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'''City of Boerne v. Flores''', 521 U.S. 507 (1997), was a Supreme Court case concerning the scope of Congress's enforcement power under the fifth section of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Contents

Facts

Result

Implications

External links

Notes

Facts

The case arose when the Catholic Archbishop of San Antonio applied for a building permit to enlarge a church in Boerne, Texas. Local zoning authorities denied the permit, relying on an ordinance governing building preservation in a historic district which, they argued, included the church. The Archbishop brought a lawsuit challenging the permit denial under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA, pronounced "rifra").
Congress had enacted RFRA in direct response to the Supreme Court's decision in ''Employment Division v. Smith'', 494 U.S. 872 (1990), wherein the Court had upheld—against a First Amendment challenge—an Oregon law criminalizing peyote use. RFRA was intended to protect the right of citizens to the free exercise of their religion above and beyond the degree to which the Court recognized it.
The rights that RFRA was intended to guarantee were imposed by Congress on the states. The vehicle by which Congress did this was the Fourteenth Amendment, and in particular that Amendment's fifth section, which gave Congress the power to enact legislation to protect the substantive rights guaranteed by the rest of the Amendment. Since the Amendment had been interpreted to implicitly incorporate the free-exercise provisions of the First Amendment and make them good against the states, Congress was able to use the Fourteenth Amendment to enact legislation designed to protect rights expressly guaranteed by the First.

Result

The Court, in an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, struck down RFRA as an unconstitutional use of Congress's enforcement powers. Because it was the Court that had the sole power of defining the substantive rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment—a definition to which Congress could not add and from which it could not subtract—and because RFRA was not legislation designed to have "congruence and proportionality" with the substantive rights that the Court had defined, Congress could not constitutionally enact RFRA. Although Congress could enact "remedial" or "prophylactic" legislation that guaranteed rights not exactly congruent with those defined by the Court, it could only do so in order to more effectively prevent, deter or correct violations of those rights actually guaranteed by the Court.
Moreover, remedial or prophylactic legislation ''still'' had to show "congruence and proportionality" between the end it aimed to reach (that is, the violations it aimed to correct), and the means it choose to reach those ends—that is, the penalties or prohibitions it enacted to prevent or correct those violations. Because RFRA was not reasonably remedial or prophylactic, it was unconstitutional.
The scope of this decision has been limited by the subsequent case of Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal. In a footnote, Chief Justice Roberts states that Flores holds RFRA unconstitutional only as to the states. While a reading of Flores does not lead itself to this conclusion, Gonzales does apply RFRA to federal statutes.
Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion,

Implications

''Flores'' is important for several reasons. One of them is that it introduced a completely new test for deciding whether Congress had exceeded its section-five powers: the "congruence and proportionality" test, a test that has proven to have great importance in the context of the Eleventh Amendment. Another reason was that it explicitly declared that the Court alone has the ability to state which rights are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet another was that it had First Amendment consequences too, in that it spelled the end for any legislative attempts to overturn ''Employment Division v. Smith''.
The "congruence and proportionality" requirement replaced the previous theory advanced in ''Katzenbach v. Morgan'' that the Equal Protection Clause is "a positive grant of legislative power authorizing Congress to exercise its discretion in determining the need for and nature of legislation to secure Fourteenth Amendment guarantees." Before the 1997 ''Boerne'' decision, ''Katzenbach v. Morgan'' was often interpreted as allowing Congress to go beyond, but not fall short of, the Court's interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.
But that is not how the majority opinion in ''Boerne'' interpreted ''Katzenbach'':
The holding of ''Boerne'' said that only the Court could interpret the Constitution, in order to maintain the "traditional separation of powers between Congress and the Judiciary." Also, ''Boerne''^[1] relied on arguments for protecting the rights that pertain to state governments^[2] based on "enumerated powers." The intent of ''Boerne'' was to prevent "a considerable congressional intrusion into the States' traditional prerogatives and general authority." The holding of ''Boerne'' specifically mentioned the state action doctrine of the ''Civil Rights Cases'' as a Court interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause that limits the "remedial or preventive" power of Congress.

External links

★ Full text at Cornell.edu

Notes

1. Kennedy's opinion for the Court, City of Boerne v. Flores
2. To support its argument that Congress lacked plenary power to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court pointed to a proposed enforcement provision which was rejected by the Congress that eventually approved the Fourteenth Amendment:
:"Democrats and conservative Republicans argued that the proposed Amendment would give Congress a power to intrude into traditional areas of state responsibility, a power inconsistent with the federal design central to the Constitution. Typifying these views, Republican Representative Robert Hale of New York labeled the Amendment 'an utter departure from every principle ever dreamed of by the men who framed our Constitution,' and warned that under it 'all State legislation, in its codes of civil and criminal jurisprudence and procedures … may be overridden, may be repealed or abolished, and the law of Congress established instead.' Senator William Stewart of Nevada likewise stated the Amendment would permit 'Congress to legislate fully upon all subjects affecting life, liberty, and property,' such that 'there would not be much left for the State Legislatures,' and would thereby 'work an entire change in our form of government.'"
521 U.S. at 521 (citations omitted).