Maryland Trying to Force Wal-Mart to Provide Health Insurance
The district court ruling in the Wal-Mart case, RELI v. Fielder provides a lot to think about. One thing is that the Court says that it would not strike down a law even if its explicit purpose was to punish one company, Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart, unlike, for example, homosexuals, is politically powerful and won’t be treated unjustly by the political process:
…unless there is a reason to “infer antipathy” from the targeting of a particular group or person, “[t]he Constitution presumes that . . . even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic process and that judicial intervention is generally unwarranted no matter how unwisely we may think a political branch has acted.” Beach Commc’ns, 508 U.S. at 314 (quoting Vance v. Bradley, 440 U.S. 93, 97 (1979)). It is only in cases involving politically vulnerable groups that the Supreme Court has appeared to rely, at least in part, on legislative antipathy when invalidating a law under the rational basis test. See Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996) (invalidating Colorado constitutional amendment that prohibited the state and local governments from passing laws to protect persons from discrimination based on their sexual orientation); City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U.S. 432 (1985) (invalidating zoning ordinance that authorized a denial of a special use permit for mentally retarded persons to live together in a group home). Wal-Mart does not contend that it is similarly situated to the plaintiffs in Romer and Cleburne, and the fact that it is the only entity subject to the spending requirement of the Fair Share Act is not itself sufficient to make out a viable equal protection claim.
What an ignorance of politics! A big company such as Wal-Mart is exactly the kind of entity which is most likely to be unjustly treated.
Deciding when to strike down a discriminatory law is a tough question. Surely, though, if a law were titled the “Wal-Mart Punishment Act” and decreed that the Wal-Mart Corporation had to make a $100 million dollar contribution to the state treasury, that would be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. The only reason the present case is tougher is that the State of Maryland could say without obvious falsity that if there were any other companies as big as Wal-Mart that didn’t provide employee health insurance, it would have liked to cover them under the law too.