Please don’t Boerne-ize the Necessary & Proper Clause

The Supreme Court has had a hard time improving on Chief Justice Marshall’s McCulloch v. Maryland formulation of the doctrinal test for Congress’s power under the Necessary and Proper Clause. At one point in time, the Court even adopted that formulation as its test for the reach of Congress’s power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In City of Boerne v. Flores, however, the Court tried to do better in its Section 5 jurisprudence. That was a mistake. Boerne‘s congruence and proportionality test is a “flabby test” that is “a standing invitation to judicial arbitrariness and policy-driven decisionmaking,” as Justice Scalia reiterated in a solo concurrence just last week.

Based on this week’s oral arguments on the constitutionality of the “individual mandate,” at least some of the Justices appear willing to formulate a new doctrinal test for what counts as a “Proper” law under the Necessary and Proper Clause. As they were in Boerne, the Justices are on a search for a limiting principle on Congress’s power. In their attempt to not Garcia-ize the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, let us hope that they do not Boerne-ize those powers instead.

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Two Fourth Circuit rulings on civil commitment of sexually dangerous persons

The Fourth Circuit yesterday issued two published opinions dealing with the civil commitment of sexually dangerous persons, United States v. Timms and United States v. Hall. The two cases were decided by unanimous vote of a panel made up of Chief Judge Traxler, Judge Agee, and Judge Motz. They are follow-up cases to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Comstock, which upheld Congress’s power to enact § 4248 under the Necessary and Proper Clause.

The opinion in Timms, by Judge Agee, contains an overview of the evolution and current state of judicial treatment of the “civil commitment system established by § 4248 as part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.” The decision reverses a district court’s dismissal of a commitment action against Gerald Timms. The Fourth Circuit concludes that § 4248 does not violate the Equal Protection Clause and that Timms’s right to due process was not violated by extended delays in the consideration of his commitment (large chunks of which were due to the lengthy constitutional challenge to § 4248 resolved by the Supreme Court in Comstock).

In United States v. Hall, authored by Chief Judge Traxler, the Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s determination that the government had failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Hall is sexually dangerous.

These two decisions are important because the vast majority of those that the federal government has certified as sexually dangerous persons are in FCI-Butner, the federal correctional facility in Butner, North Carolina. According to the opinion, the government has certified 130 persons as “sexually dangerous,” and 116 of those certifications were filed in the Eastern District of North Carolina. (Last February, the Raleigh Public Record did a two-part story (here and here) on the men at FCI-Butner being held as “sexually dangerous.”)

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Some speculation about the authorship of the individual mandate opinions in Virginia v. Sebelius and Liberty University v. Geithner

Now that the Fourth Circuit panel that heard oral argument in Virginia v. Sebelius and Liberty University v. Geithner has disposed of the other two appeals heard that same morning, one can use the panel’s actions in those cases to speculate about the authorship of the opinions in the two challenges to the individual mandate. My best guess is that Judge Motz was assigned to author the principal opinion in Liberty University v. Geithner and that Judge Davis was assigned to author the principal opinion in Virginia v. Sebelius. This is all speculative, of course, but there is a long and glorious tradition of speculating about opinion authorship in appellate cases.

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