Adam BARBOUR, Appellee, v. WASHINGTON METROPOLITAN AREA TRANSIT AUTHORITY, Appellant. United States of America, Intervenor.
No. 03-7044.
United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
Argued Feb. 10, 2004. Decided July 9, 2004.
Rehearing En Banc Denied Sept. 1, 2004.
374 F.3d 1161
Dorene M. Haney argued the cause and filed the brief for appellee.
Sarah E. Harrington, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, argued the cause for intervenor. With her on the brief were R. Alexander Acosta, Assistant Attorney General, and Jessica Dunsay Silver, Attorney.
Douglas B. Huron and Richard A. Salzman were on the brief for amicus curiae Metropolitan Washington Employment Lawyers Association in support of appellee.
Before: SENTELLE, GARLAND, and ROBERTS, Circuit Judges.
Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge GARLAND.
Dissenting opinion filed by Circuit Judge SENTELLE.
GARLAND, Circuit Judge:
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) contends that sovereign immunity protects it from being sued in federal court under § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act,
I
WMATA fired Adam Barbour from his position as a probationary electrician on April 1, 1998. Barbour charges that WMATA fired him because he suffers from a mental disability, bipolar disorder. WMATA denies the charge, maintaining that it terminated Barbour for insubordinate, threatening, and anti-social behavior.
On February 24, 2000, Barbour sued WMATA in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia under federal and local causes of action, alleging that the Authority discriminated against him because of his disability. Only one cause of action survived WMATA‘s motions for dismissal and summary judgment: Barbour‘s claim that his discharge violated § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In permitting that claim to go forward, the district court rejected WMATA‘s contention that the Eleventh Amendment renders WMATA immune from a Rehabilitation Act suit for money damages in federal court.
WMATA now appeals the district court‘s denial of immunity, a kind of interlocutory
II
WMATA, a mass transit system for the District of Columbia and surrounding suburban areas, was created by an interstate compact among Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, and enjoys the Eleventh Amendment immunity of the two signatory states. Morris v. WMATA, 781 F.2d 218, 219-20 (D.C. Cir. 1986); see Hess v. Port Auth. Trans-Hudson Corp., 513 U.S. 30, 49-50 & n. 20, 115 S. Ct. 394, 405 & n. 20, 130 L. Ed. 2d 245 (1994). The Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution provides: “The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.”
There are two important exceptions to Eleventh Amendment immunity. First, a state may waive its immunity and consent to suit. Second, Congress may exercise its enforcement power under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to abrogate a state‘s immunity without its consent. See College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd., 527 U.S. 666, 670, 119 S. Ct. 2219, 2223, 144 L.Ed.2d 605 (1999) (citing Clark v. Barnard, 108 U.S. 436, 2 S.Ct. 878, 27 L.Ed. 780 (1883), and Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U.S. 445, 96 S. Ct. 2666, 49 L. Ed. 2d 614 (1976)); Atascadero State Hosp. v. Scanlon, 473 U.S. 234, 238, 105 S. Ct. 3142, 3145, 87 L. Ed. 2d 171 (1985). Whether WMATA waived its immunity is the question at issue here.
The “test for determining whether a State has waived its immunity from federal-court jurisdiction is a stringent one.” College Savings, 527 U.S. at 676, 119 S. Ct. at 2226 (quoting Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 241, 105 S. Ct. at 3146-47). The courts will find a waiver if a state makes a “clear declaration” of its intent to submit to federal court jurisdiction. Id. To elicit a clear declaration, Congress “may, in the exercise of its spending power, condition its grants of funds to the States upon their taking certain actions that Congress could not require them to take, and ... acceptance of the funds entails an agreement to the actions.” Id. at 686, 119 S. Ct. at 2231. But Congress must exercise its power explicitly: a congressional waiver provision is constitutional only if it manifests “a clear intent to condition participation in the programs funded under the Act on a State‘s consent to waive its constitutional immunity.” Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 247, 105 S. Ct. at 3149-50.
WMATA denies that it consented to waive its Eleventh Amendment immunity from suit under the Rehabilitation Act. First, it contends that Congress did not clearly condition acceptance of federal
A
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides:
No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States ... shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance....
In 1986, in response to Atascadero, Congress passed the Civil Rights Remedies Equalization Act (CRREA), which provides in relevant part:
A state shall not be immune under the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution of the United States from suit in Federal court for a violation of section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the provisions of any other Federal statute prohibiting discrimination by recipients of Federal financial assistance.
Notwithstanding the views of the circuits and of the Supreme Court, WMATA maintains that the CRREA does not make clear that receipt of funds is conditioned on a waiver of immunity. We dis-
WMATA insists that the CRREA is ambiguous because its opening clause -- “A state shall not be immune under the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution of the United States from suit in Federal court” -- parallels language that Congress has frequently used in attempting to abrogate state immunity. The Supreme Court has indeed construed similar statutory language as the language of abrogation. See, e.g., Garrett, 531 U.S. at 360, 121 S. Ct. at 960 (Americans with Disabilities Act,
Whatever the validity of WMATA‘s claim that the language of the CRREA‘s opening clause cannot do double duty, that claim simply ignores the statute‘s closing words, which, like those of the Rehabilitation Act, single out recipients of “Federal financial assistance” as the only entities within the statute‘s purview. By contrast, none of the abrogation statutes WMATA cites contains anything more than the naked “shall not be immune” language. This is a distinction of considerable difference.
College Savings Bank v. Florida Prepaid makes clear why this distinction matters. In that case, the question was whether Congress could condition a state‘s sale of a tuition prepayment plan on relinquishment of its immunity to Lanham Act suits for false advertising. The Court held that such a condition amounted to a “forced,” rather than a voluntary waiver because the state could not avoid liability except by abstaining from interstate commerce. 527 U.S. at 683, 119 S. Ct. at 2229-30. At the same time, however, College Savings declared that “conditions attached to a State‘s receipt of federal funds are simply not analogous to ... conditions attached to a State‘s decision to engage in otherwise lawful commercial activity.” Id. at 678 n. 2, 119 S. Ct. at 2227 n. 2 As the Court explained, “Congress has no obligation to use its Spending Clause power to disburse funds to the States; such funds are gifts.” Id. at 686-87, 119 S. Ct. at 2231. Thus, what Congress threatens if the state refuses to agree to its spending condition is merely “the denial of a gift or gratuity,” which is “fundamentally different” from the “automatic[]” coercion that takes place when “what is attached to the
With this distinction, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its prior holdings “that Congress may, in the exercise of its spending power, condition its grant of funds to the States upon their taking certain actions that Congress could not require them to take, and that acceptance of the funds entails an agreement to the actions.” Id. at 686, 119 S. Ct. at 2231 (citing South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 107 S. Ct. 2793, 97 L. Ed. 2d 171 (1987)). Because that is precisely what Congress did in the CRREA, we reject WMATA‘s contention that its acceptance of funds was insufficient to constitute a valid waiver of its Eleventh Amendment immunity.
B
WMATA‘s second argument is that, even if the CRREA did unambiguously condition receipt of funds on a waiver of immunity, the Authority nonetheless did not knowingly consent to such a waiver by taking federal funds in 1998, the year in which it terminated Barbour. In that year, WMATA contends, “it reasonably believed that Congress had already abrogated its immunity” from suits for disability discrimination by virtue of Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA),
A similar argument prevailed in Garcia v. S.U.N.Y. Health Sciences Center, 280 F.3d 98 (2d Cir. 2001), a case involving alleged disability discrimination by a New York instrumentality in 1995. No other circuit has accepted this argument,5 and those that have considered the issue have decided to the contrary. See Doe v. Nebraska, 345 F.3d 593, 601-02 (8th Cir. 2003); Garrett v. University of Ala. at Birmingham Bd. of Trs., 344 F.3d 1288, 1292-93 (11th Cir. 2003); M.A. v. State-Operated Sch. Dist., 344 F.3d 335, 349-51 (3d Cir. 2003). We likewise reject it, and with it WMATA‘s claim that it did not knowingly waive its immunity when it took federal transportation funds in 1998. We do so for three reasons.
First, College Savings and Atascadero establish a single criterion for determining the validity of a waiver: Congress must clearly condition acceptance of federal funds on the state‘s waiver of its sovereign
Although Garcia conceded that the CRREA “constitutes a clear expression of Congress’ intent to condition acceptance of funds on a state‘s waiver of its Eleventh Amendment immunity,” 280 F.3d at 113, it added a second criterion for validity: that “the state, in accepting the funds, believed it was actually relinquishing its right to sovereign immunity.” Id. at 115 n. 5 (emphasis added). But the Supreme Court has never considered a state‘s state of mind when ascertaining whether a waiver has been effected. Rather, it has directed courts to inquire only as to whether the state accepted federal funds in the face of a clear condition. Because that is just what WMATA did, its protestation of lack of knowledge is to no avail.
Second, even Garcia recognized that an argument like WMATA‘s, that a state instrumentality had miscalculated what its immunity was worth, would lose force as the Supreme Court‘s Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence evolved. Although Garcia saw no reason for New York to suspect that the ADA‘s abrogation was invalid in 1995, it acknowledged that a state‘s acceptance of funds at a later date -- after the Supreme Court issued two decisions that formed the predicate for Garrett -- “might properly reveal a knowing relinquishment of sovereign immunity.” 280 F.3d at 113 n. 4. When WMATA accepted federal funds in 1998, both of those predicate decisions had already been issued. See City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 520, 117 S. Ct. 2157, 2164, 138 L. Ed. 2d 624 (1997) (holding that legislation promulgated under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment that reaches beyond the scope of the Amendment‘s guarantees must exhibit “congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end“); Seminole Tribe of Fla. v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44, 72, 116 S. Ct. 1114, 1131-32, 134 L. Ed. 2d 252 (1996) (holding that Congress lacks authority to abrogate state immunity under Article I of the Constitution). Indeed, WMATA itself argued in another case in 1997 -- a year before Barbour was terminated -- that the Court‘s decision in Seminole Tribe had rendered invalid Congress’ attempted abrogation of state immunity in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA),
Finally, even if WMATA‘s state of mind were a relevant consideration, the underlying implication of its argument -- that it was only WMATA‘s miscalculation about whether its immunity had already been abrogated by the ADA that led it to accept federal funds in 1998 -- would fail on the facts. The CRREA, after all, was passed in 1986 -- four years before the ADA, and hence four years before WMATA could claim that it thought it lost its protection against disability discrimination lawsuits. Nonetheless, WMATA took federal trans-
III
As a last argument, WMATA contends that Congress lacks power under the Spending Clause,
In the CRREA, the legislature made clear that it did not want any federal funds to be used to facilitate disability discrimination, and that exposing recipient entities to the threat of federal damage actions was an effective deterrent. Congress‘s spending condition guarantees that federal money is used for the provision of transportation, and nothing else. Every circuit that has considered the issue has concluded that the connection between the congressional goal (that federal transportation funds be used exclusively for that purpose), and the congressional means (the spending condition), is close enough to be sustained under the spending power. See Nieves-Marquez v. Puerto Rico, 353 F.3d 108, 128 (1st Cir. 2003) (“As to the third [Dole] requirement, § 2000d-7 is manifestly related to Congress‘s interest in deterring federally supported agencies from engaging in disability discrimination.“); A.W. v. Jersey City Pub. Schs., 341 F.3d 234,
We do not break any new ground in reaching the same conclusion. As the United States points out, the Rehabilitation Act‘s nondiscrimination requirement is patterned after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
WMATA‘s only response is to note, correctly, that Lau and Grove City predate Dole. But Dole itself cited Lau as a case in which Congress had lawfully used the spending power “to further broad policy objectives by conditioning receipt of federal moneys upon compliance by the recipient with federal statutory and administrative directives.” Dole, 483 U.S. at 206, 107 S. Ct. at 2795-96 (citing Lau, and quoting Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448, 474, 100 S. Ct. 2758, 2772-73, 65 L. Ed. 2d 902 (1980) (opinion of Burger, C.J.)). The Supreme Court has never suggested that it has any second thoughts about its treatment of the spending power in either Lau or Grove City.8 To the contrary, in New York v. United States, the Court again held up Lau as an example of a Spending Clause case in which it had “found no constitutional flaw in a federal statute.” 505 U.S. at 167, 112 S. Ct. at 2423-24. Nor did the specific condition imposed by regulation in Lau -- that school systems provide language instruction for non-English-speaking students -- bear a more “obvious relation,” Dissenting Op. at 6, to the general federal (educational) appropriation to which it was tied than does the condition here. Nothing in Lau suggested that the federal funds were, or had to be, intended for classroom instruction rather than, for example, the acquisition of equipment or the construction of athletic facilities. See
In its most recent Spending Clause case, the Court confirmed the constitutionality of
Finally, we note an analytic difference that may be at the root of our disagreement with our dissenting colleague. In his view, “conditional funding grants are no less regulatory than any form of federal regulation of the states.” Dissenting Op. at 2. On this point, however, College Savings teaches otherwise, and it is worth repeating that opinion‘s key passage here:
As we have held in such cases as South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 107 S. Ct. 2793, 97 L.Ed.2d 171 (1987), Congress may, in the exercise of its spending power, condition its grant of funds to the States upon their taking certain actions that Congress could not require them to take.... These cases seem to us fundamentally different from the present one [about regulation under the Lanham Act].... Congress has no obligation to use its Spending Clause power to disburse funds to the States; such funds are gifts.
527 U.S. at 686-87, 119 S. Ct. at 2231-32.
IV
We hold that WMATA waived its immunity from suit under the Rehabilitation Act by accepting federal transportation funds, and that Congress had authority under the Spending Clause to condition the receipt of federal funds on such a waiver. The judgment of the district court is therefore
Affirmed.
SENTELLE, Circuit Judge, dissenting:
The majority holds that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (“WMATA“), an entity created pursuant to an interstate compact among Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia that possesses Eleventh Amendment immunity, see Morris v. WMATA, 781 F.2d 218, 219-20 (D.C. Cir. 1986), has waived its immunity pursuant to
I would hold that conditioning acceptance of federal transportation funds on a state‘s acquiescence to private damages suits for disability discrimination in employment is not a valid exercise of Congress‘s power under the Spending Clause under the rule of New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 167, 112 S. Ct. 2408, 2423-24, 120 L. Ed. 2d 120 (1992), and South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 207, 107 S. Ct. 2793, 2796, 97 L. Ed. 2d 171 (1987). I would further hold that this step is not within Congress‘s enforcement power under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
I would reverse the judgment of the district court for the reason that Congress lacks the power to subject states, or entities like WMATA treated as states for purposes of immunity, to suits for money damages for disability discrimination in the manner it has done here.
A. Spending Clause
With all respect, I disagree with the majority that Congress has the power under the Spending Clause to expose the states to liability for the sort of suit Barbour brought against WMATA. “Congress may attach conditions on the receipt of federal funds,” but “[s]uch conditions must (among other requirements) bear some relationship to the purpose of the federal spending.” New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 167, 112 S. Ct. 2408, 2423-24 (1992) (quoting South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203, 206, 107 S. Ct. 2793, 2796 (1987)) (internal quotation marks omitted). That relationship is a nexus between the condition imposed and the “federal interest in particular national projects or programs” represented by the grant of funds. Dole, 483 U.S. at 207, 107 S. Ct. at 2796 (quoting Massachusetts v. United States, 435 U.S. 444, 461, 98 S. Ct. 1153, 1164, 55 L. Ed. 2d 403 (1978)).
The Dole principle is fundamental to our constitutional structure. Without it, “the spending power could render academic the Constitution‘s other grants and limits of federal authority.” New York, 505 U.S. at 167, 112 S. Ct. at 2423-24. As the Supreme Court explained in the only case in which it struck down an Act of Congress as exceeding Congress‘s Spending Clause authority, it is implausible to presume that
the makers of the Constitution, in erecting the federal government, intended sedulously to limit and define its powers, so as to reserve to the states and the people sovereign power, to be wielded by the states and their citizens and not to be invaded by the United States, they nevertheless by a single clause gave power to the Congress to tear down the barriers, to invade the states’ jurisdiction, and to become a parliament of the whole people, subject to no restrictions save such as are self-imposed.
United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 78, 56 S. Ct. 312, 324-25, 80 L. Ed. 477 (1936).
True, a state can simply decline to accept a conditional funding grant, but such
There is no reasonably close relationship between the grant of funds here and the imposed condition. The purpose of the federal funds WMATA receives is to subsidize the mass-transit services WMATA provides. They are transportation funds. As applied in this case, the condition is subjecting WMATA to a private suit for money damages for discriminating against its employees on the basis of disability. Prohibiting disability discrimination in employment is simply not “Necessary and Proper,”
Barbour‘s brief offers no answer to this argument. The government and the majority make an attempt to fill this gaping void in Barbour‘s case. However, I am not convinced that the connection they assert between the funds and the condition here is constitutionally adequate.
Following the government and several other circuits, the majority asserts that Congress‘s judgment that “it did not want any federal funds to be used to facilitate disability discrimination” in employment is enough of a connection between the condition here and the mass-transit funds. Maj. op. at 1168. This cannot be right. The majority and the government are saying that the legislature can identify something a state does that it does not like -- in this case, discriminate on the basis of disability -- and condition any grant of funds on a state‘s not doing that act any more, assuming the condition is otherwise constitutionally valid. Presumably, Congress has an “interest” in preventing states from doing anything with its funds that it does not like, and there is nothing magical about disability discrimination that makes
In any event, my disagreement with the majority in no way turns on this dispute over this aspect of Congress‘s Spending Clause power. The majority assumes that there are limits to that power. The core of our disagreement is whether Congress‘s disapproval of disability discrimination is enough of a connection between the transportation funds and the condition imposed here. In my view, it is not.
The reasoning of the circuits the majority cites is no better. The First Circuit‘s reasoning consists of a single sentence, to wit, that the condition “is manifestly related to Congress‘s interest in deterring federally supported agencies from engaging in disability discrimination.” Nieves-Marquez v. Puerto Rico, 353 F.3d 108, 128 (1st Cir. 2003) (citing A.W. v. Jersey City Pub. Schs., 341 F.3d 234 (3d Cir. 2003)). As discussed, however, the proper test under Dole and New York is whether the condition is germane to the interest in the ”particular national project[] or program[],” Dole, 483 U.S. at 207, 107 S. Ct. at 2796 (emphasis added), not whether Congress has a generalized “interest” in imposing the condition. For the reasons I have stated, the condition here fails the Dole test as properly understood. The Third and Ninth Circuits’ reasoning essentially tracks the reasoning of the First Circuit. See A.W., 341 F.3d at 243-44; Koslow v. Pennsylvania, 302 F.3d 161, 175-76 (3d Cir. 2002); Lovell v. Chandler, 303 F.3d 1039, 1051 (9th Cir. 2002).
Nor do I think that the majority‘s holding follows from the three Supreme Court cases it cites. The majority relies heavily on Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563, 94 S. Ct. 786, 39 L. Ed. 2d 1 (1974). Lau was a class-action suit brought against San Francisco Unified School District officials for violating regulations promulgated by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited state programs or activities that receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Id. at 566, 94 S. Ct. at 788. The regulation required the school district, “[w]here inability to speak and understand the English language excludes national origin-minority group children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school district, [to] take affirmative steps to rectify the language deficiency.” Id. at 568, 94 S. Ct. at 789. Plaintiffs claimed that the school district had not given 1,800 students of Chinese ancestry language instruction, and therefore violated this regulation. The Court, per Justice Douglas, held that this regulation was a valid exercise of Congress‘s spending power, as the schools received federal educational funds. Id. at 569, 94 S. Ct. at 789-90.
Quoting dicta from Lau, the majority states that “[s]imple justice requires that public funds, to which taxpayers of all races contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes, or results in racial discrimination.” Maj. op. at 1170 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The principle the majority quotes from Lau, which was itself a quotation from a floor speech given by Senator Hubert Humphrey during the debates on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is obvious dicta, and singularly unpersuasive dicta at that. A policy argument made in a floor statement by a Senator cannot be the basis of a legal doctrine meant to restrain the very exercise of policy-making power such an argument represents. Racial discrimination, in fact, was not at issue in Lau at all; it was a challenge to a regulation that prohibited national-origin discrimination. Neither Lau nor the Supreme Court‘s description of Lau in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. at 167, 112 S. Ct. at 2423-24 is, as the majority implies, authority for the notion that Congress may condition any appropriation on a state‘s
Equally distinguishable is the Supreme Court‘s recent decision in Sabri v. United States, 541 U.S. 600, 124 S. Ct. 1941, 158 L. Ed. 2d 891 (2004), also cited by the majority. In Sabri, the Court held that conditioning federal funds on criminalizing bribery of officials of state entities that receive at least $10,000 in federal funds was a valid exercise of Congress‘s Spending Clause power. The Court reasoned that there was a generalized interest linked to all particular federal appropriations in preventing local officials from being bribed, because “bribed officials are untrustworthy stewards of federal funds, and corrupt contractors do not deliver dollar-for-dollar value,” id. at 1946, and because “Congress was within its prerogative
to protect spending objects from the menace of local administrators on the take,” id. at 1947.
This unexceptional recognition of the link between any federal appropriation and the federal government‘s interest in ensuring that such an appropriation is not “frittered away in graft,” id. at 1946, falls far short of establishing the same sort of link between “discrimination” generally and any federal appropriation. As with graft, of course, the federal government may not like discrimination; but preventing graft ensures that funds are spent for the particular purposes for which Congress appropriated them, as opposed to any congressional purpose or “interest” whatsoever. Rampant bribery of WMATA officials, for example, would make it more difficult for federal funds to do the job of providing mass transit.3 So far as I can see, and so far as the government and majority‘s reasoning goes, discrimination against WMATA‘s employees on the basis of disability would not.4
There is no reason to believe that a similar diversion or lack of trustworthiness, and therefore, a similar connection to the federal
For all of these reasons, I conclude that Congress lacks the power under the Spending Clause to subject WMATA to suits for money damages for disability discrimination in employment.
B. Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment
My conclusion as to Congress‘s power under the Spending Clause requires me, unlike the majority, to reach whether Congress has the power to do the same pursuant to its enforcement power under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. I would hold that it does not.
Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[t]he Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” Although the power to “enforce” seems by its terms to be limited to legislation to remedy actual Fourteenth Amendment violations, see Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509, 124 S. Ct. 1978, 2009-10 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting), the Supreme Court has held that “Congress’
funds, occurs when officials discriminate on the basis of disability against their employees. Discriminating on the basis of disability has nothing to do with “wasting” or “diverting” mass transit funds. To the contrary, requiring WMATA to pay money damages for such discrimination affirmatively depletes its transportation funds. There is therefore no reason, apart from Congress‘s judgment that its money should not finance activities it believes morally opprobrious, to think that the disability discrimination “fritters away” funds the way graft does. A judgment that an activity is morally wrong is not a connection between a condition and the funding program under the Dole test.
power to enforce the Amendment includes the authority both to remedy and to deter violation of rights guaranteed thereunder by prohibiting a somewhat broader swath of conduct, including that which is not itself forbidden by the Amendment‘s text,” Board of Trs. of Univ. of Ala. v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356, 365, 121 S. Ct. 955, 962-63, 148 L. Ed. 2d 866 (2001) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Those enforcement steps that reach beyond the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment‘s substantive guarantees, however, “must exhibit ‘congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.‘” Id. (quoting City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 520, 117 S. Ct. 2157, 2164, 138 L. Ed. 2d 624 (1997)).
Here, as was the case in Garrett, the constitutional right Congress is attempting to enforce is Barbour‘s Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from irrational discrimination in employment on the basis of his disability. See City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Ctr., 473 U.S. 432, 446, 105 S. Ct. 3249, 3257-58, 87 L. Ed. 2d 313 (1985). The question becomes, then, whether subjecting WMATA to suits for money damages for disability discrimination on the basis of his employment is a “congruent and proportional” remedy for Barbour‘s right. As the Su-
While I confess not to have engaged in a comprehensive independent review of the history of Rehabilitation Act section 504 and
Moreover, the remedies created by the Rehabilitation Act against the states “raise the same sort of concerns as to congruence and proportionality as were found in City of Boerne.” Garrett, 531 U.S. at 372, 121 S. Ct. at 966-67. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act provides that “[n]o otherwise qualified individual with a disability ... shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,”
I realize that the Supreme Court recently upheld Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act as a valid exercise of Congress‘s section 5 enforcement power in Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509, 124 S. Ct. 1978, 158 L. Ed. 2d 820 (2004). But this case is not like Lane. It is instead very much like Garrett, in which the Supreme Court held that Congress exceeded its enforcement power under Title I of the ADA by subjecting states to suits for money damages for disability discrimination in employment. 531 U.S. at 373-74, 121 S. Ct. at 967-68. Title I concerns discriminating against the disabled in employment; Lane, in contrast, involved Title II, which prohibits discrimination against the disabled in public services, programs, and activities. See Lane, 124 S. Ct. at 1996 (Ginsburg, J., concurring). That broader scope meant that the constitutional rights Title II of the ADA purported to “enforce” in Lane concerned, in addition to Cleburne-style irrational discrimination, “a variety of other basic constitutional guarantees, infringements of which are subject to more searching judicial review,” for example, the right of access to courts, id. at 1988. This case, in contrast, only involves, as discussed, Barbour‘s right to be free from irrational discrimination. Barbour‘s employment discrimination suit is more like a Title I than a Title II action. And as noted, Barbour has not shown that his suit for money damages is justified by the need to remedy a widespread pattern of state infringement of his right to be free from irrational employment discrimination.