Congressional power of enforcement
This article needs additional citations for verification. (February 2024) |
A Congressional power of enforcement is included in a number of amendments to the
The variations in the pertinent language are as follows:
- The Fourteenth Amendment states "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."
- The Eighteenth Amendment states "The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Initial creation and use
These provisions made their first appearance in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which were adopted during the
Use in the courts
Interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's enforcement provision has been the subject of several important Supreme Court cases, which reflect the tension between the Courts' role of interpreting the Constitution and Congress's power of adopting legislation to enforce specific Constitutional amendments.
Early on, in the
In the
In 1970, however, in
In the 1997 case of City of Boerne v. Flores, the Court again took a narrow view of the Congressional power of enforcement, striking down a provision of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that sought to forbid the states from placing burdens on religious practice in the absence of a compelling state interest in doing so. In enacting RFRA, Congress had sought to overturn the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith, which had held that the Constitution does not require states to recognize religious exemptions to laws of general applicability. In the Boerne case, the Supreme Court decided that RFRA overstepped Congress' authority, because the statute was not sufficiently connected to the goal of remedying a constitutional violation, but instead created new rights that are not guaranteed by the Constitution. Some observers have suggested that the Supreme Court saw RFRA as a threat to the Court's institutional power and an incursion on its role as final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution, because that statute was aimed specifically at overturning the Employment Division v. Smith decision. However, the effect of Boerne lasted beyond Boerne itself. The standard announced in that case—that all legislation enacted under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment must be "congruent and proportional" to the unconstitutional harm it seeks to remedy—has been followed by every post-Boerne decision on legislation that sought to abrogate the states' sovereign immunity.
United States v. Morrison, decided in 2000, is one controversial successor case. In that case, the Supreme Court, applying the congruent-and-proportional Boerne test, overturned provisions of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which created federal civil jurisdiction over gender-based violence.[citation needed] The Court held that Congress did not have the power to enact a remedy targeting private action rather than state action, and that it could not enact a Section 5 remedy without findings of national, or near-national, harm.[1]
References
- JSTOR 3481285.