The Volokh Conspiracy

On Friday, May 17, fifty-four Colorado Sheriffs filed a civil rights lawsuit in Federal District Court in Denver, against two anti-gun bills passed by the Colorado legislature in March. Joining the Sheriffs as Plaintiffs are the Colorado Farm Bureau, disabled persons, Outdoor Buddies (an organization that helps disabled persons participate in outdoor sports), the Colorado Outfitters Association (the trade association for hunting guides), the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the trade association for the firearms industry), magazine manufacturer Magpul, federally-licensed firearms dealers, the state’s largest shooting range, the Colorado State Shooting Association (governing body for the shooting sports in Colorado), and Women for Concealed Carry. The Complaint is available here.

The lawsuit involves House Bill 1224 (a sweeping ban on magazines, including small magazines) and House Bill 1229 (an unworkable system of background checks for temporary transfers of firearms, and for private sales). The Complaint alleges violations of the Second Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment (vagueness), and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A 38 minute video of the press conference announcing the suit is available on YouTube. In this case, I am representing the Sheriffs.

Friday afternoon, Grand County Sheriff Rodney Johnson joined the case, bringing the number of plaintiff Sheriffs to 55 out of the 62 elected County Sheriffs in Colorado. (Denver and Broomfield have appointed Sheriffs who run the jail, but do not have the comprehensive responsibilities of the elected Sheriffs.) The Complaint will be amended next week to reflect Sheriff Johnson’s participation.

Co-blogger Eugene Volokh recently linked to a Virginia state court decision striking down as unconstitutional a state law that allowed religious societies without official clergy to designate only one member as having the power to perform wedding ceremonies, while religious groups that do have clergy can designate more. The court concluded that the First and Fourteenth Amendments bar this law because “The General Assembly [Virginia's state legislature] cannot favor one type of religion over another without a compelling government interest and a narrowly tailored method.”

I think the same reasoning should lead to the invalidation of another form of religious discrimination in the marriage law of our beloved Commonwealth, which I blogged about in this 2009 post:

My fiancee and I are not religious, and we plan to have our wedding performed by Judge Jerry Smith of the Fifth Circuit, the federal judge I clerked for. Unfortunately, however, Judge Smith lives in Texas. This would be fine under state law if he were a minister or other religious leader; but secular wedding officiants must be state residents.

Virginia law allows any minister of a religious denomination to perform a wedding, even if he or she is not a resident. The same applies to religious leaders of faiths that don’t have any official ministers. Similarly, state law allows any Virginia resident to perform a wedding if he posts a bond, and permits federal and state judges resident in Virginia to officiate even without posting a bond. However, Virginia does not allow out-of-state judges or any other nonresident secular personages to officiate. Thus, we have a clear case of discrimination on the basis of religion. Nonresident ministers and other religious leaders can perform weddings in Virginia; but nonresident secular leaders cannot. This holds true even if the secular figure and the religious one are exactly identical in every respect other than the fact that one is religious and the other is not (e.g. – if they are equally skilled at performing weddings, have the same high standing in their respective communities, and so on).

Under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, courts strike down state laws that discriminate on the basis of religion unless the law in question passes “strict scrutiny.” To overcome the strict scrutiny hurdle, the state would have to show that the religious classification was “narrowly tailored” to the promotion of a “compelling state interest.” Without going into an exhaustive analysis, I think it highly unlikely that the Virginia marriage law can meet this standard. No good purpose is served by categorically forbidding the performance of marriages by nonresident secular figures, much less a “compelling state interest.”

In the end, my then-fiancee and I didn’t sue, and instead got married in the District of Columbia (in large part because she preferred a site in the District over the Virginia sites we looked at). But had we sued, I think we should have prevailed under the same reasoning as in the case noted by Eugene. The only difference between the two cases is that in one the state is discriminating in favor of some religious officiants relative to others, while in the other it is discriminating in favor of out-of-state religious officiants relative to out-of-state secular ones. But discrimination in favor of the religious against the secular is still clearly discrimination on the basis of religion, and thus subject to strict scrutiny. As the Supreme Court explained in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), “[N]either a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person ‘to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.’ Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers.” (emphasis added).

Hopefully, someone else will challenge this small but annoying example of unconstitutional religious discrimination in Virginia marriage law.

[Updated with link to Prof. Hayes's new paper.]

The man-bites-dog story of Germany legalizing then banning bestiality raises the question of the constitutionality of such laws in the U.S. Most states criminalize zoophilia, and in many places the bans have been enacted quite recently. Moreover, the laws are from time to time enforced.

The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to recognize a broad and very valuable liberty interest in sexual autonomy. Constitutional doctrine regards private sexual choices as vastly more important than other kinds of choices, and thus presumptively protected. Homosexual conduct is just a hot-button particular instance of the general principle. Constitutional protection of heterosexual conduct comes from the same source. Thus if laws against premarital heterosexual sex (with or without contraceptives), sodomy, etc. are unconstitutional – and I think it clear that courts would find them to be – this must be justified by some special protection for sexual choice.

Bestiality is private sexual conduct and thus prima facie requires a very good justification to regulate. Given that bestiality taboos existed long before animal rights movements, one can assume their legalization or delegalization is largely based on the old taboos or stereotypes, perhaps in the sheep’s clothing of animal rights. (Similarly in the VMI case, the Court refused to let the state “update” the rationale for an old practice to something that might sound more in line with current thinking.) But insisting that bestiality bans simply regulate animal welfare is insufficient. Those regulations do not typically intrude on protected interests.

Bestiality bans regulate human sexual expression. And in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, sex is special. The government can also regulate, even ban, consumer products, but not when they are condoms, because that is also a regulation of sexuality. Cock fighting can be banned not because the animal suffers, but because the government needs little excuse to ban any commercial activity. Sexual activity is different.

Similarly, while government can regulate animal cruelty, the Supreme Court recently struck down a law targeting “crush films” involving weird sexualized animal torture because the statute was not precisely tailored, and could sweep in some cases where animals did not in fact suffer. Blanket bestiality bans are not narrowly tailored. Thus many European countries make zoophilia legal, but punishable under existing animal welfare laws when cruelty can be shown – but it cannot be presumed.

Constitutional protection of sexual conduct is mostly valuable for conduct that is widely perceived as deviant – when it is someone else’s ox getting gored. Otherwise it is itself merely a tool for reaffirming current mores. With bestiality, one assumes that most folks have have no dog in the fight – and that is what makes it interesting to seriously consider the constitutional issues.

The closest analogy would not be gay sex, or straight sex, but rather other kinds of autonomous sexual activity like sex toys. There are still sex toy bans in some states, including some newly enacted ones. But they’ve been getting struck down since Lawrence by courts (including the Fifth Circuit) that read Lawrence as standing for general sexual libertarianism.

One could argue that ick factor aside, bestiality should if anything be more protected than the dominant social paradigm of 2-person sex. Once there are two people involved, it is a social issue, not purely “private.” Thus such laws can be justified by some purported negative social consequences: uncared for kids with heterosexual fornication; unmarried poor men for polygamy; mutation for incest. By these standards, bestiality (or any other kind of one-person sexual activity) is the most innocuous, as it involves only a person and his property. Spill-over effects on other humans are minimal.

The New York Times several years ago had a very sympathetic piece on Washington state men who have sex with horses, which strongly suggested, based on graphic evidence, that the horses were not unwilling, and that the men seemed reasonable people for whom the activity was meaningful. The bans may well be based on (not yet outmoded) stereotypes and biases.

After the sex toy cases, why not go whole hog and extend the protection of idiosyncratic autoerotic conduct to zoophilia? Indeed, Antonio Hayes, a Fellow at Cornell Law School, has a fascinating paper just posted on SSRN critically examining the various rationales for bestiality laws and finding them wanting. He stresses that animals do not necessarily find such practices painful, and may even enjoy them. As a political matter, I’m not bullish on the success of this argument. And I know this post will really get the animal rights folks’ goat, as the sex toy analogy assumes that animals are more like things than like people.

I should say at the outset that I approach this delicate subject sheepishly, but this development bears noting. In a rare example of a Western country taking steps to restrict previously recognized sexual liberties, Germany is seeking to ban bestiality. (Its supporters call it zoophilia – are opponents zoophobes?) This will presumably put out to pasture Germany’s erotic zoos, where visitors go beyond heavy petting.

Germany legalized bestiality in 1969, together with sodomy. When Justice Scalia analogized from the decriminalization of the latter to the former in his Lawrence dissent, he was widely denounced, but apparently the liberal Germans agreed with him, at least until now.

I suspect the motives behind the ban are entirely moralistic. Yet the government cannot come out and say so. Thus effort is made to distinguish the matter from Germany’s libertarian approach to sexual matters by suggesting the animals do not consent in the way consenting humans do. Yes, but they don’t consent to being bought or sold, or butchered, either, and they are not human, so consent is a red herring. This would not pass intermediate scrutiny in the U.S.

It is an invariable aspect of sexual morality regulation that those who regard a practice as amoral, or vile, also believe it has negative practical effects. The latter allows one regard one’s own knee-jerk preferences as sound social policy rather than moralizing. In today’s post-morality world, vestigal aversions to prostitution, polygamy and incest have to be justified with strained public policy arguments.

If erotic zoos are bad, it is not because, as critics contend, it is “animal rape,” any more than prohibitions on intercourse with human remains can be justified by the “non-consent” of the corpse. Requiring two-sided consent in zoophilia situations privileges the person/person intercourse model in a way which is neither neutral nor value-free.

Usually it is harder to roll back new social rights than to extend them – the “non-retrogression principle.” I’d be interested to see if the zoophiles mount a challenge based on European human rights law, and how it fares. Berlin may find it is closing the barn door after the animals have escaped.

This is the subject of my article in a forthcoming symposium issue of the Fordham Urban Law Journal. The article details the political, cultural, social, and legal battles over gun control from the 1920s to the early 21st century. Here’s the abstract:

A movement to ban handguns began in the 1920s in the Northeast, led by the conservative business establishment. In response, the National Rifle Association began to get involved in politics, and was able to defeat handgun prohibition. Gun control and gun rights became the subjects of intense political, social, and cultural battles for much of the rest of the 20th century, and into the 21st.

Often, the battles were a clash of absolutes: One side contended that there was absolutely no right to arms, that defensive gun ownership must be prohibited, and that gun ownership for sporting purposes could be, at most, allowed as a very limited privilege. Another side asserted that the right to arms was absolute, and that any gun control laws were infringements of that right.

By the time that Heller and McDonald came to the Supreme Court, the battles had mostly been resolved; the Supreme Court did not break new ground, but instead reinforced what had become the American consensus: the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, especially for self-defense, is a fundamental individual right. That right, however, is not absolute. There are some gun control laws which do not violate the right, particularly laws which aim to keep guns out of the hands of people who have proven themselves to be dangerous.

In the post-Heller world, as in the post-Brown v. Board world, a key role of the courts will be to enforce federal constitutional rights against some local or state jurisdictions whose extreme laws make them outliers from the national consensus.

Also recently published in SSRN is a very good draft article by David Hardy, analyzing the four opinions in McDonald v. Chicago. As he persuasively shows, the arguments by Justice Stevens and Breyer against enforcing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms against the states would, if taken seriously, cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of enforcing against the states almost everything else in the Bill of Rights.

Over at Balkinization, Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern) has an interesting and thoughtful post on the state of originalism. Synthesizing analysis by Jamal Greene and Jack Balkin, Koppelman writes, “Originalism is fundamentally about a narrative of rhetorical self-identification with the achievements of a founding historical moment. That is the real basis of its power. An originalist argument will be powerful to the extent that can persuade its audience that it can keep faith with that identification.”

Thus, “Originalist argument is an artifact designed to recall the Constitution’s origin and connect what we are doing now with that origin. Once this functional definition of originalism is understood, it follows that the range of possible original arguments is quite broad. It is not, however, infinite.” So, argues Koppelman, the fact that originalists differ among themselves in many important details about what “originalism” really is, is not a fatal flaw. Simiilarly, there are many different things called “aspirin” (e.g., Excedrin, generic products, St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin, etc.), but they all contain acetylsalicylic acid, and they all have a generally similar function. Which particular one you use at a given time will depend on the particular purposes for which it is needed.

I do want to quibble, though, with one particular legal history claim that Koppelman makes: “Thus originalists struggle with the problem whether the general purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, to mandate the legal equality of blacks, should trump the framers’ specific intention to permit school segregation and miscegenation laws.”  Michael McConnell and Randy Barnett have written on the school segregation issue, but I’d like to add something on miscegenation. I don’t think that the historical record unambiguously supports the claim of a specific intent in the 14th Amendment to allow the continuation of laws against interracial marriage.

We do know for certain that one very specific intention of the 14th Amendment framers was to provide a solid constitutional foundation for the Civil Rights Act of 1866. According to the Act: “All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, . . . as is enjoyed by white citizens. . .”

Early exposition by courts is one source of original public meaning. (Although this source is not always guaranteed to be reliable. See, e.g., the Slaughter-House majority’s dicta). In 1872, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the state’s 1866 constitutional ban on miscegenation  violated the “cardinal principle” of the Civil Rights Act and of the Equal Protection clause. Burns v. State, 48 Ala. 195 (1872). According to the unanimous Burns court, the idea that contracts could be limited to members of the same race was absurd: “Marriage is a civil contract, and in that character alone is dealt with by the municipal law. The same right to make a contract as is enjoyed by white citizens, means the right to make any contract which a white citizen may make. The law intended to destroy the distinctions of race and color in respect to the rights secured by it. It did not aim to create merely an equality of the races in reference to each other. If so, laws prohibiting the races from suing each other, giving evidence for or against, or dealing with one another, would be permissible. The very excess to which such a construction would lead is conclusive against it.”

That same year, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled that  the “the law prohibiting such a [common law] marriage [between a white and a black] had been abrogated by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” Bonds v. Foster, 36 Tex. 68 (1872) (inheritance case). As detailed in Peggy Pascoe’s book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (2010), in the years after the Civil War, eleven states repealed their bans on interracial marriage.

It was the Indiana Supreme Court  that figured out the way to evade the clear statutory language about the equal right of contract. According to the court, marriage is  ”more than a mere civil contract”; it is an institution fundamental to society. The Indiana court insisted at length that the 14th Amendment had not limited the traditional police power of the states. If Congress could ban states from imposing a racial  mandate on the right to enter a marriage contract, then Congress would (supposedly) have the power to legislate on all aspects of marriage. State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389 (1871).

I don’t find the Indiana court’s 1871 reasoning persuasive, and, apparently, neither did the Alabama and Texas Supreme Courts in 1872. But courts cannot stand forever against the sustained will of the electorate. After four losses, the proponents of anti-miscegenation won on their fifth try in the Alabama Supreme Court. When the courts in the various states finally acquiesced to anti-miscegenation laws, Gibson was the essential citation, because it came from a state where slavery had never legally existed. The Texas intermediate Court of Appeals provided the legal reformulation that marriage was “status” and not “contract,” and was therefore not covered by the Civil Rights Act: “Marriage is not a contract protected by the Constitution of the United States, or within the meaning of the Civil Rights Bill. Marriage is more than a contract within the meaning of the act. It is a civil status, left solely by the Federal Constitution and the laws to the discretion of the states, under their general power to regulate their domestic affairs.” Frasher v. State, 3 Tex. App. 263 (Tex. Ct. App. 1877). (The regressive Frasher decision is one more data point in support of the observation in Henry Sumner Maine’s great 1861 book Ancient Law: “we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.” Maine’s book elaborates in great detail why marriage law fits this paradigm.)

By the time that Plessy v. Ferguson was decided in 1896, the Supreme Court majority, which was willfully oblivious to contemporary social reality (e.g., if blacks consider a segregation mandate to be a “a badge of inferiority,” that is “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it”) , was also lazily ignorant of legal history: “Laws forbidding the intermarriage of the two races may be said in a technical sense to interfere with the freedom of contact, and yet have been universally recognized as within the police power of the state.” The sole citation for this allegedly “universal” recognition was State v. Gibson. The Court was right that as of 1895, miscegenation laws were constitutionally safe, but the Court seemed quite unaware that during the first years when the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act were the law of the land, the issue was in dispute.

Although the late Professor Pascoe’s book is suffused with critical race/gender theory, readers who find such theories useless will still find Pascoe’s book enormously useful. It is an excellent legal history of anti-miscegenation laws and cases, and not just during Reconstruction. You will learn about the national panic to spread such laws during the early 20th century because the black boxer Jack Johnson (who defeated a string of opponents who were billed as “the Great White Hope”) notoriously consorted with white women; how courts struggled with interpreting miscegenation laws in the West (which were mainly aimed at Asians, and which raised questions such as whether a ban on white marriage to “the Mongolian or Malay races” applied to Filipinos); the NAACP’s political opposition to new miscegenation laws coupled with its great reluctance to mount legal challenges to existing ones; and the extremely risky litigation (not endorsed by NAACP) which led to the landmark 1948 California Supreme Court Perez v. Lippold decision (won mainly on void for vagueness, the fundamental unenumerated right to marry, and First Amendment  free exercise of religion, rather than a categorical attack on all racial discrimination).

Justice Carter’s concurrence in Perez is a good illustration of the main thesis of Koppelman’s post, and of the point made by the second Justice Harlan (and also by Jack Balkin) that our “tradition is a living thing,” in which our national understanding of the original meaning can be deepened by new experiences. Rebutting respondent’s collection of social scientists who contended that race-mixing was destructive to the health of the white race, Justice Carter quoted some essentially similar claims from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Justice Carter continued: “To bring into issue the correctness of the writings of a madman, a rabble-rouser, a mass-murderer, would be to clothe his utterances with an undeserved aura of respectability and authoritativeness. Let us not forget that this was the man who plunged the world into a war in which, for the third time, Americans fought, bled, and died for the truth of the proposition that all men are created equal.” And so, “In my opinion, the statutes here involved violate the very premise on which this country and its Constitution were built, the very ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the very issue over which the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Second World War were fought, and the spirit in which the Constitution must be interpreted in order that the interpretations will appear as ‘Reason in any part of the World besides.’”

By a vote of 272 to 154. (The vote on the motion to recommit was 161 to 263). On the final vote, 44 Democrats voted in favor, and 7 Republicans voted against. H.R. 822 now goes to the Senate. In the previous Congress, a broader bill on interstate carry was narrowly defeated by a filibuster led by Sen. Charles Schumer. Of course whether the bill ever comes up for a vote in the Senate is up to Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In September, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, in support of the bill. My testimony focused mainly on the Congress’s constitutional authority to pass the bill under the powers granted by section 5 of the 14th Amendment. Among the explicit purposes of the 14th Amendment was to give Congress the power to enact legislation protecting the right to interstate travel, which is one of the Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States. My written testimony is here. A video of the subcommittee hearing is here. And here’s short podcast on the subject, with Cato.

HT to Shall Not Be Questioned for coverage of the day’s voting, in which all hostile amendments were defeated.

On Tuesday I testified before the U.S. House subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, regarding H.R. 822, which would set up a national system of interstate reciprocity for concealed handgun carry permits. My 24-page written testimony is here. The video of the subcommittee hearing is about and hour and 45 minutes. Nearly all members of the 21-member attended the hearing, and used their opportunity to ask 5 minutes worth of questions. Most of the questions posed to George Mason Law’s Prof. Joyce Malcolm, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and me, were quite thoughtful. Some congressional hearings are just a form of kabuki theater, but in Tuesday’s hearing, Representatives of both parties, and on both sides of the gun issue, seemed to be sincerely trying to learn more. The bill currently has 243 House co-sponsors.

In this iVoices.org podcast, Rob Natelson explains why unilateral presidential creation of new debt is: 1. Utterly contrary to the Constitution’s structure of limiting executive power. 2. Directly contrary to the text of the 14th Amendment. President Obama, to his credit, declaimed any unilateral power to raise the debt ceiling. But many people–some of whom have taken oaths to uphold the Constitution, or who profess respect for constitutional law–have insisted that the President has unilateral debt power. And since the current deal that is being rushed through Congress may slightly delay the insolvency of the federal government, but not prevent it, understanding what the 14th Amendment says about the issue remains important. Rule of law, not an elective dictatorship.

At CNN, Politico, National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog, and at the Susan B. Anthony List website, you can read the developing controversy over some Republican presidential candidates’ refusal to sign the SBA Lists’ “2012 Pro-Life Citizen’s Pledge.”

Signers thus far are Bachmann, Gingrich, Pawlenty, Paul, and Santorum. The items on the pledge are:

FIRST, to nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;

SECOND, to select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;

THIRD, to advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;

FOURTH, advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.

Of the candidates who have refused to sign, Mitt Romney objects because the wording of the demand to cut on federal abortion funding could be construed to stop federal aid to many hospitals; further, he refuses to make pro-life a litmus test for his executive branch appointments, as long as the appointees are willing to abide by (President) Romney’s own pro-life views. Herman Cain says he would “sign” the pain bill, but will not take the pledge to “advance” the bill, because “Congress must advance the legislation,” and he must have ”respect for the balance of power and the role of the presidency.”

Thus, of the announced candidates, we have only Gov. Gary Johnson who might have constitutional scruples about the federal pain bill.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which has been enacted in several states, requires that physicians provide a woman who is at least 20 weeks pregnant, and who is seeking an abortion, with information to obtain informed consent about the pain that the fetus will feel during the abortion.

The PCUCPA is probably constitutional under Planned Parenthood v. Casey, since it does not ban pre-viability abortions, and the lower courts have not generally found other informed consent laws for abortion to be an “undue burden,” as Casey defines that term.

However, a federal PCUCPA is plainly unconstitutional under the “original meaning” of the Constitution, which judges appointed by SBA Pledge signers would presumably uphold. The federal version of PCUCPA is S. 314, introduced by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.). After the definitions section of the proposed statute, the bill states: “Any abortion provider in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, who knowingly performs any abortion of a pain-capable unborn child, shall comply with the requirements of this title.”

Federal abortion control under the purported authority of congressional power “To regulate Commerce...among the several States” is plainly unconstitutional under the original meaning of the interstate commerce.

Even under the lax (but non-infinite) version of the interstate commerce power which the Court articulated in Lopez,  a federal ban on partial-birth abortion is dubious, as Glenn Reynolds and I argued in a Connecticut Law Review article. Indeed, in the 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the federal ban, Gonzales v. Carhart, Justices Thomas and Scalia, who voted in the majority to uphold the ban as not violating the Casey abortion right, concurred to point out “that whether the Act constitutes a permissible exercise of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause is not before the Court. The parties did not raise or brief that issue; it is outside the question presented; and the lower courts did not address it.”

In other words, if the attorneys who challenged the federal ban on partial-birth abortions had been willing to raise all plausibile constitutional claims, instead of losing the case 4-5 they probably could have won 6-3, by assembling a coalition of 4 strongly pro-abortion-rights Justices, plus Scalia and Thomas on the commerce issue.

When we get beyond Lopez, and truly look at original meaning, then the unconstitutionality of the federal PCUCPA is obvious. In Gibbons v. Ogden, Chief Justice Marshall explained that “health laws of every description” are outside the scope of the federal commerce power. The statement has been cited with approval by other Supreme Court justices at least 20 times. As Wickard v. Filburn observed, the Marshall opinion in Gibbons “described the Federal commerce power with a breadth never yet exceeded.” Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 120 (1942). (For more on Marshall’s views about federal health control, see this article by Rob Natelson and me.)

Marshall’s opinion in Gibbon may be considered the outer boundary of any originalist interpretation of the interstate commerce power. What doctors tell patients before providing abortions is obviously not interstate commerce, all the more so since the vast majority of patients do not cross state lines to obtain abortions.

Yale’s Jack Balkin makes the argument that in the original meaning, “commerce” means “intercourse,” and thus the original meaning allows a vast amount of federal regulation of intra-state, non-economic activity. Rob Natelson and I explained the errors in this theory in an on-line article for the Michigan Law Review.

Presumably the Republican signers of the SBA pledge would not assert that the appointment of judges who accept Balkin’s “commerce = intercourse” theory of original meaning would comport with President’s pledge to appoint judges who would follow original meaning. All of the Republican presidential candidates have said that the Obamacare individual mandate to purchase expensive congressionally-designed health insurance from the congressionally-favored insurance oligopoly is unconstitutional. Balkin’s intercourse theory, however, would support the constitutionality of the mandate.

The signing of the SBA pledge by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) is particularly disappointing, since Paul has usually made a point of being scrupulous about federal powers. Indeed, Paul was the sole “pro-gun” Representative who voted against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, a federal statute which outlawed lawsuits, in federal and state courts, against the manufacturers, wholesalers, and lawful retailers of firearms for guns which were lawfully sold and properly functioning. Paul’s argument was that the law exceeded the federal power to regulate interstate commerce; I disagree, since the undisputed original purpose of the interstate commerce power was to empoower Congress to act against state barriers to interstate commerce. The anti-gun lawsuits were plainly an effort to use fanciful tort theories to damage the entire national market in firearms, by imposing on that market many restrictions which had been considered and rejected by Congress and the state legislatures.

Thus, in regard to the anti-gun lawsuits, Paul’s scruples were mistaken, in my view, but he deserves credit for being sincerely scrupulous. I wish that he, and the rest of the Reublican presidential field, kept their constitutional scruples intact regarding federal anti-abortion legislation.

While the federal PCUCPA does not invoke section 5 of the 14th Amendment as a basis for the legislation, it is possible to construct an argument that some federal anti-abortion laws could be based on that power. However, it’s hard to base such an argument on the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, since there is not a shred of evidence in the 1865-68 history of the creation and ratification of the 14th Amendment (nor in the immediate post-ratification period, nor for nearly a century after ratification) that anyone imagined that the 14th Amendment empowered Congress to enact abortion-control laws, or guaranteed abortion rights.

So if a Republican who signs the SBA pledge is elected President, and he or she adheres to item 1 in the SBA pledge, appointing judges who adhere to the Constitution’s original meaning, then those judges will uphold state versions of the PCUCPA while declaring unconstitutional a federal PCUCPA.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ffBXm7kJkk[/youtube]

A wonderful song at all times, and especially around Independence Day, especially this year.

“The Battle Cry of Freedom” was written during the Civil War, and sung by Union troops going into battle. This video pays tribute to Ulysses Grant, the General most responsible for winning the war for the Union. Elected President of the U.S. in 1868 and re-elected in 1872, U.S. Grant vigorously enforced federal civil rights laws to protect the freedmen. Not until Lyndon Johnson in 1963-69 would an American President work with such determination for civil rights. After leaving the White House, Grant served as the 8th President of the National Rifle Association.

The National Rifle Association’s brief in McDonald v. Chicago quoted President Grant:

Subsequently, President Grant issued a report on enforcement of the Civil Rights Act which noted that parts of the South were under the sway of the Klan, which sought “to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms,” and to reduce them “to a condition closely akin to that of slavery * * *.” Ex. Doc. No. 268, 42nd Cong., 2d Sess., 2 (1872).

The brief  likewise quoted a report from General Grant about the conditions in Mississippi which had helped convince Congress of the necessity of the Fourteenth Amendment, to make the Second Amendment applicable to all state and local governments:

“The statute prohibiting the colored people from bearing arms, without a special license, is unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 2d Sess., 33 (1866).

McDonald v. Chicago brings the United States an important step closer to accomplishing a central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment: making all of the Bill of Rights applicable to every state and local government in America. It was a national tragedy that the Supreme Court essentially nullified much of the Fourteenth Amendment for so long. It is a national blessing that America’s many civil rights organizations were able, over the long term, to revitalize the Fourteenth Amendment, and change the Supreme Court from a nullifier of the Amendment into an enforcer of the Amendment.

Last month, retired Justice David Souter delivered the commencement address at Harvard.  His speech was a veiled challenge to proponents of originalism. Some commentators, such as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick,  and TalkLeft’s Big Tent Democrat were impressed.  Others, not so much.

In today’s WSJ, Northwestern University’s John McGinnis and USD’s Michael Rappaport take issue with Justice Souter, suggesting he misunderstands original meaning jurisprudence and inadvertently justifies the jurisprudential methodology that produced such horrors as Plessy v. Ferguson.  Here is a taste:

At the recent Harvard commencement, retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter attacked what he regards as the “simplistic” model of giving the Constitution a “fair reading.” A judge, he said, must determine which of the conflicting constitutional values should become our fundamental law by taking account of new social realities. . . .

Justice Souter actually provided a primer on how not to be a judge. He made up a Constitution that never was to justify a kind of judicial power that was never intended. . . .

Justice Souter recognizes that his method of interpreting the Constitution is indeterminate, but he argues that it is necessary to put our trust in justices to reach just results. The historical reality is that this interpretive method permitted justices to create a Constitution of their own contrivance in the service of injustice.

Read David Bernstein’s excellent blog post. Unfortunately, because the title of David’s post referred to Bruce Bartlett and not Rand Paul, some seeking a “libertarian” take on this issue may overlook his analysis. To David’s libertarian analysis I would add the following considerations pertaining to the original meaning of the Constitution:

(1) The problem of Jim Crow in the South was a direct product of slavery–indeed it was a deliberate and concerted effort by Southerners to reimpose slavery in everything but name. Slavery was a private as well as a public institution, which is why the Thirteenth Amendment was not limited to state action. As such, even private conduct that amounted to “badges and incidents” of slavery should have been reachable by Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment, which empowered Congress to make laws to put that provision into effect. It was under Section 2 that Republicans in Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Freedman’s Bureau Act. Whether or not these acts were truly within the original meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment is, of course, a matter of dispute. I think the better analysis of the Thirteenth Amendment was explained by Justice Harlan in his dissenting opinions in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson. The opposing view that limited the reach of the Thirteenth Amendment was articulated by President Andrew Johnson — a “War Democrat” — when he vetoed the Civil Rights Act in his highly racist veto message. Because Johnson’s reading of the Thirteenth Amendment has largely prevailed among legal scholars of all stripes, Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment is generally overlooked in debates concerning the scope of Congressional power over “private” conduct.

(2) As David mentioned, the South systematically denied free blacks, and whites who wished to deal with them on an equal footing, the (equal) protection of the law. During Reconstruction, Republicans in Congress tried to respond to this with a series of civil rights measures–including measures reaching public accommodations–that were struck down by the Supreme Court. Thereafter, “private” discrimination that existed in public accommodations was enforced by private terrorism from which no one was safe–most particularly no one who owned a business with a fixed location. In the end, (to paraphrase Justice Holmes’s infamous aphorism) 100 years of legal apartheid was enough! — as was 100 years of private violence aimed at blacks and anyone who associated with them publicly. The back of this egregious system of subordination and terrorism needed to be broken — thanks to the leadership of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and Northern liberal Democrats, with the crucial support of congressional Republicans like Senator Everett Dirkson, and over the vociferous objection of Southern Democrats. Whether or not courts could rectify this system, I believe that Congress was well within its Section 5 powers under the Fourteenth Amendment to compensate for the deeply entrenched lack of equal protection by desegregating all public accommodations. The pity is that, out of respect for its Reconstruction-era precedent, the Supreme Court chose to uphold it as an exercise of its Commerce Clause power rather than either Section 5 or Section 2 of the Thirteenth, although we forget that some of the Warren Court justices protested that Section 5 was the better the basis for the decision.

(3) For these reasons (and others), in addition to those given by David, the prohibition on racial discrimination in public accommodations was amply justified by the original meaning of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. But if that is not the case, in light of the fact that slavery was held to be sanctioned by the original Constitution for 80 years (over the objection of abolitionist constitutionalists), and the subordination of blacks continued for another 100 years after the formal abolition of slavery, if any deviation from original meaning is ever justified, it would be justified in interpreting Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment, and Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to reach the racial discrimination banned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

There is much more to be said about this than can be said in 2 blog posts. On the one hand, the evidence of original meaning of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment is complicated. On the other hand, at least some of the academic resistance to these originalist claims stem from a desire to discredit originalism (and libertarianism) on this issue, so it will be delegitimated on other issues having nothing to do with discrimination. Because I am now immersed in grading exams to which I need to return I cannot say any more now. But I am grateful to David for getting the ball rolling, and I wanted to make sure that readers interested in the Rand Paul controversy found David’s post, and might also consider these additional points concerning the original meaning of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Part 2 of 3-part series. This installment, “The Origins of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Part II: John Bingham’s Epiphany,” has a very detailed analysis of changes in the drafts of the 14th Amendment.  Lash argues that the drafting history shows that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to protect every part of Amendments I through VIII, but not to protect any unenumerated rights.

I’m still inclined to a broader view of the 14th Amendment, but perhaps I will change my mind after reading Part III of the series. Regardless, anyone with an interest in the original meaning of the 14th Amendment will benefit from reading this article. Obviously the aforesaid group does not include most of the current Justices of the Supreme Court.

Thus far, the argument among law professors over the constitutionality of Obamacare has been well represented by scholars who have made pro and con arguments over particular clauses in the constitution, such as the interstate commerce clause, or the tax power. In this post, I would like to examine an insight by Jonathan Turley, which points the way to strong, recent, and repeated precedent suggesting that Obamacare is unconstitutional.

Let’s begin by getting rid of the red herring that questioning the constitutionality of Obamacare requires denying the constitutionality of the New Deal and the Great Society. Orin asks:

In your view, which of the following federal programs or agencies are constitutional?

(a) Social Security
(b) The Federal Trade Commission
(c) Medicare/Medicaid
(d) The Securities and Exchange Commission
(e) The new Health Care mandate

In my view, (a), (b), (c), and (d), are constitutional, but (e) is not. My answer is based on using “constitutional” in the normal sense of the word as it appears in most modern public dialogue. That is, “Should a judge who accurately applies existing precedents, and other sources of legal authority, find the law to be constitutional?” This is the question that federal district judges and circuit court of appeal judges will have to answer, since they have no authority to reject Supreme Court precedent. The Supreme Court can change its own precedents, but for for purposes of argument, I am presuming that the Supreme Court would not overrule any precedents.

As Jack Balkin, Sandy Levinson, and others have ably pointed out, “constitutional” can be used in a different way, in that people express aspirations about what the Constitution should mean, even if that meaning is contrary to current precedents. For example, a person in 1946 might say “Discrimination against women is unconstitutional.” That person would not be describing the current state of the law, but would be making an argument that constitutional intepretation should be changed. Often, these aspirational statements do become constitutional law, especially when they win the hearts and minds of the public. Some of the 1930s decisions upholding parts of the New Deal or its state analogues are examples of the success of this aspirational constitutional rhetoric.  For example, the statement in 1890 that “mortgage relief laws are constitutional and do not violate the Contract Clause” would have been  incorrect in regard to Supreme Court precedent, and was utterly contrary to the original meaning of the Contract Clause. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court later changed its intepretation of the Contract Clause, so that the aspirational statement became an accurate description of the law.

People are free to argue all they want, on the basis of aspiration, original meaning, or anything else, that items (a) through (d) on Orin’s list are unconstitutional. If these people persuade enough of their fellow Americans, perhaps the Court might eventually narrow or overturn some of the precedents which uphold (a) through (d). However, my argument is based on the law as it actually exists today, and it presumes the continuing validity of all the New Deal and Great Society precedents.

Some parts of Obamacare, such as the calorie labeling requirement for restaurant chains, appear to be solidly within the scope of existing precedents. (At least based on the discussion I’ve heard thus far.)

In contrast, the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is not. It “is unprecedented in our jurisprudence.” Romer v. Evans (1996). It is possible to make arguments for extensions of cases such as Wickard, Raich, and Sonzinsky in support of the mandate. However, such arguments are a plea for extending those cases, not for merely applying them. For example, an application of Wickard/Raich might be a law against a person manufacturing her own medicine at home, rather than purchasing the medicine through the federally-controlled market.

No prior case stands for the proposition that Congress may use the interstate commerce power to order persons to buy a particular product, or may use the tax power to punish people for choosing not to purchase a particular product. I can imagine a judicial opinion that builds on the foundation of Wickard, Raich, and Sonzinsky, and extends those cases much further, in order to uphold the mandate. The Court might do so, but the Court would be doing much more than merely applying precedent.

At this stage in the debate, the only cited instance of Congress ever forcing people to buy particular products have come under the congressional exercise of the enumerated militia powers in Article I, section 8, clause 16, “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia. . .” Here, the congressional power to mandate is provided in the text itself. Further, the original understanding of the militia was that the militiamen ”were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.” United States v. Miller  (1939). The congressional power to provide for arming the militia straightforwardly includes the power to tell militiamen what kind of arms to bring to duty.

The federal militia powers come from the state militia powers, which (by enacting the Constitution) the People and the States chose to give (at least concurrently) to Congress. No one could possibly dispute that state militia powers included the power to require militiamen to bring certain types of arms to duty, and thus to require the purchase of such arms if necessary. The federal power to regulate commerce among the several states was likewise granted to Congress from the powers which were then possessed by the States and by the People. There was certainly no understanding in 1789 that state power to regulate interstate commerce (e.g., by inspecting goods at ports of entry) included the power to compel individuals to purchase goods in commerce.

So neither the Militia arming clause nor any cases provide precedent for the unprecedented mandate to purchase insurance. At best, the mandate is in a constitutional gray zone. To resolve the gray zone question, we are not limited to wondering whether to greatly extend some prior cases on the interstate commerce clause or the tax power. In addition, we can consider the structure of the Constitution itself.

As Jonathan Turley has written, allowing the individual mandate to stand “could amount to a ‘do not resuscitate’ order for federalism.” If judges find this argument (in the greatly eleborated form that will eventually be presented to the courts) to be persuasive, then the Supreme Court precedent is very clear. Several recent cases, including Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (1996), Alden v. Maine (1999), City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), United States v. Morrison (2000), Board of Trustees of University of Alabama v. Garrett (2001), and Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v. Hibbs (2003)  have demonstrated the Court’s persistent determination to defend state sovereign immunity. Some of these cases involved the Eleventh Amendment, and some involved the Fourteenth (Cong. powers under sect. 5). In one case (Hibbs), the federal abrogation of sovereign immunity was upheld, partly because the federal law involved a state practice (sex discrimination) that was already unconstitutional.

These decisions have been heavily criticized by the academic Left, and the critics have pointed out that these decisions have much less to do with the constitutional text, or with original meaning of the text, than they do with the Court’s broad view of constitutional structure: the essential nature of state sovereignty, and one of the attributes of sovereignty, namely sovereign immunity.

According to the Court, a Congressional statute making it easier for states to be sued for patent infringement is such a serious violation of federalism that it must be held unconstitutional. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Board v. College Savings Bank (1999).  (Eugene Volokh’s article on the case is here.) In terms of the practical harm to state sovereignty, the congressional law on patent suits is to Obamacare as a house cat is to lion.

The extensive line of recent cases on state sovereignty is complemented by the Ninth Amendment. The Ninth Amendment may be read to create a presumption of liberty. Randy Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2005). Or it may be read as requirement that enumerated federal powers be narrowly construed so that they do not violate the retained natural rights of the people, including the people’s right of self-government in the states. Kurt Lash,  The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment (2009).  Either reading raises further doubts about the constitutionality of the insurance mandate.

As the joint complaint of the 13 Attorneys General has argued, Obamacare constitutes an immense assault on federalism. If Obamacare is upheld, the states may be well on the way to becoming like the Roman Senate in 100 A.D.: formerly the an essential component of republican sovereignty, but now a hollowed remnant, possessing the forms of the old republic but really functioning as a mere puppet of the Leviathan.   

“[F]ederalism was the unique contribution of the Framers to political science and political theory,” wrote Justice Kennedy. United States v. Lopez (1995) (concurring). To declare Obamacare to be unconstitutional, the Court may take into account the importance of preserving the unique contribution of Our Federalism. In doing so, the Court need not overrule a single precedent, nor need the Court cast into doubt any of the creations of the New Deal or the Great Society. Instead, the Court may simply choose not to invent unprecedented extensions of the interstate commerce power and the tax power.

From federal district court to the Supreme Court, the judges and justices who decide to leave constitutional doctrine exactly as it is today will decline to validate the unprecedented exercise of power in Obamacare. The last fourteen years of the Supreme Court determination to defend our precious constitutional system of dual sovereignty gives reason to hope that the courts will apply the existing law rather than make up new law, and that the insurance mandate will be declared unconstitutional.

And then: Over two thousand pages of laws certainly contain items (e.g., restaurant menu labeling, tanning taxes) that theoretically could have been enacted separately from the mandate, and might be considered severable. But the main provision of Obamacare–turning private insurance companies into ultra-regulated public utilities–makes no sense without the individual mandate; it would not have been enacted without the mandate, and it is not severable.