[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 22, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Page S5430]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         THE SUPREME COURT'S DECISION IN ALEXANDER v. SANDOVAL

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, there are a great many important policy 
issues that divide Democrats and Republicans. When we find certain 
common sense principles that we agree on, however, we should seize the 
opportunity and act on them.
  I believe that we have such an opportunity today. On April 24, 2001, 
the Supreme Court issued its latest in the never-ending sequence of 5-
to-4 ``State's rights'' decisions, Alexander v. Sandoval. I rise to 
urge my colleagues to reaffirm our shared values by passing legislation 
to reverse the Court's decision in this case. By doing so, we can 
reinstate what was always Congress's intent, and reaffirm our nation's 
commitment to civil rights for all Americans. Let me explain.
  Let's start with the principle of cooperative federalism. Every year, 
we in Congress send billions of Federal taxpayer dollars to the States 
to help fund education systems, health care, motor vehicle departments, 
law enforcement and other government services that every American is 
entitled to enjoy, no matter which State he or she lives in. That is 
the essence of federalism: helping to fund the States to perform 
government functions that are best performed at the local level. It is 
not Republican, and it is not Democratic; it is common sense.
  The Federal Government and Federal taxpayers count on the States to 
use those Federal funds in a lawful manner, and most everyone would 
agree that the States should be accountable for doing so. President 
Bush has made accountability the central guiding principle of his 
education proposals. We have some immensely important differences of 
view on how to achieve accountability. But we should not lose sight of 
what unites us.
  Republicans believe in accountability, and so do Democrats. We here 
in Washington owe the American people a duty, when we send their tax 
dollars to State and local authorities, to ensure that the people get a 
chance to hold those authorities accountable for using their money for 
the public good, for the benefit of all the people, and in accordance 
with the law of the land. That is not politics; it is common sense.
  What has all this got to do with the Supreme Court? Well, 37-years 
ago, Congress enacted perhaps the most important piece of legislation 
of the post-war era, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI of the 
Civil Rights Act is an accountability provision pure and simple. It 
prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national 
origin, in any program or activity that receives Federal funds.
  The Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act was committed to full 
and strong enforcement of civil rights. It recognized that 
discrimination comes in many forms. Governmental practices may be 
intentionally discriminatory or, more commonly, they may be 
discriminatory in their effect, because they have a disparate or 
discriminatory impact on minorities. To catch this more subtle but no 
less harmful form of discrimination, Congress authorized the Federal 
agencies that were responsible for awarding federal grants and 
administering federal contracts to adopt regulations prohibiting 
Federal grantees and contractees from adopting policies that have the 
effect of discriminating.
  There has never been any serious question about Congress's intent in 
this matter. Before Sandoval, the Federal Courts of Appeals had 
uniformly affirmed the right of private individuals to bring civil 
suits to enforce the disparate-impact regulations promulgated under 
Title VI. The Supreme Court itself, in a 1979 case called Cannon v. 
University of Chicago, had concluded that Title VI authorized an 
implied right of action for victims of race, color, or national origin 
discrimination. And as Justice Stevens noted in his dissenting opinion 
in Sandoval, the plaintiff in Cannon had stated a disparate-impact 
claim, not a claim of intentional discrimination.
  I will not attempt in these brief remarks to go over all the reasons 
why Sandoval was incorrectly decided as a matter of Supreme Court 
precedent. Justice Stevens does an excellent job in his dissent of 
demonstrating how the activist conservatives on the Court rejected 
decades of settled laws.
  I will say this: The holding in Sandoval makes no sense as a matter 
of national policy. The lower courts in Sandoval found that the 
defendant, the Alabama Department of Public Safety, was engaged in a 
discriminatory practice in violation of Federal regulations. The 
Supreme Court did not challenge that finding, and also accepted that 
the regulations at issue were valid. Yet the Court's conservative 
majority held that the victims of the discrimination had no right to 
sue to enforce the Federal regulations. You do not have to be liberal, 
and you do not have to be conservative, to be troubled by the notion 
that a State can engage in unlawful discrimination and yet not be 
accountable in any court.
  The good news is that the Sandoval holding is based on statutory 
interpretation and not constitutional law. The Congress is therefore 
free to overturn it, and we should do so at the very first opportunity. 
By doing so, we will fully preserve what I have called cooperative 
federalism. We will continue to provide funding assistance to the 
States. At the same time, we will prove that we are serious about the 
right of the American people to hold their government accountable in 
the most basic sense, accountable for obeying the law. And we will 
prove that we are as serious about the civil rights of minorities as 
the groundbreaking Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
  Fixing what the Court has broken should be a bipartisan undertaking. 
This is not about being a Republican or a Democrat; it is about 
reaffirming the will of the people as expressed by the Congress, 
reaffirming that the American people are entitled to have a government 
that is accountable, and reaffirming that in America, discrimination is 
not acceptable, whether it is done openly and crassly, or more 
invidiously and subtly. The unfair effects are the same and deserve 
redress.

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