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Montana Can’t Use a 150-Year-Old Anti-Catholic Law to Discriminate Against Religious Schools
Blaine Amendments—adopted by many states starting in the late 1800s as an anti-Catholic measure—prevent states from using public funding for religious education. Thirty-seven states currently have the amendments, and some courts have interpreted them excluding religious options from state school-choice programs—that is, preventing access to otherwise publicly available benefits purely on the basis of religion. In other words, Blaine Amendments let some states practice religious discrimination.
Montana created a program where people who donated to private-school funding organizations received tax credits. The program both encouraged school choice and allowed people to spend their own money how they saw fit. However, the Montana Department of Revenue used the state’s Blaine Amendment to exclude those donors whose money found its way to religious private schools, and, at the same time, it allowed non-religious private-school donors to benefit. During the ensuing legal challenge, the Montana Supreme Court not only ruled against the religious families that challenged the discrimination, it struck down the entire program, meaning both religious and non-religious donors wouldn’t receive tax credits.
Our friends at the Institute for Justice have petitioned the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, and Cato has filed a brief in support. Both Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom and the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies have an interest in this case, so we teamed up to cover both the constitutional and policy angles of the issue. We argue that the Court should correct the Montana Supreme Court’s flawed reading of the First Amendment’s religion clauses and reaffirm that states cannot erode the Free Exercise Clause in the guise of strengthening the Establishment Clause. The Religion Clauses work together to help protect the freedom of conscience, not to prohibit school-choice programs that help both religious and non-religious schools.
The First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses prohibit laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As Cato explained in a recent brief, the two clauses work together to protect individual freedom of conscience. However, states like Montana often use the Establishment Clause to justify the existence of Blaine Amendments. They argue that Blaine Amendments are necessary to prevent “an establishment of religion” by strengthening the wall of separation between church and state. But in the modern world, where government is so involved in giving public benefits like tax credits, it is impossible to maintain a complete wall of separation without discriminating against religion (as Blaine Amendments do), which is not what the Framers intended. Instead, the government must remain neutral toward religion and not disfavor religious people or organizations. In this sense, the Establishment Clause is a shield protecting the people from state religion, not a sword enabling government to discriminate against religious faith.
At the same time, school-choice programs help prevent the forced ideological conformity that is inevitable in public schools. Tax-credit programs like Montana’s allow parents to select schools that share their values, reducing the need to impose those values on others. In so doing, they improve our nation’s social and political cohesion and reduce conflict. Cato’s Public Schooling Battle Map tracks how public schools create conflict by forcing uniformity onto ideological diversity. Blaine Amendments merely fan the flames of the ideological conflicts that currently engulf public education.
Despite all these considerations, the Montana Supreme Court declined to properly consider the First Amendment implications of the state’s Blaine Amendment. Instead, it gave the Montana Department of Revenue a slap on the wrist for exceeding its procedural authority and destroyed the entire tax credit program rather than contend with the unconstitutional discrimination inherent in Montana’s Blaine Amendment. As school choice becomes more popular around the country, the question of religious discrimination and Blaine Amendments will become more salient. The Montana decision was just the latest in a series of federal and state courts decisions that are divided on the issue. That divide will continue without guidance from the Supreme Court. The Court should take this case to clarify that the Constitution requires religious neutrality, not discrimination.
Supreme Court Argument in the “Scandalous Trademarks” Case Wasn’t So Funny
FUCT may be f … Well, you get the idea. Two years ago in the Tam case, the Supreme Court struck down the Lanham Act’s “disparaging trademarks” provision, but the justices seem less likely to erase the “scandalous trademarks” prohibition now — at least as far as one can tell from this morning’s argument in Iancu v. Brunetti.
That’s because racial slurs and other offensive phrases necessarily have a viewpoint — on the basis of which the First Amendment doesn’t allow the government to discriminate — but swear words can be just a “mode of expression.” At the same time, the “scandalous” mark restriction is so broad that the government is asking the Court to either accept its benevolent assurances or narrow the statute. There were echoes of the government’s assurances not to prosecute certain kinds of speech in Citizens United there, and indeed the same deputy solicitor general, Malcolm Stewart, initially argued that case — leading to the Court’s setting it for re-argument and blowing up the relevant statute.
The most telling series of questions involved the regulation of bus advertising, and that example should indeed decide the case: you should be able to register trademarks that come short of obscenity (which is generally pictures or sentences, rather than single words), but both registered and unregistered trademarks are still properly subject to time, place, and manner restrictions. And that includes “limited public forums” like the sides of municipal buses, public park benches, and the like.
One other note: none of George Carlin’s seven dirty words were used during the argument (though the late comedian’s formulation was invoked several times). Stewart described FUCT’s “scandalous” homonym as the “past participle of paradigmatic profanity,” while Chief Justice John Roberts at one point asked (page 58): “I take it that the — a correct spelling of the vulgar word at the heart of the case, that can’t be trademarked, right?”
We’ll know by the end of June whether edgy marks are up Schitt’s Creek.
I previously wrote about the background of Brunetti — in which Cato filed its latest “funny” (more “vulgar”) brief.
Editor’s note: This post originally misstated the chief justice’s question.
Cato Files Brief Challenging Qualified Immunity for Warrantless Strip Search of 4‑Year-Old
For over a year, Cato has been leading the charge to challenge the doctrine of qualified immunity: an atextual, ahistorical doctrine invented by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, which shields government agents from liability for misconduct — even when they break the law. Today marks a huge milestone in that ongoing campaign, as Cato has just filed an amicus brief in support of a new cert petition calling on the Court to reconsider this doctrine. So has a diverse, cross-ideological alliance of over a dozen prominent public interest groups, as well a group of leading qualified immunity scholars. In the words of Wyatt Earp: “You called down the thunder. Well, now you’ve got it!”
The case at issue is I.B. and Doe v. Woodard. When I.B. was a four-year-old girl, she was strip searched and photographed at her preschool by April Woodard, a state caseworker. Woodard had neither a warrant, nor the consent of the girl or her mother, nor were there any exigent circumstances requiring such an invasive search. All she had were unfounded abuse allegations (specifically, of a few marks and bruises on I.B.) which easily could have been checked and disproven through a non-invasive search. After I.B. complained to her mother about what happened, Woodard denied having performed a search at all, and continued to lie about that fact for several weeks, until finally admitting what she had done. I.B. suffered severe and ongoing emotional trauma as a result of being strip-searched and photographed against her will.
I.B. and her mother filed a Section 1983 against Woodard (and others), alleging violations of I.B.’s Fourth Amendment rights. But a divided panel of the Tenth Circuit held that the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity, because Woodard’s strip search did not violate “clearly established law.” The court failed to even address the Fourth Amendment claims on the merits, noting only that (1) there was a circuit split on whether a warrant was necessary under these circumstances, and (2) assuming a warrant wasn’t necessary, it was still not “clearly established” whether this sort of strip search was permissible. This latter holding is particular shocking, because the Supreme Court itself recently addressed this exact subject matter (warrantless strip searches of children in schools) in Safford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding. In Safford, the Court even said it was seeking “to make it clear” that an intrusive strip search of a child was justifiable only with “specific suspicions” that evidence of danger or wrongdoing will be found in the area searched. For this reason, Judge Briscoe dissented in part from the Tenth Circuit’s decision, and would have held that I.B.’s strip search violated “clearly established law,” as stated in Safford.
The Tenth Circuit’s decision exemplifies everything that is perverse and unjust about qualified immunity. I.B. had her constitutional rights violated in an egregious manner, yet she was left without a remedy because of a fictitious doctrine, with no grounding in the text or history of Section 1983. The Tenth Circuit refused to even decide whether her constitutional rights were violated in the first place, and it applied the “clearly established law” test so strictly that a seemingly on-point Supreme Court case concerning nearly identical circumstances was still insufficient to overcome qualified immunity.
I.B. and her mother are now represented by Scott Keller, chair of Supreme Court practice at Baker Botts, and they’ve filed a powerful cert petition, asking the Supreme Court both to resolve the Fourth Amendment questions at issue here, but also to reconsider the doctrine of qualified immunity itself. Today, Cato filed an amicus brief in support of that petition, arguing that qualified immunity lacks any proper legal or historical basis, and that it is not entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis. Specifically, we explain how (1) the “clearly established law” standard is so malleable and indefinite that it has failed to create the kind of stability and predictability that justify respect for precedent in the first place; (2) that the Supreme Court itself has already made major modifications to qualified immunity over the years, and therefore should have no qualms about reconsidering the doctrine now (but this time to bring it line with the statute Congress actually passed); and (3) that allowing the status quo to continue severely undermines public accountability and effectively subjects citizens to ongoing constitutional violations.
Ours is far from the only brief being filed today, however — we’ve also helped coordinate the drafting and filing of two additional amicus briefs. The first is on behalf of a group of leading qualified immunity scholars, who discuss the academic consensus that the Court’s qualified immunity doctrine is in serious need of correction. The second is on behalf of a diverse array of groups from across the ideological and professional spectrum, who nevertheless all share a common interest in ensuring that government officials are held accountable for their misconduct. This brief was joined by all of the following groups: the ACLU, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Association for Justice, Americans for Prosperity, Due Process Institute, Institute for Justice, Law Enforcement Action Partnership, MacArthur Justice Center, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Public Justice, R Street Institute, Reason, and the Second Amendment Foundation. Take a moment and consider just how egregiously misguided a Supreme Court doctrine has to be to unite all of these organizations in opposition, on a single brief. (Note also that several other groups have filed additional amicus briefs asking the Court to take the case, although we weren’t specifically involved with those.)
All in all, this case represents one of the most promising opportunities in the ongoing fight against qualified immunity. It highlights the sort of gross injustice that the doctrine regularly permits, demonstrates just how much cross-ideological consensus there is on this issue, and presents the Court with an ideal vehicle for restoring Section 1983 to its proper stature. We can only hope the Court answers the call.
Sen. Warren Calls for Imprisoning Executives Over Negligent Harm
Presidential candidate and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D‑Massachusetts) wants to see more business people behind bars, and she’s not fussy about how to make that happen. In a Washington Post op-ed last week she unveiled a new Corporate Executive Accountability Act, which in her words would expand “criminal liability to any corporate executive who negligently oversees a giant company causing severe harm to U.S. families.” She says she wants top executives to know that they can be (again in her own words) “hauled out in handcuffs for failing to reasonably oversee the companies they run.”
Under longstanding legal protections in the Anglo-American legal system, before convicting you of most crimes prosecutors must ordinarily show that you had mens rea, a guilty state of mind. Occasionally one or another law relaxes the standard of guilt to “willful blindness” or gross negligence. More rarely, as under a controversial doctrine in FDA law, courts have permitted convictions on a theory of what amounts to vicarious criminal liability, as of a drug executive whose underlings commit certain offenses even absent proof that the higher-up knew of, encouraged, or was willfully blind toward the offenses. I criticized that “responsible corporate officer” doctrine in the FDA setting in this space two years ago, as well as in the chapter on white-collar prosecution in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers. Warren explicitly states that her proposal “builds on” it as the basis for her proposals for what should happen to executives generally.
Cato has been sounding the alarm about decay in mens rea standards for years, even as some civil libertarians have chosen to stay on the sidelines. But you don’t have to be libertarian to find what Warren is proposing a “very bad idea,” one based on “dangerous” arguments and propelled by “political rhetoric that is designed to inflame voters’ sense of injustice and righteous indignation.” Writing in Slate, law professors Carissa Byrne Hessick and Benjamin Levin observe:
Negligence is an incredibly low standard for criminal punishment. A person who is acting negligently does not know that what she is doing (or failing to do) is wrong or risky. Negligence means that a “reasonable person” in that position would have realized that there was a risk of harm. Prosecutors are likely to think that defendants should have known that there were risks simply because something bad occurred—not because they necessarily would have recognized the risks themselves if they’d been in that situation.
Warren backs her call for a simple negligence standard for criminality with what Hessick and Levin call a “highly misleading” example in which hypothetical executives are aware that their conduct might break the law but are willing to count on a low risk of being held personally to account. But that’s not a case of simple negligence, but of “recklessness or ‘willful blindness’ —mental states that are both more serious and more difficult to prove than the negligence standard she proposes.” In other words, Warren demands a broad dragnet while inveighing against conduct that could have been addressed with a much narrower prohibition. Is the senator’s slipshod manner of argument merely negligent? Or should we interpret it as reckless or perhaps even as deliberate misconduct?
One of Warren’s most dangerous arguments for relaxing the law’s standards for knowingness and requisite mental state is that prosecutors often find it difficult to prove higher and more exacting standards. The effect, note Hessick and Levin, is “to water down the law simply to make it easier to punish people.” Some may imagine that prosecutors will use the broader powers only against defendants who did something that is worse but harder to prove. Hessick and Levin call that argument “very dangerous”:
We should not change the law to include conduct we don’t actually want to punish in order to make it easier for prosecutors to punish people we think do bad things that are hard to prove. Overly broad laws essentially delegate the content of the criminal law to prosecutors. And prosecutors will decide what is worthy of punishment using criteria that the public doesn’t know about and that can change from case to case and defendant to defendant. Prosecutors can even enforce the law as written—to cover truly accidental behavior—and there is nothing potential defendants can do about it.
We should be clear about who will be at risk if Sen. Warren passes her law. The civil courts already hear many thousands of cases seeking damages over claims that serious harm arose from industry conduct that falls short of being reckless or deliberately wrongful. Not infrequently — as with claims over supposed “sudden acceleration” in cars, cancer from Roundup, and autoimmune disease from silicone breast implants — large sums get paid even when science finds no basis for concluding the products caused the harms alleged, such is our legal system’s tendency to tilt against business defendants as unsympathetic. Under the Warren standard, complaints that driverless cars have gotten into avoidable accidents or vaccines have caused side effects — maybe even that cheeseburgers, supersize sodas, and margaritas have worsened the harms of obesity — will put business people at risk for long prison terms. To her backers, will this count as a bug? Or a feature?
Brown v. Board Did Not Start Private Schooling
A common refrain in opposition to school choice is that choice is rooted in racial segregation. Specifically, that people barely thought about choice until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required public schools to desegregate, and racists scrambled to create private alternatives to which they could take public funds. I have dealt with this before and won’t rehash the whole response (hint: Roman Catholics), but a new permutation popped up on Vox yesterday, with author Adia Harvey Wingfield asserting:
Prior to Brown v. Board of Education, most US students attended local public schools. Of course, these were also strictly racially segregated. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court struck down legal segregation that a demand for private (and eventually charter and religious parochial) schools really began to grow, frequently as a backlash to integrated public institutions.
Kudos to Prof. Wingfield for making clear that many public schools were “strictly racially segregated,” which often seems to be soft pedaled when linking choice to segregation. But her assertion that private schooling didn’t “really” begin to grow until after Brown is not borne out by the data. As the chart below shows, while the share of enrollment in private schools spiked in 1959, the growth in private schooling didn’t suddenly increase right before that. In 1889—the earliest year available— the private school share was 11 percent, dipping to 7 percent in 1919, then pretty steadily rising until the 1959 peak. (Note, the earlier years of the federal data are in ten-year increments. Also, data include pre‑K enrollments.)
History is clear that private education has long been with us, and while it has certainly at times been used to avoid racial integration, it has also been employed for reasons having nothing to do with that. This remains true even in our relatively modern era in which “free” public schools have crowded out many private options.
Wisconsin’s Butter Grading Law Is Udderly Ridiculous
Minerva Dairy, based in Ohio, is America’s oldest family-owned cheese and butter dairy. It has been producing artisanal, slow-churned butter in small batches since 1935. It has sustained its business through their website and by selling to regional distributers in several states. This model has worked well everywhere except Wisconsin, which requires butter manufacturers to jump through a series of cumbersome and expensive hoops to sell their product.
Of course, Wisconsin is America’s Dairyland, with many large producers who (big surprise) have an interest in limiting competition. At the behest of these companies, the state requires every batch of butter to be “graded” by a specifically state-licensed grader—all of whom live in Wisconsin, except for a half-dozen in neighboring Illinois and a handful around the country that have been licensed only in the last year—who must taste-test every single batch. Because Minerva’s butter is produced in multiple small batches over the course of each day, the law would effectively require the dairy to keep a licensed tester on-site at all times, which is cost-prohibitive. The state admits that the grading scheme has nothing to do with public health or nutrition, but claims that its grades, based largely on taste, inform consumers.
The fact that Wisconsin is trying to shape the taste of butter isn’t even the most absurd part of this story. The criteria used to grade the butter are a ludicrous mad-lib of meaningless jargon not even the state’s experts understand. The law purports to identify such flavor characteristics as “flat,” “ragged-boring,” and “utensil.” (All commonplace terms spoken by consumers in dairy aisles across the nation, no doubt.) The terminology hearkens to a freshmanic—not even sophomoric—term paper on the semiotics of postmodern agrarian literature. To claim that a grade calculated with reference to udder nonsense serves the purpose of informing anyone illustrates the danger inherent in judges’ deferring to government rationales for silly laws that burden people who are just trying to make an honest living.
Our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation represent Minerva in a lawsuit that challenges the butter-grading law on the grounds that it burdens interstate commerce in violation of the Commerce Clause, and also hurts small dairies’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process and equal protection of law. Minerva lost at the district court when the judge applied a toothless, cheesy “rational basis” test to the law in question, giving little weight to the serious concerns described above, then again in the Seventh Circuit (where Cato filed an amicus brief).
Tireless in its pursuit of reasonable review of this silly law, Minerva has asked the Supreme Court to take its case. Because laws that abrogate constitutional rights warrant meaningful judicial oversight, Cato has again filed an amicus brief supporting Minerva’s petition.
Wisconsin’s law directly burdens the right to participate in the state’s butter market, and thus their economic liberty, for no sane or “rational” reason. There are simply no benefits to consumers that come from forcing producers to pay considerable sums to have an arbitrary process deposit a random letter on product packaging. It curdles the mind to argue otherwise.
The Supreme Court will decide before it breaks for the summer whether to take up Minerva Dairy v. Pfaff.