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May 17, 2004

Lawyers' Committee Applauds Supreme Court Decision Protecting the Rights of People with Disabilities

Washington, DC - The United States Supreme Court today reaffirmed, by a narrow 5-4 majority, the power of Congress to require that the fifty states respect the fundamental rights of all Americans, including those with disabilities. In Tennessee v. Lane, No. 02-1667, the Court ruled that Congress had the power to enact Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and thereby require that courthouses be made reasonably accessible to the disabled.

The plaintiff in the case, George Lane, ordered to answer to criminal charges on the second floor of a county courthouse that had no elevator, crawled up two flights of stairs to get to the courtroom. When he returned for a second hearing, he refused to crawl again or to be carried by officers, and he was subsequently arrested and jailed for failure to appear. The Supreme Court held today that Congress has the power under the Fourteenth Amendment to remedy this blatant and outrageous violation of Mr. Lane's fundamental right of access to the courts. Remarkably, four justices dissented from that holding.

In today's decision, the Supreme Court affirmed that Congress has "broad power indeed" under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent and remedy unconstitutional discrimination. As the Court wrote, "When Congress seeks to remedy or prevent unconstitutional discrimination, Section 5 authorizes it to enact prophylactic legislation proscribing practices that are discriminatory in effect, if not in intent, to carry out the basic objectives of the Equal Protection Clause." Congress exceeds that power only when it acts "not to enforce the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment," but to "work a substantive change in constitutional protections" themselves.

In a series of 5-4 decisions over the last decade, the Supreme Court substantially restricted the power of Congress to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment and to prohibit or remedy unconstitutional conduct by state and local governments. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights continues to believe that these decisions represent an unwarranted and unfounded assault on the power of Congress and threaten to undermine the ability of private citizens to seek redress for violations of their constitutional rights.

Today's decision sounds a note of promise that a majority of the current Supreme Court will allow Congress to protect all Americans against at least the most egregious deprivations of their fundamental rights. The decision, while protecting the fundamental right of persons with disabilities to access the courts does not, however, address the more basic question of whether Congress retains the power to protect more broadly the rights of people with disabilities and others to be free from other varieties of arbitrary discrimination by the states, such as employment discrimination. Indeed, in Kimel v. Florida Bd. of Regents in 2000 and Board of Trustees of Univ. of Ala. v. Garrett in 2001, the Court has already ruled that Congress did not have the power to prohibit employment discrimination by states on the basis of age and disability. That four justices dissented even in this seemingly easy case highlights the continuing danger to Congress's power and the extraordinary importance of future appointments to the Supreme Court.

The Lawyers' Committee is a forty year old nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights legal organization, formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy to provide legal services to address racial discrimination.

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