WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Congress can exclude Puerto Rico residents from a Social Security program, that a California family can file a lawsuit to recover a painting stolen by the Nazis, and that a city ordinance regulating off-site signs didn’t have to pass the most demanding form of the First Amendment exam.
Puerto Rico
The Puerto Rico case involved a social security program that provides monthly cash payments to elderly, blind and disabled people who cannot take care of themselves. The benefits, known as Supplemental Security Income, are available to US residents in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Northern Mariana Islands, but not in Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Guam.
Case United States v. Vaello-Madero, No. 20-303, involved Jose Luis Vaello-Madero, a disabled man who received the benefits while living in New York and continued to receive them after moving to Puerto Rico in 2013 Upon learning of the move, the Social Security Administration sought back the benefits Mr. Vaello-Madero had since received and eventually sued him for approximately $28,000.
Mr Vaello-Madero said the law violated his right to equal protection and won in lower courts.
Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for eight members of the court, said the unequal treatment was justified by the fact that residents of Puerto Rico generally do not pay federal income taxes. “In formulating tax and benefit programs,” he wrote, “it is reasonable for Congress to consider the general balance between benefits and burdens for residents of Puerto Rico.”
Judge Kavanaugh noted that Congress was free to strike a different balance. Last year, President Biden said that removing Puerto Rico from the program was “inconsistent with my administration’s policies and values” and urged Congress to consider the matter.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose parents were from Puerto Rico, disagreed. “There is no rationale,” she wrote, “for Congress to treat needy citizens living anywhere in the United States so differently from others.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch each issued lengthy concurrent opinions. Judge Thomas questioned whether the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibited the federal government from violating the principles of equal protection.
Judge Gorsuch wrote that the court should overrule a series of early 20th-century decisions known as the Insular Cases, which ruled that territories acquired by the United States were not automatically entitled to all of the constitutional protections.
“The island cases have no basis in the Constitution and are instead based on racial stereotypes,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “They deserve no place in our law.”
Stolen Art
The court ruled unanimously that an appeals court should rule in a dispute between the heirs of Lilly Cassirer, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939, and a Spanish museum over ownership of a painting of a Parisian streetscape, the “Rue Saint-Honoré Après-midi, Effet de Pluie” (“Rue Saint-Honoré in the afternoon, rain effect”) by Camille Pissarro.
“While the legal question before us is prosaic, the subject matter and background of the case are anything but,” Judge Elena Kagan wrote for the court.
Ms. Cassirer gave the painting to the Nazis to obtain an exit visa, and she and her family were unable to locate it after the war. In 1958, after being declared her rightful owner, Germany paid her compensation of approximately $250,000 in today’s dollars.
The painting eventually turned up in a Spanish museum, a government institution. It is now believed to be worth tens of millions of dollars, Judge Kagan wrote.
Ms. Cassirer’s heirs, who live in Southern California, sued for recovery, prompting the lower courts to consider a tangle of questions about whether Spanish or California law governed the case. They concluded that under federal law the correct answer was Spanish law. And according to Spanish law, the family lost.
The correct answer to the initial question, Judge Kagan wrote, was that California, not federal law, should determine which laws of the jurisdiction apply, and the case Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation, No. 20-1566, should reopen and send back the lower courts for further proceedings.
The Supreme Court decision, Justice Kagan wrote, is an interim step and does not resolve the larger question of “whether the Cassirer family can get the painting back.”
sign regulation
The court continued a debate over when the First Amendment would require laws that make distinctions based on the content of the speech they regulate to meet the most demanding form of judicial review, a rigorous scrutiny.
In 2015, in Reed v. Gilbert, the court reversed an ordinance in Gilbert, Arizona, that imposed varying restrictions on political, ideological, and directional signs.
“Content-based laws – those that target language based on their communicative content – are presumptively unconstitutional and can only be justified if the government demonstrates that they are narrowly tailored to serve overriding state interests,” Judge Thomas wrote for the at the time Majority.
Thursday’s decision concerned an ordinance in Austin that imposed different restrictions on “off-premises signs” — those that advertise goods and services that weren’t where the signs were located — than on “on-premises signs.”
Outdoor advertising companies challenged the regulation, saying it draws distinctions based on the content of the messages the two types of signs conveyed.
Judge Sotomayor, writing for the majority, said the Austin ordinance is distinct from that at issue in the Reed decision and does not have to meet the demanding constitutional test required of it.
“The City regulations at issue here do not single out any issue or issue for differential treatment,” she wrote. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Kagan and Kavanaugh concurred with the majority view. Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., in partial agreement, agreed with the majority’s final finding, but not with the reasoning.
In contrast, Judge Thomas, the author of the majority opinion in Reed, said the court misapplied and undermined it.
“Under Reed, Austin’s off-premises stance is content-based,” he wrote. “It discriminates against certain signs based on the message they convey — e.g. B. whether they are promoting an event, activity or service on-site or off-site.”
The majority, he wrote, “misinterprets Reed’s clear rule for content-based restrictions and replaces it with an incoherent and malleable standard.”
Judges Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joined Judge Thomas’ dissenting opinion in City of Austin v. Reagan National Advertising of Austin Case No. 20-1029.