CHAPTER 1
The Battle of Boerne
The big break came with Boerne. I tell its story here against the background of the American devotion to religious liberty and the power granted Congress after the Civil War by the fourteenth amendment.
THE LUSTROUS EXPERIMENT
A unique contribution of the United States to civilization is the invention of religious liberty. No nation before our own had moved beyond tolerance. No nation had made freedom of religion a cherished value. No nation had designated "exercise," not mere opinion, as the value guaranteed. No nation had ever guaranteed in a written constitution that the nation would enact no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
The mother country, Great Britain, had for a century enjoyed a highly limited tolerance, coupled to the establishment of a church endowed with many prerogatives and privileges. Protestants who were not communicants in the Church of England, Catholics, Jews, members of all the other religions of the world, agnostics, and atheists were the subject of legal disabilities destructive of their civil rights and prohibitive of their participation in the government of the country. Some of the American colonies founded by Englishmen had moved toward greater tolerance, but none before the American Revolution had established equality and complete freedom of religion. All the colonists were part of an empire whose monarch was also the head of a church.
A would-be imitator of America, revolutionary France, adopted a statute guaranteeing freedom of religious opinion shortly before Congress adopted the Bill of Rights, in which the free exercise of religion was set out as our first freedom. The French National Assembly so little grasped the idea of religious liberty that, within months of enacting the statute, the assembly took on the task of reorganizing the Catholic Church in France along the lines of a civil organization. Within two years, freedom of religious opinion in France had disappeared in favor of a sustained, bloody persecution of Catholics and of organized attempts to exterminate Christianity.
The unique United States provision was, therefore, an experiment. It had to be an experiment. It had never been tried before. It was proclaimed as an experiment by its principal proponent, James Madison, who also drew the corollary that the umpire of the experiment would be experience. It has been the American experience that has determined the success of the experiment and its extent and contours.
The experiment at first was modest. The guarantee bound only the fledgling nation. It did not bind the thirteen states. A number of them, especially in New England and the South, had established churches. The states had no intention of giving them up. New Hampshire even had a provision that only Protestants could be elected to the state senate, and as this body elected that state's United States senators, New Hampshire indirectly violated article VI of the constitution, which stated: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." So, even the national frame was impaired by religious prejudice.
The American experiment did not succeed by force of words alone. It was aided by the spaciousness of the West and by immigration that created a more diverse population than the previous predominantly Protestant one. As Tocqueville accurately noted, the newly arrived Catholics were also among the staunchest defenders of religious freedom.
In the end, the national ethos was established by the commitment made in the constitution. The states eventually disestablished their established churches. A foreign observer like Tocqueville, anxious to hold up an example to his own countrymen, proclaimed the freedom of religion to be the distinctive mark of the American republic. Most importantly, religion was exercised freely and vigorously in the religionists' campaign for the abolition of slaveryña campaign subversive of the settled order, begun by Congregational ministers, carried on by a clerical network appealing to Christian duty, and reaching its culmination in a war whose battle hymn proclaimed, "God is marching on."
In these developments, the Supreme Court of the United States was a latecomer, having nothing to say on the state religious establishments or the abolitionists' campaign, except to reaffirm the constitution's acceptance of slavery. Even the enactment of the fourteenth amendment in 1868 did not alter the role of the court as bystander. The New Hampshire constitution, obnoxious as it was to religious liberty, was not altered until 1877 when demographic changes in New Hampshire made it no longer supportable.
The Supreme Court's one sustained venture in interpreting religious freedom after the Civil War was a series of cases involving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Supreme Court, obedient to Congress's determination of the national interest, upheld a federal statute making polygamy criminal in the territories. The court also upheld a territorial statute that used a tried and true inquisitorial technique, an oath requiring the oath-swearer to disavow membership or belief in a church promoting polygamy as a doctrine. Climactically in 1890, the court enforced a federal law confiscating the property of the Mormon Church. In all these cases the court was reminded of the first amendment and, instead of heeding it, upheld the Christianity that the court found to have motivated the anti-Mormon legislation.
If one looked up "freedom, religious," in casebooks on constitutional law prior to the 1930s, the standard references were to the Mormon cases that rejected appeal to the first amendment. In the 1930s the Jehovah's Witnesses began to seek protection under the constitution. Jehovah's Witnesses believed that it was idolatry to salute the flag. They also believed in vigorous proselytizing. These beliefs, and the actions accompanying them, led to various state prosecutions. When the Witnesses appealed to the Supreme Court, they were rebuffed.
RFRA
The reaction to the peyote case, Employment Division v. Smith, united civil libertarians and many religious groups. A formidable and unusual coalition of the Left and the Right and the Center asked Congress to restore the old rule. Witnesses before Congress included the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, the chair of the People for the American Way Action Fund, and one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as well as seasoned scholarly authorities on the first amendment, such as Robert Destro of the Catholic University of America, Edward M. Gaffney Jr., of Valparaiso Law School, and Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas.
Part of the testimony before Congress emphasized the shock of Smith, the sudden abandonment of established precedents, the extent of the damage likely to result, the insensitivity manifested to the requirements of conscience. The court's opinion in Smith had actually said that "we cannot afford the luxury of deeming presumptively invalid, as applied to the religious objector, every regulation of conduct that does not protect an interest of the higher order." Incredibly, it was remarked, free exercise was being characterized as a luxury. Other civil liberties secured by the first amendment would yield only to a compelling governmental interest. Why was free exercise treated as inferior? In the opinion of the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, Smith was "the Dred Scott of first amendment law." A variety of contemporary examples of laws of general application having actual or potential impact on the free exercise of religion were presented. It was pointed out that if Smith were good law and taken at its face in its quotation of Frankfurter, the broad freedom of conscience from compulsion established by Barnette no longer stood.
Congress responded. The House passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) unanimously. The Senate passed it ninety-seven to three. President Clinton signed it into law on November 16, 1993. With its enactment Congress employed the power that the amendment of the constitution had granted it after the Civil War.
RFRA began with findings made by Congress that "laws 'neutral' toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise" and that in Smith the Supreme Court had "virtually eliminated the requirement that the government justify burdens on religious exercise imposed by laws neutral toward religion." Having set out its target, RFRA provided: "Government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability except. . . ." The exception was where the burden imposed was "in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest" and "the least restrictive means" were used to further that interest.
RFRA was designed as legislation appropriate to enforce the provision of section 1 of the fourteenth amendment, guaranteeing that no person shall be arbitrarily deprived of liberty by a state. The fourteenth amendment, section 1 declares:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Section 5 of the fourteenth amendment states:
The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Congress exercised the power conferred on it by section 5 "to enforce" the amendment's provisions "by appropriate legislation."
In 1940 in Cantwell, the Supreme Court by reading the first amendment into the fourteenth had taken upon itself the definition of the liberty protected by section 1 of the fourteenth. Section 1 was a very broad prohibition. If it was to be more than an empty exhortation, it had to be applied to particular acts of deprivation. It had to be given effect, it had to be enforced. The Supreme Court in 1940 had not only defined liberty but enforced the protection of it. Not before RFRA had Congress exercised as to religious liberty the power to enforce conferred upon it by section 5. When Congress finally used the power the constitution gave it and, doing so, explicitly rebuked the Supreme Court, would the court accept the rebuke?
The court's view, to be expressed in Boerne, was that the guarantees of life, liberty, and property in section 1 of the fourteenth amendment are "self-executing." But no law, no constitution is "self-executing." Lawyers, judges, marshals, process servers are all required to make any provision of law come to life. When the court described this portion of the constitution as "selfexecuting," the court unselfconsciously identified the court with the constitution. The guarantees were "self-executing" in the sense that the court would execute them, and the assumption was made that the court and the constitution were the same.
The Congress that drafted the fourteenth amendment after the Civil War had been deeply suspicious of the Supreme Court, still under a cloud for its notorious decision in Dred Scott. Dred Scott had denied congressional power to prevent slavery extending into the territories governed by federal law; had denied the very possibility of any descendant of a slave becoming a citizen of the United States; and, by its maladroit effort to end the controversy over slavery with a kind of final solution sustaining it forever, had helped bring on the Civil War. The drafters of the fourteenth amendment did not desire to destroy a federal structure or concentrate all power in Congress. Still less, however, did they have in mind a grant of power to the court. They gave power for the amendment's enforcement to Congress.
In 1879, eleven years after the states had ratified the amendment, the Supreme Court, now dominated by Northern Republicans, had occasion to examine its scope. Disavowing power in the judicial branch to enforce or to protect the rights guaranteed, the court in Ex parte Virginia declared:
It is the power of Congress which has been enlarged. . . . Whatever legislation is appropriate, that is, adapted to carry out the objects the amendments have in view, whatever tends to enforce submission to the prohibitions they contain, and to secure to all persons the enjoyment of perfect equality of civil rights and the equal protection of the laws against State denial or invasion, if not prohibited, is brought within the domain of congressional power.
The words of section 5 granting Congress power to enact "appropriate" laws were even broader than the words of article I, section 8 of the constitution that empowered Congress to legislate on commerce, crime, currency, and other federal matters. There the empowering language spoke of legislation that was "necessary and proper." These two terms arguably constituted a restraint, leaving to a court the determination of what federal laws met the conjoint criteria of being both needed and proper. Did Congress have power to create a national bank? Not a word in the constitution addressed the question. But when Congress had exercised its article I, section 8 power to create the Bank of the United States, and Maryland attempted to tax the bank, Chief Justice John Marshall had held that Congress had acted within its powers, creating a bank that was not only national but by implication free from taxation by the states. In McCulloch v. Maryland, Marshall wrote:
Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.
So, "necessary and proper" had been expanded to "appropriate," and "appropriate" had been explained to include what was adapted to an end within the powers conferred on Congress. The drafters of the fourteenth amendment used the talismanic term of McCulloch—"appropriate"—to describe the amplitude of power that the amendment conferred on Congress.
Civil rights legislation in the 1960s had relied on this amplitude to override the Supreme Court. In 1959, the court had held that a test of literacy in English imposed by North Carolina did not violate the fourteenth amendment even when the test was used to disqualify African Americans as voters. Congress had responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prohibiting such testing of anyone who had passed the sixth grade. The protection of the new law was sought by Puerto Ricans living in New York. The state of New York defended the English literacy requirement, a part of its constitution since 1916. The state contended that the Supreme Court had already determined the constitutionality of such a requirement in its 1959 decision for North Carolina, and that Congress was powerless to change the court's understanding of the constitution.
The Supreme Court cited and quoted both the 1879 case of Ex parte Commonwealth of Virginia and Marshall's opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland and, in terms of both cases, explained the power given Congress to enforce the fourteenth amendment. The evidence that Congress was remedying purposeful discrimination against Puerto Ricans was slight. There were not many immigrants from Puerto Rico to New York in 1916 when the literacy test had been enacted. The court put in a footnote the evidence it said Congress might have had. The evidence consisted in quotation of a single statement made at the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1916 that there was danger to "our race" if literacy in English was not required for voters. The Supreme Court also noted, without further elaboration, "the cultural milieu" from 1915 to 1921 as "evidence" of which Congress was aware. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, finding a freedom whose existence the Supreme Court had denied seven years earlier, was held to be constitutional. The Voting Rights Act precedent, the ample implications of section 5's "appropriate," and the equivalence of section 5 power to the article I power so broadly construed by John Marshall, all pointed to the full legitimacy of RFRA. Those who relied on such pledges by the Supreme Court did not consider sufficiently that the court could change its mind.
A CHURCH DIVIDED, A VILLAGE SPLIT, A CONSTITUTION REMADE
Boerne, a city in Texas parlance, was a village of a little over four thousand inhabitants, located twenty-five miles from San Antonio. It possessed a single Catholic church, St. Peter the Apostle. The parish was formed in the 1860s when a determined French missionary had built for German immigrants a small church on a hill on the outskirts of the settlement. This structure was preserved when a larger edifice was begun in 1923, modeled after Mission Concepcion in San Antonio. In 1991, a new pastor, Father Tony Cummings, was assigned to St. Peter's by Patrick Flores, archbishop of San Antonio. Father Cummings's assignment was to enlarge the church of the 1920s to accommodate a growing congregation. He counted 780 families enrolled in the parish. The church seated 250 persons. Even when he arranged for three masses on Sundays, the people were, in his words, squeezed in "like sardines." There were often thirty or more standing. The need for space was undeniable. The question was how to obtain it.
In 1991 Father Cummings took advice and began to plan a new church, leaving intact little more than the twin bell towers that marked the main entrance of the 1923 edifice. In the same year, not coincidentally, the city council of Boerne adopted an ordinance designed to preserve buildings in what it designated as "an historic district." St. Peter's, or part of it, fell within the district. Anna Marie Davison, a member of the parish and a leading preservationist, pressed the Texas Historical Commission to give the church landmark status and prevent its alteration. She did not succeed with the state commission, but she roused the town. A battle that would divide the parish and the town began.
Few issues, it may be observed, are more likely to rouse local passions than disputes over zoning. The natural sense of the owners of the property, that they should be allowed to do what they want with what they own, is put in conflict with the community's sense that property rights are not absolute and that there is a communal interest in congruence, history, or aesthetics that may need to be taken into account. The conflict is intensified when the zoning is focused on preservation of a building that the owners no longer find useful. Why should they who built it be forced to keep it at their expense? A fortiori, the question is pressed when the building is a church put up as a place to worship and no longer able to accommodate the worshippers. In Europe, governments take on the cost of the upkeep of historic shrines. In America, local governments, often enough, would like the churches to shoulder the burden. Is forced preservation of an unusable structure a type of prohibition of religion?
Feelings ran high. The majority of the congregation backed Cummings. He got over $600,000 in pledges to do the remodeling when he would be permitted to do it. Still, a minority, mostly old-time members of the parish, stirred by Anna Marie Davison, steadfastly opposed the plans for change. The new design was denounced as nondescript, a destruction of beauty, a horror. The archbishop and then the pope were asked to intervene to stop the desecration. The rest of the town joined the battle. It was questioned whether the zone of the Historic District embraced more than the bell towers, which the parish promised to preserve. Finally, the Historic Landmarks Commission of Boerne, the local body charged with enforcing the zoning of the Historic District, denied the church a permit to go ahead with demolition. In the spring of 1994, after a tense public hearing, the city council, four to one, sustained the denial of the license. Cummings, describing the outcome as "morally and grossly unjust," moved Sunday masses to the Rainbow Senior Citizens' Center. Archbishop Flores entered the scene, seeking relief under RFRA in the federal district court in Midland, Texas. No compelling governmental interest, he maintained, justified Boerne's burden imposed upon the believers.
In February 1995, Boerne raised as a defense to Flores's suit a challenge to the constitutionality of RFRA. The solicitor general of the United States entered the case to defend the legislation. In March 1995, District Judge Lucius Desha Bunton III held RFRA unconstitutional. He quoted John Marshall: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." Departing from the Supreme Court's position in the peyote case, Congress had violated the constitution.
Appeal was taken to the court of appeals for the Fifth Circuit sitting in New Orleans. The panel to whom the case was fortuitously assigned was composed of Patrick E. Higginbotham, Emilio Garza, and Fortunado Benavides. The panel's composition was chiefly of importance in reflecting a broad range of backgrounds and experience. On January 23, 1996, in an opinion by Higginbotham, the panel unanimously reversed Judge Bunton.
Applying Supreme Court precedent, the court of appeals noted three questions to be answered: First, might RFRA be regarded as an enactment to enforce the protection of religious freedom, guaranteed from infringement by the state? Citing the testimony of three witnesses before the House of Representatives, the court found it easy to answer the question affirmatively. Second, was RFRA "plainly adapted" to the purpose of enforcement? The court noted that Congress had no power to add to the fourteenth amendment but did have power to act remedially "where a violation lurks." As the United States now argued, RFRA supplied a remedy to facially neutral laws actually hostile to religious exercise; acted prophylactically in preventing such laws; and aided religious minorities, such as the Amish, Hmong, Jewish, and Mormon, that had suffered because their religious practices had not been respected by the majority. The third question was whether RFRA was consistent with the letter and spirit of the constitution. Unquestionably, it was. The city argued that Congress had usurped the power of the Supreme Court. The answer was given by the Voting Rights case. As it had with voting rights, Congress could go beyond the bare constitutional minimum. The Supreme Court in the peyote case had not held that a law exempting religious exercise from statutes of general applicability was unconstitutional; all the court had decided was that exemption was not required. Now Congress had lawfully gone beyond this minimum.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Boerne. The same lawyers who had faced each other in New Orleans argued in WashingtonñDouglas Laycock, a leading authority on the constitution and religious liberty, appearing for the archbishop, and Marci Hamilton, a young professor at Cardozo Law School in New York, representing Boerne. Walter Dellinger, solicitor general of the United States, argued on the archbishop's side, reflecting RFRA's popularity with the Clinton administration and the judgment of the executive branch that RFRA's restrictions would not seriously restrict the federal government. Argued in February 1997, the case was decided in June at the end of the court's term.
The court's starting point was that the power of Congress under section 5 of the fourteenth amendment was remedial. Congress could act to cure an evil. It could not act to enlarge the rights the amendment guaranteed. Admittedly, the line between a remedy and the creation of an enlarged right was "not easy to discern." Admittedly, Congress "must have wide latitude in determining where it [the line] lies." But, the court reassured itself, "the distinction exists and must be observed."
How was the distinction to be observed? Here the court unveiled a new test for legislation: "There must be a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end." This formula was unprecedented. Proportionality in legislation! Who would measure the proportion? Implicitly, the answer was "the court." What measure would the court use? Implicitly, the answer was "whatever we find handy." A few years earlier, scorn had been heaped by members of the court themselves on the notion of the court measuring proportionality in criminal sentences. How would the court know, two justices had asked, what proportion should be observed? A determination of proportionality between a crime and its punishment, according to these members of the court, invited the "imposition of subjective judgment." If objective measures did not aid in an area where common sense had at least some competence, what measure could the court use when determining the proportion between violations of civil rights and laws meant to cure or prevent such violations? Was there anything but subjective feeling for the justices to use as a measuring stick?
Introduction of the test introduced a judicial concern with the record upon which Congress acted. When the question had been, Is the law remedial?, it had been enough for a court to see that Congress had been aware of evils in need of elimination or prevention. When congruence and proportionality were the measures, there appeared to be a need for a court to look more closely at what evils the legislation was said to be eliminating or preventing.
The Supreme Court looked more closely at the record made in the legislative hearings on RFRA. The court observed that there had been "anecdotal evidence of autopsies performed on Jewish individuals and Hmong immigrants in violation of their religious beliefs." The court observed that there had been testimony to the "adverse effects" of zoning and preservation laws on churches and synagogues. The court discounted this evidence because the examples did not evince a governmental purpose to discriminate against religion. The burdens imposed were "incidental." No religious persecution by law had been shown to have occurred "in the past 40 years."
Measured by this evidence, paltry and unconvincing as the evidence in the court's eyes was, RFRA was overkill. RFRA's "sweeping coverage" assured "its intrusion at every level of government." RFRA applied "to every agency and official" of federal, state, and local government. It had no termination date. Its protections could be invoked by any individual who alleged that an action of the government burdened his or her religion. It was disproportionate to the evils established by the record.
In Cantwell v. Connecticut in 1940 the Supreme Court on the basis of the record in a single case had created a new rule of law binding all fifty states. Congress, acting on the basis of legislative hearings, testimony by experts, and accounts of oppression by individuals, was now declared by the court not to have enough evidence of discrimination against religion to fashion a law setting a standard of proof of such discrimination.
The court did not pause to note that the sweep of RFRA paralleled the sweep of the first amendment. It, too, had been interpreted by the court itself to bind all units of government. It, too, had no termination date. It, too, could be invoked by an individual. The court's real quarrel with RFRA was that RFRA made incidental burdens on free exercise provable as substantial burdens that prohibited free exercise in violation of the first amendment. The court's position was that only purposeful persecution constituted prohibition. For the court the case was as simple as that. The court had already spoken. Congress could not enlarge the liberty protected.
An alternative approach, also fatal to RFRA, was attractive to one member of the majority. Any exemption for religion from a general law was, in this member's view, an establishment of religion. Establishment of a religion was forbidden by the same amendment that protected free exercise. Protection of free exercise, therefore, could not extend to exemptions.
The difficulty of this position was that, if applied, it would clash with a variety of particular exemptions created by Congress, some of them already accepted by the Supreme Court. Most notable were the exemptions for clergy, persons studying for the ministry, and conscientious objectors to all warñexemptions made by the draft laws in both World War I and World War II. After the nineteenth amendment prohibited the sale of liquor "for beverage purposes," Congress in the Volstead Act had permitted the sale of liquor for the purpose of being consumed in religious services, such as those held by Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews, and Lutherans. If the wine was consumed, it was used as a beverage; but the statute was evidently allowed to amend the constitution. After the Supreme Court had held that the Old Order Amish were not entitled to an exemption from Social Security by reason of their religious belief, Congress gave them one. After the Supreme Court had held that the free exercise of religion did not entitle an Orthodox Jew to wear a yarmulke when he was on duty as an officer of the Air Force, Congress had created the exemption. After the Supreme Court had refused to stop the logging road through Indian burial grounds, Congress stopped it. If all these exemptions were bad as establishments of religion, a more wholesale revision of the laws would have to be undertaken than the court contemplated.
Unless exemption was establishment, the issue of all the exemptions from federal law was not presented by Boerne. It was remarkable then that in computing the disproportionate sweep of RFRA, the court should have added RFRA's impact on all federal laws and agencies to its calculation. That Congress had the power to restrict federal law from prohibiting the exercise of religion had never been doubted by the court as a whole.
All the exemptions Congress had made, now unmentioned by the court, stood as mute testimony to the long standing belief of the legislative and executive branches as to the respect to be accorded free exercise. The exceptions also stood as testimony to the workability of exceptions. If great federal bureaucracies could live with them, couldn't city hall? But this question was not addressed. No doubt the exceptions were also evidence that large minorities (as in the case of sacramental wine) or small but strategically knowledgeable minorities (as in the case of Social Security or the case of the yarmulke) could secure exceptions without judicial help. So why should the judiciary bother itself? This way of thinking had been explicit in the court's opinion in Smith. The answer, as obvious as the question, was that the most odious kind of anomaly was not an exception to the law but judicial indifference to a right the other branches of government believed that the constitution secured.
The court's way of handling this anomaly was not to address it but to announce the new tests—variously phrased as "congruence and proportionality" or as "congruence or proportionality"—and the consequent scrutiny by the court of the evidence Congress had considered. Unnecessary in reaching the result, the new tests carried what in modern jargon was the metamessage of Boerne addressed to Congress: Six or even five of us count for more than five hundred of you because the constitution has provided us with a province and a function in regard to federal legislation, a duty to give definitive meaning to the foundational document. We are not to be governed by the judgments made by the two branches of government that are our co-equals but that are not equal to us in the discharge of this duty. Performing it, we are not only the highest court in the land but the highest authority. Our words constitute the constitution that is now in force.
Conveying that message, the court created, for possible future use against Congress, two new and powerful weapons to be deployed in constitutional litigation: that the congressional record could be closely inspected for convincing evidence of the evil legislated against, and that the legislation responding to the evil must be congruent or proportionate or both. The test of "congruence and proportionality" was unchallenged by any member of the court. Two of the three dissenters explicitly agreed with it. The absence of challenge to the creation of new criteria vitally affecting the balance between the courts and Congress was an unusual characteristic of the case.
The battle in Boerne was over. After the court's decision, villagers asked, "Who's in charge—Congress or the Supreme Court?" and grumbled audibly about being made pawns in a test case. Both sides professed to be ready to fight on. But a compromise was soon reached. A new remodeling plan kept 80 percent of the 1923 church and won a national architectural award. Father Cummings got seven hundred more seats. The real battle begun by Boerne was to continue. Were the new requirements for legislation ad hoc defenses set up by the Supreme Court to rebuff RFRA or would they be norms governing the future? Boerne raised this question without resolving it. Resolution of this question was to interact with the immunity the court attributed to sovereigns.
Notes
A unique contribution: See John T. Noonan Jr.,
The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 75-91 (hereafter
Lustre).
The mother country: id. at 57-58.
A would-be imitator: id. at 267-275.
the umpire of the experiment: id. at 91.
The states had no intention: id. at 96.
New Hampshire even had a provision: New Hampshire Constitution, pt. 2 (1784), in James Fairbanks Colby, comp.,
Manual of the Constitution of the State of New Hampshire (Manchester: J. B. Clarke, 1912), 110-113; Lustre at 99.
A foreign observer like Tocqueville: Lustre at 95.
Most important, religion was exercised freely: id. at 119-137.
The Supreme Court's one sustained venture: id., 252-254;
Supreme Court upheld: Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878);
federal statute: An Act to punish and prevent the Practice of Polygamy in the Territories of the United States and other Places, and disapproving and annulling certain Acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah, 12 Stat. 501-502 (July 1, 1862);
court also upheld a territorial statute: Murphy v. Ramsey, 114 U.S. 15 (1885);
court enforced a federal law confiscating the property: The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints v. United States, 140 U.S. 665 (1891).
various state prosecutions: See e.g.,
Nicholls v. Mayor and Sch. Comm. of Lynn, 297 Mass. 65, 7 N.E. 577 (1937) (expulsion from school);
When the Witnesses appealed to the Supreme Court: Lustre at 241-242.
The Supreme Court decided that religious liberty: Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940).
The makers of the fourteenth amendment did have a sense that the religious freedom of the newly emancipated slaves: Kurt T. Lash, "The Second Adoption of the Free Exercise Clause: Religious Exemptions under the Fourteenth Amendment." 88
Nw. U.L.R. 1106, 1134-1135 (1994).
Three overlapping reasons: Freedom of speech and freedom of the press read into fourteenth amendment: Gitlow v. New York, 286 U.S. 652, 666 (1925);
withdrawn from the business of invalidating governmental regulation: West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937);
"in the delusion of racial or religious conceit": Cantwell, 310 U.S. 296 at 310.
Writing for the court, Felix Frankfurter: Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940);
"an interest inferior to none": id. at 595.
"If there is any fixed star": West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943).
"Providing public schools ranks at the very apex": Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 213 (1972);
"[B]elief and action cannot be neatly confined": id. at 220;
"[A] regulation neutral on its face": id. at 220.
The national government was always found to have had a national interest: See e.g.,
Bowen v. Roy, 476 U.S. 693 (1986);
Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 U.S. 503 (1986);
United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252 (1983).
The governmental interest . . . had to be "compelling": See
Employment Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 894-895 (1990) (concurrence, collecting cases)
"Compelling interest" . . . could be dispensed with: Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Assn., 485 U.S. 439, 447 (1998);
"the Indians' ability to practice": id. at 451.
It would not have been a stretch to hold that Oregon had a compelling interest: Employment Div., 494 U.S. 872 at 905 (concurrence).
It did so without even asking: Michael W. McConnell, "Free Exercise Revisionism and the
Smith Decision," 57
U. Chi. L. Rev. 1109, 1113 (1990).
To achieve this result, the court had to put a new skin: Employment Div. v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990) (opinion by Scalia, J., joined by Rehnquist, C. J., and by White, Stevens, and Kennedy, JJ.);
Cantwell and Yoder explained: id. at 881;
a Mormon case: Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), twice cited in
Employment Div. at 879 and 885;
"Instead the opinion of Justice Frankfurter": id. at 879.
"sweeping result," . . . "disregard our consistent application of free exercise doctrine": id. at 892 (O'Connor, J., joined by Brennan, Marshall, and Blackmun, JJ.);
The misreading of Cantwell and of Yoder: id. at 896.
A formidable and unusual coalition: See Gustav Niebuhr,
Disparate Groups United Behind Civil Rights Bill on Religious Freedom, Washington Post, October 16, 1993 at 7, available at 1994 WL 2093750 (noting "no fewer than 48 religious and civil liberties groups" from People for the American Way and the ACLU to the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and major Jewish organizations).
Incredibly . . . free exercise was being characterized as a luxury: Testimony of John H. Buchanan, Jr., chairman, People for the American Way Action Fund, Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1990: Hearings on H.R. 5377 before the House Committee on the Judiciary, 102d Cong. at 53 (1990);
"The Dred Scott of first amendment law": Testimony of Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, Religious Freedom Act of 1992: Hearings on S. 2969 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 102d Cong. at 171 (1992). See also Statement of Elder Dallin H. Oaks in the same hearings, p. 33 (1992); Testimony of Robert P. Dugan Jr., Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1991: Hearings on H.R. 2797 before the House Committee on the Judiciary, 102d Cong. at 13 (1992).
RFRA: 42 U.S.C. §2000bb;
House and Senate votes on RFRA: 139
Cong. Rec. 26416 (103rd Cong.,
1st sess., October 27, 1993); 139
Cong. Rec. 27241 (103rd Cong.,
1st sess., November 3, 1993).
"self-executing": City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 522 (1997).
The Congress that drafted the fourteenth amendment: Joseph T. Sneed III, Footprints on the Rocks of the Mountain: An Account of the Enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment (West Coast Print Center, 1997), 330-331, 370; Stephen A. Engel, "The
McCulloch Theory of the Fourteenth Amendment:
City of Boerne v. Flores and the Original Understanding of Section 5," 109
Yale L.J. 115, 131-134 (1997);
Cong. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess. (1866): 43, 2765.
Dred Scott: Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).
"It is the power of Congress which has been enlarged": Ex parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 339, 345-346 (1879).
"Let the end be legitimate": McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 421 (1819).
the court had held that a test of literacy . . . did not violate the fourteenth amendment: Lassiter v. Northampton County Bd. of Elections, 360 U.S. 45 (1959);
Congress had responded: see Voting Rights Act of 1965 41(a), 42 U.S.C. §1971(a)(2)(C) (banning literacy tests).
The evidence that Congress was remedying: Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641, 654 n.14 (1966).
The history of St. Peter's: "St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church," http//www.massintransit.com/tx/stpeter-tx-boerne/index.html, accessed July 18, 2001.
The early stages of the battle of Boerne: San Antonio Express News, August 8, 1993;
"like sardines": id.;
over $600,000 in pledges: id.;
historical value of church: James Steely to Anna Marie Davison, June 23, 1992;
The archbishop and then the pope: Thomas P. Sullivan to Archbishop Flores, June 1993;
petition to the pope: reprinted, Boerne Star, October 13, 1993;
question as to extent of historic zone: San Antonio Express, January 30, 1996;
actions of landmarks commission and city council: Boerne Star, April 20, 1994;
"morally and grossly unjust": Hill County Recorder, April 5, 1995;
move to Rainbow Senior Center: id.
The case in the district court: Flores v. City of Boerne, 877 F. Supp. 355 (M.D. Texas, 1995);
the case in the Fifth Circuit: Flores v. City of Boerne, 73 F.3d 1352 (5th Cir. 1996),
cert. granted, 519 U.S. 926 (1996). Almost in parallel with
Boerne a case arose in the Ninth Circuit in which RFRA was invoked. In Eugene, Oregon, a young man was arrested on strong suspicion that he had murdered three teenagers. As he awaited trial, he asked that a priest hear his confession. The confession was made by means of an intercom and routinely recorded as a matter of prison policy. The district attorney subpoenaed the recording to introduce at the man's trial. No Oregon law forbade such evidence, and no Oregon judge would prevent its introduction. Invoking RFRA, the priest and his archbishop asked the federal court to protect the secrecy of the religious rite that had been engaged in. The district attorney argued that RFRA was unconstitutional. Like the Fifth Circuit, the Ninth Circuit held RFRA to be in accord with precedent. It ruled that RFRA forbade the secular intrusion into a sacrament—a new, startling, and unlawful aggression against free exercise.
Mockaitis v. Harcleroad, 104 F.3d 1522 (9th Cir. 1997) (per Noonan, J., joined by Thompson and Kleinfeld, JJ.).
"not easy to discern": City of Boerne, 521 U.S. 507 at 519;
"must have wide latitude": id. at 520;
"the distinction exists": id.
"There must be a congruence and proportionality": id. (opinion by Kennedy, J. with Rehnquist, C. J., and Stevens, Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg, JJ., concurring). For a searching critique of
Boerne, see Evan H. Caminker, "'Appropriate' Means-Ends constraints on Section 5 Powers," 53
Stan. L. Rev. 1127-1199 (2001).
"imposition of subjective judgment": Hamelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957, 985 (1991) (Scalia, J., joined by Rehnquist, C. J.).
"anecdotal evidence": City of Boerne, 521 U.S. 507 at 531;
"adverse effects": id.;
"in the past 40 years": id. at 530;
"sweeping coverage": id. at 532.
exemption as establishment: id. at 536-537 (Stevens, J., concurring)
exemptions already accepted by the court: See Selective Draft Act §4, 40 Stat. 76, 79 (May 18, 1917); Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 §5(g), 54 Stat. 885, 889 (September 16, 1940) (draft exemptions); Volstead Act §3, 41 Stat. 305, 308-309 (October 28, 1919); 26 U.S.C. §3127 (Social Security exemption); 10 U.S.C. §744 (exception for religious apparel); 102 Stat. 1826 (1988) (suspension of funds for logging road). See generally,
Lustre, at 222-226.
Two . . . dissenters explicitly agreed: City of Boerne, 521 U.S. 507 at 544 (O'Connor, J.) and 563 (Breyer, J.).
"Who's in charge?": San Antonio Express, June 27, 1997;
compromise: San Antonio Express, September 26, 2000.
