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. Jump to: navigation, search 1997 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court Building, Washington, D.C., (large image) The Supreme Court of the United States, located in Washington, D.C., is the highest court (see supreme court) in the United States; that is, it has ultimate judicial authority within the United States... The Congress of the United States is the legislative branch of the federal government of the United States of America. ... A number of amendments to the United States Constitution include a Congressional power of enforcement. ... Jump to: navigation, search Amendment XIV (the Fourteenth Amendment) of the United States Constitution is one of the post-Civil War amendments and includes the due process and equal protection clauses (Section 1). ...

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"). In Christianity, an archbishop is an elevated bishop heading a diocese of particular importance due to either its size, history, or both, called an archdiocese. ... Jump to: navigation, search Downtown San Antonio as viewed from the Tower of the Americas Nickname: Alamo City Location in Texas Founded Incorporated 1731   County Bexar County Mayor Phil Hardberger Area  - Total  - Water 1,067. ... Boerne is a city located in Kendall County, Texas. ... A lawsuit is a civil action brought before a court in which the party commencing the action, the plaintiff, seeks a legal remedy. ... The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was a 1993 act by the United States Congress aimed at preventing laws which substantially burdened a persons free exercise of their religion. ... 1993 is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ...

Congress had enacted RFRA in direct response to the Supreme Court's decision in Employment Division v. Smith, 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.) Holding Remanded decision on sacramental peyote use to Oregon State Supreme Court. ... Jump to: navigation, search The first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution make up the Bill of Rights. ... Jump to: navigation, search State nickname: Beaver State Other U.S. States Capital Salem Largest city Portland Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) Senators Ron Wyden (D) Gordon Smith (R) Official languages None Area 255,026 km² (9th)  - Land 248,849 km²  - Water 6,177 km² (2. ... Jump to: navigation, search Binomial name Lophophora williamsii (Lem. ...

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. And 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. Justice Anthony Kennedy For other people of the same name, see Anthony Kennedy (disambiguation). ... This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ...

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].""

Dissent

Justices O'Connor, Souter and Breyer dissented. Jump to: navigation, search Justice Sandra Day OConnor Sandra Day OConnor (born March 26, 1930) has been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1981. ... Justice David Souter Justice David Hackett Souter (born September 17, 1939) has been an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court since 1990. ... Justice Stephen Breyer Justice Stephen Gerald Breyer (born August 15, 1938) has been an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1994. ...

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 only the Court had the ability to state what rights were 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. Amendment XI (the Eleventh Amendment) of the United States Constitution was passed by the US Congress on March 4, 1794 and was ratified on February 7, 1795. ...