Declaring that ''the Constitution requires a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local,'' the Supreme Court today invalidated a six-year-old provision of federal law that permitted victims of rape, domestic violence and other crimes ''motivated by gender'' to sue their attackers in federal court.
The 5-to-4 decision, striking down the civil remedy provision of the Violence Against Women Act, was the latest application of the court's newly restrictive view of Congressional power and of the degree of deference that Congress is owed by federal courts. Although one of the most sweeping of the justices' decisions in this area recently, it will almost certainly not be the last.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's majority opinion rejected each of the two sources of constitutional authority that Congress had asserted as the basis for the legislation. The majority concluded that the civil remedy provision was neither a valid regulation of interstate commerce nor a proper means of enforcing the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment. [Excerpts, Page A20.]
The decision affirmed a ruling last year by the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., dismissing a suit brought by a college student against two varsity football players whom she accused of raping her in her dormitory room shortly after the start of her freshman year.
The plaintiff, Christy Brzonkala, withdrew from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and brought her suit after learning that the football players, Antonio Morrison and James Crawford, would not be disciplined by the college. When the defendants then challenged the constitutionality of the Violence Against Women Act, the federal government intervened in the suit to defend the law.
The law's supporters argued that widespread violence against women, and fear of violence, had a negative effect on the nation's economy, measured in the billions of dollars a year, by impairing the productivity and the mobility of female employees and students. To accept that reasoning, the chief justice said today, ''would allow Congress to regulate any crime as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact of that crime has substantial effects on employment, production, transit or consumption.'' But a general police power is something ''which the founders denied the national government and reposed in the states,'' he added.
