consults the text of the Constitution, “If the Constitution is the charter of liberty and free government which I have always supported that it is, it does not permit this.”
*151If Section 304 is valid, Congress can disqualify for public office or service racial minorities, political minorities, and, probably, religious minorities. To do so would, indeed, be less unjust than what is done by Section 304. If a racial minority were excommunicated, the statute would at least have one quality of what we have been accustomed to regard as law, the quality of generality of application to all persons of an ascertainable class. No individual would have the finger of the state pointed at him, as these three plaintiffs have, saying “You are degraded, not because of the kind of person you are, for there may be thousands of persons just like you in all essential respects, who are still full citizens; not because of what you have done, for there may be thousands of persons who have done the same things, so far as those things are relevant to a rational state, as you have done. You are degraded because the state has selected you for degradation.” And a racial or other minority could under the constitutional protections which would apply even to second-class citizens, pool their resources and agitate for the repeal of the statute with some slight hope that in the turn of political events a powerful party might need the votes of this minority to insure its success, and hence would espouse its cause. But three individuals, such as these plaintiffs, are helpless. If they speak, who will listen? If they should happen to have the money to publish, who will read? Their appeal would appear to be completely selfish. The reaction would be: “Who are these persons, of the dominant race, of many generations of honorable American ancestry, to be complaining of discrimination ? I don’t know just what has happened to them, but if they can’t take care of themselves, nobody can.” And nobody can, if Section 304 is valid.
Section 304 is asserted by the plaintiffs to be unconstitutional because (1) it purports to remove the plaintiffs from executive offices, and no power of removal resides in the legislative branch of the Government, except, by impeachment; (2) it is a bill of attainder, or its equivalent, a bill of pains and penalties, which the Constitution forbids: and (3) it deprives .the plaintiffs of liberty and property without due process of law, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
I have no doubt that Section 304 is ’ a bill of pains and penalties and is therefore unconstitutional. It has the ancient flavor of the bills of attainder which were so odious to the makers of our Constitution that they forbade such laws in the main body of the Constitution and before the bill of rights later embodied in the first ten amendments was thought necessary, in that it, like the bills of attainder that the fathers were familiar with, selects its victims as named individuals, and not as persons belonging to any describable class. It punishes them by removal from office and income and disqualification from ever again serving their Government for compensation except in military or jury service. It thus imposes the same penalty which the Senate is authorized to impose, on conviction by a two-thirds vote after impeachment by the House, upon officers guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The question of whether the forfeiture of the right to pursue a public calling was punishment, so that a statute imposing it for past innocent conduct is an ex post facto law and a bill of pains and penalties was settled right in the cases of Cummings, the priest, Cummings v. State of Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 18 L.Ed. 356, and Garland, the lawyer, Ex parte Garland, 4 Wall. 333, 18 L.Ed. 366.
I think Section 304 violates the Fifth Amendment in that it attempts to deprive the plaintiffs of liberty and property without due process of law. I recognize that the Fifth Amendment does not, like the Fourteenth, which applies only to state governmental action, expressly assure equal protection of federal laws. But a statute which selects persons for punitive action on a completely personal basis, with no attempt to treat similarly other persons similarly situated, is so foreign to our concepts of law that it is difficult to think of it as law at all, though it bears the stamp of legislative enactment. If a legislature refuses to define the conduct which it desires to punish, if done by A, in such terms that B and C and D will be equally punishable if they do it, but instead merely provides that A shall be punished if he does it, the legis*152lature engages, not in law making, but in arbitrary action. And this would be true, even if the statute did not, as Section 304 does, attempt to make punishable conduct which was wholly innocent when engaged in. There are indications in opinions of the courts, though the necessity for deciding the questions has not hitherto arisen, that the due process of law which is required by the Fifth Amendment would not be satisfied by the arbitrary selection by the legislature of certain named individuals to be the sole victims of penal laws. In Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, 535, 4 S.Ct. 111, 121, 292, 28 L.Ed. 232, where the arbitrary action of a state was in question, the court said:
“But it is not to be supposed that these legislative powers are absolute and despotic, and that the amendment prescribing due process of law is too vague and indefinite to operate as a practical restraint. It is not every act, legislative in form, that is law. Law is something more than mere will exerted as an act of power. It must be not a special rule for a particular person or a particular case, * * *”
The cases of Nichols v. Coolidge, 274 U.S. 531, 47 S.Ct. 710, 71 L.Ed. 1184, 52 A.L.R. 1081; Wallace v. Currin, 4 Cir., 95 F.2d 856; Minski v. United States, 6 Cir., 131 F.2d 614; United States v. Ballard, D.C.W.D.Ky., 12 F.Supp. 321, also indicate the same attitude toward governmental action in the guise of law which penalizes persons unequally. I think, therefore, that Section 304 is forbidden by the Fifth Amendment.
It is urged that Section 304, even if it would otherwise be invalid as a trespass by Congress upon the executive function of removal of executive officers, is saved by the provision that these plaintiffs might keep their positions if, within the period of a few months set by the statute, they were appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. But no other person in the country had to pursue such a course in order to obtain or hold those positions, or identical or comparable ones. The requirement was intended to be, and was, discriminatory and oppressive as to three selected individuals out of all the people in the country. Under a system of equal justice under law, the three plaintiffs should not be subjected, in order to get or hold a Government position, to any other or different requirements than the rest of us are subject to. And the Constitution, I think, forbids their being so oppressed.
It is, in effect, urged that even though Section 304 is unconstitutional for any or all .of the reasons suggested, there can be no relief for its victims because the Section is a part of an Appropriation Act, and the power of Congress to control expenditures is absolute. It may well be that under our Constitution, and under any constitution which might be devised for a free people, one branch of the Government could, temporarily at least, subvert the Government. The Judges might refuse to enforce legal rights or convict criminals. The President might order the Army and Navy to surrender to the enemy. Congress might refuse to raise or appropriate money to pay the President or the Justices of the Supreme Court and the other courts. But any of these imagined actions would not be taken pursuant to the Constitution, but would be acts of subversion and revolution, the exercise of mere physical power, not lawful authority. And conduct by any branch of the Government less ruinously subversive, but, so far as it goes, equally unconstitutional, is likewise an exercise of physical power rather than lawful authority. I do not think, therefore, that the power of the purse may be constitutionally exercised to produce an unconstitutional result such as a taking of a citizen’s liberty or property without due process of law, a conviction and punishment of a citizen for wholly innocent conduct, or a trespass upon the constitutional functions of another branch of the Government. And to whatever extent it is within the jurisdiction of a court to which the question is presented in litigation, to give judgment according to the Constitution, even though that requires the court to disregard a statute which conflicts with the Constitution, the judges are bound by their oaths to give such a judgment. In this case; therefore, we must disregard Section 304. Without it, the plaintiffs are in the position of having performed services for the Government, under lawful appointments for which the Government has refused to pay. Each of them is, therefore, entitled to a judgment.