The Supreme Court: Defending the Judiciary

WASHINGTON, June 25 -- In one of its most important modern-day rulings on the sources and limits of Congressional power, the Supreme Court said today that Congress exceeded its authority when it passed a law four years ago to give the practice of religion more protection than the Court itself had found to be constitutionally required.

The 6-to-3 decision to strike down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was a forceful reminder of judicial power and a warning to the other branches of Government not to trespass into the Court's domain.

''The power to interpret the Constitution in a case or controversy remains in the judiciary,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said in his majority opinion, which was joined not only by the Court's three most conservative members, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, but also by two of the most liberal Justices, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer dissented.

The act, the product of the work of a broad coalition of religious and civil liberties groups, passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and attracted only three negative votes in the Senate.

Supported by President Clinton and defended by his administration in court, it provided that no level of government could enforce laws that ''substantially burden'' religious observance without demonstrating a ''compelling'' need to do so and without using the ''least restrictive means available.''

While the practical impact of today's decision -- which may be substantial -- will be felt in the myriad ways that religion and government interact, the case as the majority approached it was not principally about religion. Rather, this was the third major Supreme Court decision in as many years, grounded in three separate lines of constitutional analysis, to reject Congress's expansive interpretation of its own powers and to take a generous view of the role of the states in the Federal system.

Justice Kennedy said that by requiring ''searching judicial scrutiny'' of any state law that had the effect of making it more difficult for people to practice their religion, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was a ''considerable intrusion into the states' traditional prerogatives and general authority to regulate for the health and welfare of their citizens.''

In the case before the Court today, a Catholic church in the Texas city of Boerne, near San Antonio, had tried to invoke the law to challenge the city's refusal to let it enlarge its church building in a neighborhood zoned for historic preservation. The city responded by challenging the constitutionality of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

A Federal District Judge in San Antonio declared the law unconstitutional, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, reversed that decision and upheld the law last year.

The law was passed in response to a 1990 Supreme Court decision that rejected the ''compelling interest'' test, which the Court had previously applied in some contexts. The Court decision in rejecting the test held that there was no religious exemption from laws that apply generally to everyone and that were not passed to single out or discriminate against religion.

That 5-to-4 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, held that members of a Native American church who used the illegal hallucinogen peyote in their religious rituals had no constitutionally based exemption from Oregon's narcotics laws.

While a constitutional ruling of the Supreme Court can only be overturned by a constitutional amendment, and not by ordinary legislation, supporters of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act argued, in arguing for its enactment in 1993, that they were not confronting the Court directly but simply legislating a more protective standard of review for laws affecting religion, a standard the Court had deemed neither necessary nor forbidden.

As authority for the law, Congress invoked Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, the source of much modern civil rights legislation, which gives Congress the power to ''enforce, by appropriate legislation,'' the amendment's guarantees of due process and equal protection. The Supreme Court has interpreted the amendment's due process guarantee to make the First Amendment, with its guarantee of religious freedom, binding on the states.

That longstanding interpretation was not at issue today. Rather, the question as the Court saw it was whether in enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Congress was ''enforcing'' the 14th Amendment or, by contrast, going beyond that limited role to declare for itself the substantive meaning of the amendment. It was in this respect that the majority found Congress had gone too far.

''Congress does not enforce a constitutional right by changing what the right is,'' Justice Kennedy said, adding, ''It has been given the power 'to enforce,' not the power to determine what constitutes a constitutional violation.''

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Justice Kennedy said, ''cannot be considered remedial, preventive legislation, if those terms are to have any meaning.'' He said the law was ''so out of proportion to a supposed remedial or preventive object that it cannot be understood as responsive to, or designed to prevent, unconstitutional behavior. It appears, instead, to attempt a substantive change in constitutional protections.''

Beyond the immediate context of the case, City of Boerne v. Flores, the significance of the decision lay in how the majority drew the line between ''remedial'' and ''substantive'' actions to enforce the 14th Amendment. In the past, Congress had not limited itself to a precise tracking of the Court's constitutional rulings; for example, in a series of laws dealing with voting rights in the 1960's, Congress prohibited certain literacy tests even though the Court had ruled that literacy tests were constitutional. The Court, in turn, upheld the legislative prohibitions.

The Court reaffirmed the voting rights decisions today. Justice Kennedy said that, properly understood, the laws at issue in those decisions were responses to the ''persisting deprivation of constitutional rights resulting from this country's history of racial discrimination.'' He added, ''The appropriateness of remedial measures must be considered in light of the evil presented.''

On the other hand, Justice Kennedy said, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act reflected ''a lack of proportionality or congruence between the means adopted and the legitimate end to be achieved.'' Describing the law as ''sweeping'' and intrusive -- ''displacing laws and prohibiting official actions of almost every description and regardless of subject matter'' -- Justice Kennedy said it placed burdens on the states that ''far exceed any pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct'' revealed in Congressional hearings or elsewhere.

He said there was no evidence of ''some widespread pattern of religious discrimination in this country,'' but at most evidence of ''incidental burdens'' such as the zoning dispute in this case.

The Court's requirement that Congressional action under the 14th amendment must demonstrate ''proportionality or congruence'' to the problem Congress is addressing is a new departure for the Court, which previously had left the full extent of Congress's 14th Amendment powers undefined. Some of the act's supporters said today the Court had taken an unduly circumscribed view of Congressional power.

Douglas Laycock, a University of Texas law professor who helped draft the law and who argued the case at the Court, said the ruling would invite new challenges to ''all the civil rights laws that apply to state and local government.'' Mr. Laycock said the Court was asserting ''the power to unilaterally contract our liberties and to deprive Congress of its power to protect those liberties.''

Many members of the coalition behind the Religious Freedom Restoration Act were more concerned today with what they saw as the Court's minimizing of the religious interests at stake, but calls by some groups for a constitutional amendment met with, at best, a cautious response.

The Rev. Oliver Thomas, special counsel to the National Council of Churches and the chairman of the legislative coalition, said in an interview that a constitutional amendment should be ''a last resort.'' He said the groups would get together early next month to devise a strategy.

''Every religious person will be hurt by this decision,'' Mr. Thomas said. He said the Court misunderstood the goal of the law, which was not to deter ''a bunch of wicked people'' from discriminating against religion but to prevent the ''unintended consequences'' of ordinary laws that make religious observance difficult or impossible.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was widely unpopular in the states, 16 of which filed a brief with the Court recounting the sometimes fanciful religious claims that prison inmates were making under the law.

The three dissenting Justices did not take issue with the standard the Court applied today to Congressional action under the 14th Amendment. Justice O'Connor, in fact, endorsed it.

But Justice O'Connor said the Court should have used this case to revisit and overturn the 1990 decision in the peyote case, from which she dissented and that she still regards, it was clear from her 23-page opinion today, as profoundly wrong.

Justices Breyer and Souter also called for re-examining the 1990 case.

The Court has declared several Federal laws unconstitutional in the past few years. Last year, it invalidated part of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a 1988 law that permitted Indian tribes to sue states in disputes over establishing casinos. Two years ago, the Court ruled that a Federal gun control law exceeded the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.