Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1999

Saenz v. Roe

526 U.S. 489 | 119 S. Ct. 1518 | 143 L. Ed. 2d 689 | 1999 U.S. LEXIS 3174

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Takeaway

In short, this case holds that a State cannot give newly arrived citizens lower welfare benefits than other residents merely because of how recently they moved or where they previously lived, and Congress cannot authorize that Fourteenth Amendment violation.

Background

California enacted a welfare rule limiting cash assistance for families that had lived in California for less than 12 months. Rather than receiving California’s ordinarily higher benefit level, a newly arrived family received no more than it would have received in its prior State of residence. The rule applied even if the family had not previously received welfare and regardless of why it moved to California. It did not apply to families arriving from foreign countries.

California initially needed federal administrative approval to implement the rule under the former AFDC program. Litigation over that approval prevented implementation. Congress then replaced AFDC with TANF in the 1996 welfare-reform law and expressly allowed States to apply the prior State’s benefit rules to families that had moved into the State less than a year earlier. California consequently began enforcing its rule in 1997.

New California residents who would receive substantially lower benefits brought this class action. The District Court preliminarily enjoined the law, reasoning that it penalized migration and treated new residents unequally without adequate justification. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the preliminary injunction. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and affirmed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether California may provide newly arrived residents lower welfare benefits than longer-term California residents by tying benefits during the first year to the residents’ prior States of residence.

Holding

No. California’s one-year, prior-State-based welfare classification violates the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Court described the constitutional right to travel as having three components: the right to enter and leave another State, the right of a temporary visitor to receive the privileges and immunities afforded to citizens of the visited State, and the right of a person who moves permanently to be treated like other citizens of the new State. California’s law did not bar entry into the State, and Article IV’s Privileges and Immunities Clause principally protects temporary visitors. The case therefore concerned the third component: equal treatment of a newly arrived permanent resident.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship and Privileges or Immunities Clauses protect the right of a United States citizen to become a citizen of any State by bona fide residence and to enjoy the same rights as other citizens of that State. The Court relied on the Slaughter-House Cases, including both its majority and dissent, as recognizing this core protection. A State cannot create degrees of state citizenship based on how long someone has lived there.

California’s rule imposed a direct inequality on citizens who had already completed their move and become California residents. The relevant comparison was not between newcomers’ California benefits and what they would have received in their former States. It was between newcomers and otherwise eligible California citizens who had lived in California for at least one year. The unequal treatment itself was the constitutional injury, whether or not the measure actually deterred migration.

The scheme also created multiple subclasses among new California citizens. Some newcomers received the full California benefit because they had come from another country or a State with equally generous benefits, while others received lower amounts determined by the laws of their particular former States. Neither the length of California residence nor the identity of the prior State had any connection to a family’s present need for assistance or to an equitable distribution of California welfare funds.

California’s asserted goal of saving approximately $10.9 million annually was legitimate in the abstract but could not justify discrimination among equally eligible citizens. The State could achieve comparable savings by reducing benefits evenhandedly across all recipients. Fiscal economy does not permit a State to make the amount of basic welfare assistance turn on a citizen’s recent arrival or former residence.

Issue #2

Whether Congress’s 1996 authorization of state durational-residency welfare rules validates California’s otherwise unconstitutional law.

Holding

No. Congress cannot authorize States to violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and its TANF authorization does not save California’s rule.

Reasoning

Congress has broad authority to legislate and, under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to enforce that Amendment’s guarantees. But Section 5 does not authorize Congress to restrict, dilute, or abrogate those guarantees. Congress therefore cannot validate state action that the Fourteenth Amendment itself forbids.

The federal government characterized the TANF provision as a specialized choice-of-law rule and urged a less demanding form of review. The Court rejected that characterization because California law, not merely a neutral interstate choice-of-law principle, treated California’s own citizens differently based on their prior residences.

The possibility that differing TANF benefit levels might encourage welfare recipients to move, or that States might otherwise engage in a race to lower benefits, did not provide a constitutional basis for California’s discrimination. Those policy concerns did not alter the central rule that citizens who establish residence in a State may not be assigned lesser state citizenship rights because they are new arrivals.

Dissents

Chief Justice Rehnquist

Reasoning

Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented, arguing that the Chief Justice agreed that States may not erect barriers to interstate movement and that Article IV protects temporary visitors from discrimination. But he maintained that neither principle applied once the respondents had completed their move and sought to become California citizens. In his view, the majority improperly treated a right to equal state citizenship as a component of the distinct right to travel.

He argued that the Court had previously analyzed durational-residency rules through equal protection and the idea that some rules impermissibly penalize travel. The majority instead revived the long-dormant Privileges or Immunities Clause and adopted a broad rule against classifications based on length of residence. He believed that shift was unsupported by constitutional text and precedent.

A State may, in his view, require bona fide residence before extending resident-only benefits. Because intent to remain is difficult to verify case by case, States may use objective durational requirements as practical evidence that an applicant truly intends to establish residence. Prior decisions allowing one-year requirements for in-state tuition, divorce jurisdiction, and certain primary-election participation demonstrated that such measures can be permissible.

The Chief Justice saw no meaningful constitutional distinction between welfare subsidies and in-state tuition subsidies. Both are valuable state-funded benefits, and both can yield benefits that follow a recipient beyond the State. California’s partial, one-year limitation did not deny all aid, Medicaid, job training, or supportive services, and other programs mitigated its effects. He therefore regarded the rule as a reasonable way to balance immediate subsistence needs against California’s interest in confirming bona fide residence and managing its welfare budget.

Congress’s express TANF authorization did not itself decide the constitutional question, but it reinforced his conclusion that the policy was reasonable. In his view, California had permissibly used a narrowly tailored, objective residency rule during a period of welfare reform.

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas joined the Chief Justice’s dissent and separately challenged the majority’s interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. He noted that the Slaughter-House Cases had confined that Clause to a narrow set of rights of national citizenship, and he believed the majority gave the Clause a meaning that was unlikely to have been understood when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted.

Looking to colonial charters, the founding-era use of the terms privileges and immunities, Article IV, and Justice Bushrod Washington’s opinion in Corfield v. Coryell, Justice Thomas concluded that the phrase traditionally referred to fundamental rights rather than every benefit a State creates by positive law. Corfield did not require equal access to all public benefits available under state law.

He acknowledged that the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause merits serious reconsideration because Slaughter-House largely drained it of force. But he maintained that the Court should first resolve the Clause’s historical meaning and its relationship to equal protection and substantive due process before using it to invalidate California’s welfare rule. Otherwise, he warned, the Clause could become an unbounded source of judicially created rights.