Oregon v. Mitchell

400 U.S. 112 (1970)

Opinion of Brennan, J. …

[Justice Brennan, voting to uphold the statute, noted that courts must presume statutes to be constitutional and reject a judicial challenge if any set of facts could justify the statute. However, he contended that Congress was free to evaluate the rationality of a state statute itself, and if it found rationality lacking after exercising its fact finding capabilities, could enact a law voiding the state statute under the 14th amendment.]

There remains only the question whether Congress could rationally have concluded that denial of the franchise to citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 was unnecessary to promote any legitimate interests of the States in assuring intelligent and responsible voting. …

This scheme is consistent with our prior decisions in related areas. The core of dispute over the constitutionality of Title III of the 1970 Amendments is a conflict between state and federal legislative determinations of the factual issues upon which depends decision of a federal constitutional question — the legitimacy, under the Equal Protection Clause, of state discrimination against persons between the ages of 18 and 21. Our cases have repeatedly emphasized that, when state and federal claims come into conflict, the primacy of federal power requires that the federal finding of fact control. The Supremacy Clause requires an identical result when the conflict is one of legislative, not judicial, findings.

Finally, it is no answer to say that Title III intrudes upon a domain reserved to the States — the power to set qualifications for voting. It is no longer open to question that the 14th Amendment applies to this, as to any other, exercise of state power. As we said in answer to a similar contention almost a century ago, “the Constitution now expressly gives authority for congressional interference and compulsion in the cases embraced within the 14th Amendment.” …

In sum, Congress had ample evidence upon which it could have based the conclusion that exclusion of citizens 18 to 21 years of age from the franchise is wholly unnecessary to promote any legitimate interest the States may have in assuring intelligent and responsible voting. See Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966). If discrimination is unnecessary to promote any legitimate state interest, it is plainly unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, and Congress has ample power to forbid it under § 5 of the 14th Amendment. We would uphold § 302 of the 1970 Amendments as a legitimate exercise of congressional power.

Opinion of Stewart, J. …

[Justice Stewart voted to invalidate the provisions of the statute that would force states to allow 18 year olds to vote in state elections.]

Section 302, added by the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970, undertakes to enfranchise in all federal, state, and local elections those citizens 18 years of age or older who are now denied the right to vote by state law because they have not reached the age of 21. Although it was found necessary to amend the Constitution in order to confer a federal right to vote upon Negroes and upon females, the Government asserts that a federal right to vote can be conferred upon people between 18 and 21 years of age simply by this Act of Congress. Our decision in Katzenbach v. Morgan, it is said, established the power of Congress, under § 5 of the 14th Amendment, to nullify state laws requiring voters to be 21 years of age or older if Congress could rationally have concluded that such laws are not supported by a “compelling state interest.”

In my view, neither the Morgan case, nor any other case upon which the Government relies, establishes such congressional power, even assuming that all those cases were rightly decided. …

Katzenbach v. Morgan does not hold that Congress has the power to determine what are and what are not “compelling state interests” for equal protection purposes. In Morgan the Court considered the power of Congress to enact a statute whose principal effect was to enfranchise Puerto Ricans who had moved to New York after receiving their education in Spanish-language Puerto Rican schools and who were denied the right to vote in New York because they were unable to read or write English. The Court upheld the statute on two grounds: that Congress could conclude that enhancing the political power of the Puerto Rican community by conferring the right to vote was an appropriate means of remedying discriminatory treatment in public services; and that Congress could conclude that the New York statute was tainted by the impermissible purpose of denying the right to vote to Puerto Ricans, an undoubted invidious discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause. Both of these decisional grounds were farreaching. The Court’s opinion made clear that Congress could impose on the States a remedy for the denial of equal protection that elaborated upon the direct command of the Constitution, and that it could override state laws on the ground that they were in fact used as instruments of invidious discrimination even though a court in an individual lawsuit might not have reached that factual conclusion.

But it is necessary to go much further to sustain § 302. The state laws that it invalidates do not invidiously discriminate against any discrete and insular minority. Unlike the statute considered in Morgan, § 302 is valid only if Congress has the power not only to provide the means of eradicating situations that amount to a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, but also to determine as a matter of substantive constitutional law what situations fall within the ambit of the clause, and what state interests are “compelling.” I concurred in Mr. Justice Harlan’s dissent in Morgan. That case, as I now read it, gave congressional power under § 5 the furthest possible legitimate reach. Yet to sustain the constitutionality of § 302 would require an enormous extension of that decision’s rationale. I cannot but conclude that § 302 was beyond the constitutional power of Congress to enact.