City of Boerne v. Flores
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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.
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. (In other words, RFRA was supposed to "ratchet up" the rights of citizens—as opposed to ratcheting them down—which the Court in the earlier decision of Katzenbach v. Morgan had suggested was perfectly constitutional.)
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.
Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion, "Congress' power under §5, however, extends only to "enforc[ing]" the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court has described this power as "remedial," South Carolina v. Katzenbach, supra, at 326. The design of the Amendment and the text of §5 are inconsistent with the suggestion that Congress has the power to decree the substance of the Fourteenth Amendment's restrictions on the States. Legislation which alters the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause cannot be said to be enforcing the Clause. Congress does not enforce a constitutional right by changing what the right is. It has been given the power "to enforce," not the power to determine what constitutes a constitutional violation. Were it not so, what Congress would be enforcing would no longer be, in any meaningful sense, the "provisions of [the Fourteenth Amendment].""
Implications
City of Boerne 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.
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