Fifty years ago, a rawboned countryman from Nelson County graced the Virginia General Assembly. A gifted orator, he regularly assailed a tax bill that kept coming back, in one form or another, year after year.
"Same old 'coon," he would warn the House. "Just another ring around his tail."The Supreme Court welcomed an old raccoon in September. The high court agreed to hear California's appeal in a case involving an issue that has kept coming back since Colonial times. In an effort to avoid becoming a "welfare magnet," may a state treat residents and nonresidents differently?
In the welfare reform act of 1996, Congress authorized the states to set up a two-tiered structure of welfare benefits: one level for established residents, a presumptively lower level for aliens from out of state. Will the act stand up? I doubt it, but who knows?
The facts are not in dispute. Until early in 1997, Brenda Roe was a resident of Oklahoma. When her husband lost his job, the Roes decided to move to California to pursue employment there. Brenda was six months pregnant. Complications developed. Because she could not be left unattended, her husband could not look for a job. The couple applied for public welfare.
Bad news. The Roes ran into a law adopted by California in 1992. The law says that a family that has resided in the state for less than 12 months may receive welfare benefits "not to exceed the maximum aid payment that would have been received by the family from the state of prior residence." Oklahoma's maximum payment at the time was $307 a month. California's was $565.
The Roes brought suit, charging that the two-tiered system violated their civil rights. Last January the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with their position. Now the Supreme Court has set the case for argument Jan. 13.
The American Colonies took the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 as a model. Newcomers to a town or county who might become public charges were "warned out" or "passed on" to the next jurisdiction. In contemporary times, many states have sought to distinguish new residents from old-timers in all kinds of diverse ways.
It's easy to understand the position of states that offer above-average welfare benefits. States paying high benefits don't want to be welfare magnets.
Trial and appellate courts have struck down efforts to penalize outsiders for being outsiders. The leading precedent is known as the Shapiro case of 1969. It had to do with a woman who moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut in 1966 and immediately applied for welfare benefits. Connecticut's law denied any payments at all to persons who had not lived in the state for at least a year.
Speaking through Justice William Brennan, the high court declared the Connecticut law unconstitutional.
In any event, to reverse the 9th Circuit in the case of Brenda Roe would require the high court to exile Shapiro and its progeny to an orphans home of overruled cases. This seems unlikely. The Constitution hasn't changed in the 30 years since Shapiro.
Universal Press Syndicate