Chief Justice John Roberts

by Atiba R. Ellis, Associate Professor of Law, West Virginia University College of Law

In my earlier guest blog on Shelby County, AL v. Holder, I suggested that the conservative justices of the Supreme Court would be tempted to offer a post-racialist narrative concerning the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. 

The justices did not disappoint. Justice Anthony Kennedy asked whether Alabama should remain “under the trusteeship of the United States government.” Chief Justice John Roberts asked whether “the citizens in the South are more racist than the citizens in the North.” Both of these comments implicitly ask whether the long history of race has been atoned for once and for all.

And then there was Justice Antonin Scalia’s statement on the Voting Rights Act. In explaining the almost unanimous consensus for the 2006 reauthorization of Section 5, Scalia said:

Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

On one level, this quote fits the post-racial narrative. Yet Justice Scalia intended a deeper message by invoking the rhetoric of “racial entitlement.” That message is the ahistorical belief that race-conscious analysis is immoral and leads to corrupt outcomes. Establishing this concept is part of a larger post-racial agenda (as we have seen already in the affirmative action debates), and the Voting Rights Act is the latest battleground. Yet, if applied to the right to vote, it will fly in the face of the plain text of the Constitution and our democratic consensus to insure equality in voting.

By Kent Greenfield, Professor and Law Fund Research Scholar, Boston College Law School. Follow Professor Greenfield @kentgreenfield1. This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Day Symposium.

Every September, the American Constitution Society celebrates Constitution Day, as well it should. ACS isn’t alone, of course. Schools around the country, from kindergartens to universities, also commemorate the day in various ways.

And every year at this time I play the constitutional curmudgeon, warning that Constitution Day may be unconstitutional. You can read previous iterations of my arguments in this blog here and in The New York Times here.

The basic argument is that Constitution Day is unconstitutional because, as a federal mandate on any public or private educational institution receiving federal funds, it amounts to coerced speech under the First Amendment.  If a kindergarten or university were to refuse to alter their curriculum to cover the topic, they would stand to lose all federal funds.  That sounds to me like a violation of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine.  As Justice Jackson famously said for the Court in West Virginia v Barnette: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Because I’m a law professor, I can alter the hypothetical to make my point. If Congress passed a law saying “no school receiving federal funds is permitted to offer a course about Islam,” wouldn’t it be clearly unconstitutional?

Of course the argument is not simple, mostly because the unconstitutional conditions doctrine is a hash. Sometimes the Court allows conditions — see Rumsfeld v FAIR or Rust v Sullivan — and sometimes it doesn’t — see Speiser v Randall or Legal Services Corp. v Velazquez.

I will say, however, that my argument is stronger this year. Why? Because of Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius, the ACA case.