4/5/2023 0 Comments Rational scrutiny![]() Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed and held that the mentally retarded constituted a quasi-suspect class because of the history of discrimination against them and because mental retardation is immutable. The district court ruled in favor of the city, but the U.S. The Cleburne Planning and Zoning Commission denied the variance and CLC brought suit in federal court for violation of Equal Protection of the Law. Simply put, the RBT is the distilled essence of judicial abdication and is incapable of protecting our constitutional rights.The Cleburne Living Center, Inc., a residential treatment center for mildly and moderately mentally retarded persons, applied for a zoning variance that would permit them to operate in a Cleburne neighborhood. There is no other setting in which judges abandon their responsibility to seek truth and it is inappropriate for them to do so in rational basis cases as well, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s inexplicable and irresponsible command to the contrary. ![]() What makes the RBT different from every other standard of review is its abandonment of the judciary’s customary truth-seeking function. Rights that the Framers held sacred are trampled upon in plain sight. The result? An empty charade in place of meaningful judicial review. Under the RBT, the government receives the benefit of an effectively irrebuttable presumption of constitutionality. Judges are required to assist the government by inventing justifications for its conduct, a glaring breach of judicial impartiality that is not tolerated in any other setting. Judges help the government rationalize its actions. Instead, courts will uphold a law if there is a conceivable set of facts that could justify the government’s actions, even if those facts don’t appear anywhere in the record. Unlike cases involving “heightened” standards of review (where “heightened” is simply a euphemism for “real”), in rational basis cases, judges do not require the government to support its factual assertions with evidence. Those challenging the law must negate every conceivable justification for it. Judges will not seek to determine the government’s actual ends in passing or enforcing a given law, but will uphold legislation if a legitimate end can be hypothesized. ![]() The government’s true ends are irrelevant. If the court can imagine a “legitimate” interest that might be served by the challenged law, that’s enough to uphold it. What makes the RBT so toothless? The Supreme Court has stated that under rational basis review, the government’s true ends in passing a given law are “entirely irrelevant” and those laws may be based on “rational speculation unsupported by evidence or empirical data.” Those seeking to challenge a law under rational basis review must “negative every conceivable basis” for the government’s actions, even ones that are purely speculative or hypothetical. Contrary to its name, the rational basis test is not rational, it is not concerned with the actual basis for the government’s actions, and it is not a “test” of anything except judicial willingness to turn a blind eye to the misconduct of other branches. Invented out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court, the rational basis test applies in all constitutional cases that do not involve rights the Supreme Court has deemed “fundamental” such as free speech, religion, and voting.
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